If You See a Turtle, Don’t Pet His Head. If You See a Shark, Don’t Pet His Teeth.

First, check this out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy_TB6onHVE

Hello from Sydney!

I arrived here last Wednesday morning. My first meal? A Krispy Kreme donut... not quite as good as in NC but it did the trick. The 23 of us going on the trip to Lady Elliot Island spent Wednesday night on UNSW's campus in Kensington.

First observations:

EVERYTHING IS BACKWARDS. Getting used to vehicles driving on the left side of the road will hopefully happen before I get run over.

Door knobs? Australia doesn't seem to believe in them. I have to open my door by turning my lock, which is also backwards.

Salad sandwiches. Literally a salad on slices of bread.

Thursday morning we took a flight to Hervey Bay, then a little baby plane to Lady Elliot Island.

Lady Elliot Island is one of the southernmost islands on the Great Barrier Reef. It's a tiny little island- the airstrip runs the entire length of it, and it only takes about 40 minutes to walk around the whole thing.

We had two lectures a day on various components of the marine environment and spent the rest of the day snorkeling. I did one day of scuba diving and it was easily among the coolest things I've ever done. My dive buddy and instructor was Ales, a Czech guy nicknamed the Emperor. (We never figured out how he earned that...) The title of this post is in honor of him, as those were his last words to us before going under for our dive.

I saw so many animals while diving and snorkeling. I felt like I was in Finding Nemo. (By the way, I actually DID find Nemo... while diving I saw a clown fish poking its head out of an anemone.) I also saw:

a moray eel

various reef sharks (most harmless)

eagle ray

sting ray

sea turtles (you can scratch their shells under water)

millions of different fish and coral- the diversity of species was truly impressive

cone shell (one of the animals on the video above)

At night we would relax on the deck or go see turtles struggling on shore to lay their eggs or babies crawling to the sea.

Update on Sydney soon!