Aya Sofya and Archaeology

29 July 2014
Our first stop was Aya Sofya, it's Turkish name, but also seen as Hagia Sophia, it's Orthodox name. As a sanctified space, we can't call it a church, cathedral or mosque,but it has been all of those since 537. The land it sits on has been used for a church since the year 360.

Little cat in the corner of one door leading from the former narthex to the sanctuary.

Aya Sofya's long history makes it interesting and compelling to many,many visitors. The space itself feels as familiar as any large cathedral or basilica.  But the orientation of some of the interiors were angled toward Mecca when the building became a mosque. Islam does not show faces in art so the mosaics were covered up, although with plaster and pieces of them have been restored. They must have been incredible since the gold backgrounds on the pieces that exist still have a glow. The dome overhead is the most impressive because it is light inside and the dome is 184 ft high. There are huge Ottoman medallions that look new (they aren't) and so it is possible to see Islam calligraphy and Christian pictures side by side in the space. 

Difficult to photograph from my distance and small camera.

Medallion on right and mosaic on left.

 

A couple from Pakistan (they'd actually been to Woodstock NY!) who we shared a hired guide with thought that this side-by-side of two major faiths was most significant. Our guide spend much time on the tour focusing Mark and I on Islam and how much he wanted peace. He also gave Mark a pocket size English copy of the Koran.

Last amazing view for this part of our day: There are stones from the ruins of the older buildings the predated the current Aya Sophya and they are just collected into areas on the grounds and people walk among them and sit on them This just amazed us! Ancient artifacts are so rare in the States, this seems so cavalier!

We spend the afternoon at the archeological museum-- parts of it at least. We took a look at the Troy exhibit since we are heading there next week.

Back for a dip in the roof top pool with amazing views of minarets and then we went back to the old city for dinner.

The streets are packed in the old part of the city, but many shops (and there are more shops here than anywhere I have ever been) are closed. Eid is still being celebrated. We had a slow meal at a restaurant that cooked food in the style from Ankara. I loved my eggplant and lamb dish, but the waiter told me I would have to come back to his restaurant or else go to Ankara if I ever wanted to have it again.

Our tram ride back was full of humanity-- actually, it was just full of humans. Three trams came and went before we were able to squeeze on one. I was surrounded by men in their 20's, all strap hangers. One had his plastic bag of take-out dinner on his wrist which kept banging into my ear. Mark looked down and said, "That's sort of in in your way..."--well, not more than all the arm pits around me. I could barely keep a straight face.

 

Arriving in Istanbul

 July 28,2014

 We're here! We have the jet lagged feeling of having pulled an all nighter, coupled with, as usual, not much sleep on the plane.

Once in Istanbul, though, this has been one of the easiest countries to enter. Quick, multi-tasking immigration officer, and no one really cared at customs. Our driver found us-- poor guy had been waiting two hours because our flight was so delayed.

Today is Eid, the end of Ramadan. It is a family visiting day and the streets around our hotel are very, very quiet.  After we unpacked (twice because our first room has a heavy smoker next door), we stepped out in our disorientation to find some dinner.

My first hours in another country always make me feel like I am watching a movie instead of living my life. This afternoon was no exception. When everything is unfamiliar, two things happen at once.  The brain finds ridiculous reference points (I keep reading the word Fatih (a municipality in Istanbul)  as "fath," for example.) And, almost nothing gets screened out. We were lucky that today is a holiday and so quiet. There was less to take in since so few people are on the streets.

 We are staying near The Prince's Mosque. We heard the call to prayer when we were at our early dinner. Service continued although they turned off the music and it seemed quieter all around.

Our neighborhood is filled with textile stores-- drapery, clothing and lots of shoe stores. The shoe stores were open even into this evening, for some reason,  but little else.

We probably will not ever get used to the ancient side by side with the new.

Blogger is giving me directions in Turkish-- not very helpful-- and I am hoping this will post in English.

Leaving Australia

Steerage...Third Class was the default choice of many immigrants... The conditions varied by ..line and was likely to be fairly harsh... Early steerage often housed hundreds of immigrants in one large room.

http://www.gjenvick.com/Steerage/

It did occur to me, as we settled into economy class, that someone may read about the airline traveling conditions in the 21st century and wonder how we ever managed to handle it.  I think the tranquilizing effect of the in-seat entertainment screen factors heavily.  Quantas was pretty good, but there is no getting around the fact that to get between Australia and the east coast of the USA, you have to pretty much stay in a seat for about 24 hours... are probably not going to get much sleep, and will emerge with 'cankles,' no matter how often you get up and walk. (OK, maybe only travelers of a 'certain age,' have to worry about those).  Nevertheless, our young travelers kept their good cheer for most of the journey!  The old ones did pretty well too.

Now that we are back, some 'global' thoughts:

Sydney or Melbourne?

Mark says Sydney. That's probably because he walked through the Royal Botanic Garden almost every day.  Alan said Melbourne, because it was like NYC, laid out on a grid, walkable, and very oriented to food and shopping that was out of our price range. JR can't pick (diplomat!).  I think I give Melbourne a slight margin, and here's why:

What I liked about Melbourne was that it is very cosmopolitan.  Not that Sydney isn't, but Melbourne seemed a bit more jazzed to have such a very diverse population.  Melbourne seemed to have an 'emerging Australia,' sense-- the atmosphere was not as tied to old England.  I liked this about Melbourne too.  Sydney seemed more British.  It is an older city and more aware of its historical roots as a colony, whereas Melbourne really boomed as a gold rush town in the 1850's.  Its history is more tied to events that happened locally. 

I Still Don't Understand the Commonwealth

I try very hard to be aware of my 'cultural lens' when I am traveling.  I hope I am pretty good at it.  One of the most difficult things for me to understand in Australia, though, is what it means to the citizens to be part of the Commonwealth.  We saw lots of historical markers of places where Queen Elizabeth visited (like the Three Sisters) or opened (like the Sydney Opera House.)  Her portrait hung in the Vampire (the navy destroyer we toured), and this ship was decommissioned in 1986.  Secretly, I found myself hoping for Australia to grow to feel independent from the queen, in the way that I might hope for an adult to become self-actualized.  I realize this isn't fair since Australia only has the queen because they seem to enjoy her.  With apology, I have to admit that the subtleties involved seem to escape me, and I will have to keep learning.

Why Don't We Do That?

Here are some good ideas from Australia that I wish we would implement in the States .

Milk, in condiment sized containers for tea

Little milk containers were in our refrigerators in all of our hotel rooms and always when tea and coffee were served. When you made tea, you could have a drop of milk in it.  I never saw powdered coffee whitener, anywhere.  Even coffee drinkers prefer milk sometimes, and just think of how many calories and fat grams we could save if little milk vials were available instead of always half-and-half!

Don't leave the lights on

This is not unique to Australia, but I haven't seen in in the USA.  In our newer hotels, we had to insert our key into the holder in the room in order to turn on the lights.  That meant that if no one was in the room, the lights were off.  This must represent a huge savings in electricity since patrons don't leave the lights on when they go out. 

Turn off the power at the outlet

Each outlet has its own on/off switch.  Whether you plug in a toaster or a charger, you have to also turn on the outlet itself.  I would love to have this feature in the USA.  We try hard to unplug appliances with transformers since they draw a little bit of current just from being plugged in.  Some appliances, though, are really hard to unplug all the time.  Australia runs on a higher current so I have been told that the outlet switch is a safety feature more than a saving feature, but still...  The next time you conscientiously unplug your phone charger, think of Australia.

The half flush for lighter loads

This was my favorite environmentally friendly find in Australia.  In the States, low flow toilets have been mandated for new installations since 1994.  The Australian company Caroma was the first to sell (in 1980) a dual flush toilet that gives the user the option of using only .8 gallons of water in a flush.  Installation is mandatory in Australia for new construction, and most of the toilets we used had dual flush.  Our family knew how to use them because the only other place we have seen one is in New Hampshire, at my parents' house.  Yes, the same folks who showed us Banksia pods a year ago, also 'toilet trained' us for our Australian trip!

Probably a Sign Off, for Now, and Some Stats and Thanks

We are unpacking, organizing, and getting over jet lag, in this first 24 hours of being back.  Mark and Alan were happy to be coming home.  John Roy and I thought we would have been just fine to stay away for another week or so.  Everyone has remarked about what a great trip it was.

In its short existence, Leaving with Laura had visitors from over ten countries.  The most read post was "24 hours to go," posted July 16, and the second most read was "Coffee Tour!" posted July 29.  The highest referring URL's have been Facebook, Stumbleupon, and Twitter.

Leaving with Laura may go dark for a while, since I'll be staying home for a while.  If you would like to leave with me on my next trip, you can click to follow this blog, or click on the RSS feed button, or follow me on Twitter.  My twitter name is lauragraceffa.

Mark has been very helpful in proofreading, especially when we had to conserve connection time and when I was writing at night after a long day, and feeling a bit bleary. 

To all reading, I wish you safe travels.

At Last the Sydney Opera House!

We've seen it, and it is an magnificent building.  The Sydney Opera House first attracted my attention in 1999.  The very last moments of 1999, actually.  Sydney was the first major population center to ring in the new century, and I have a vivid memory of the fireworks over the harbour and seeing the opera house, which looked so nautical against the background of the harbour.

Sydney held a competition for the design of the opera house, and from the tour today we saw that most of the submissions were very conventional.  One of the last entries was by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon, and it was a strikingly different design.  Utzon build the main performance spaces side by side, along the narrow pennisula.  From the air, the venue actually has three separate roof structures--one basically covers the largest "symphony" space, and the other the "opera/ballet" theater.  A third roof structure covers a restaurant area.  In spite of the three roof structures, the opera house is still one building, since the spaces are connected below.  Also, the opera house holds smaller performance spaces in addition to the two large ones.

So many aspects of this building are intriguing, like the royal purple carpet in the upper foyer of the symphony theater, or the organ in the symphony space that took ten years to build, two years to tune, and is only played five or six times a year.  Because the footrprint of the buildings is so narrow, the opera sets have to be stored below--and some days the set are changed between evening and matinee performances!

The best stories of the Sydney Opera House, though, have to do with the architect and the roof.  The architect, and the team of engineers that was hired, did not know how to build the roof when the project began.  For four years Utzon worked on this problem while the rest of the building was being constructed below.  Quite a dramatic turn of affairs--to have a city spending a vast amount of money on a visionary building, without the builder or architect knowing how the roof was going to be constructed.  By this point, the project was well over budget and well over schedule.

The crux of the problem was that everyone was trying to think of a way to construct the roof out of more or less horizontal "sheets" of material over some sort of supporting structure.  To pour these horizontal "sheets" out of concrete would have required an impossible heavy and strong scaffold, and also would have been difficult to construct and move onto the site. 

The stroke of genius came to Utzon when he realized that he could build the roof in vertical sections and then cover it all with ceramic tile.  The sections could be poured on site, which was much more feasible.  I think it adds to the nautical feeling as well, because the vertical sections are sort of like the ribs of a ship.  Outside of the opera house is a brass display that shows Utzon's thinking about the design and how he thought of it as using the properties of the sphere for the strength of the roof.

And maybe this photo from the inside also helps to see the supporting structure.

Sadly, Utzon resigned under controversy before the project was completed.  There was a lot of political pressure because of the time and cost overruns.  It's easy to imagine that such a visionary architect had a pretty unyielding attitude at times.  Still, it is very sad that the building was finished and dedicated without him.  In the last decade or so of his life, the Utzon and the city not only reached a compromise but the city hired him back as a consulting architect for renovations to the structure's interiors.   Today, in fact, any changes to the building have to be in keeping with the Utzon vision, and his son oversees new work.  But Utzon himself never came back to Australia.  And those cost overruns?   The city started the Opera House Lottery and it paid off the building a year and a half after completion!

The drama sets me to musing about the fine line between vision and leadership, being foolish and being impractical.  It can be so common for groups that make decisions to conclude that, "We can't do that because..."  The because almost always has some version of what will be interrupted or stopped if a new direction is taken.  It's extraordinary that as an architect, Utzon designed a building that he didn't know could be built.  Equally extraordinary is that the design was chosen in spite of this circumstance. Having politicians, on behalf of the tax payers, lose patience with the visionary, is not extraordinary--it's pretty ordinary, actually!  And then the building was paid for by thousands of people buying losing lottery tickets--embarking on the chance that only works as a scheme because most tickets lose, seems an interesting coda to the piece.

At the start of the tour, they took our photo, as has been usual at just about all of the attractions on our trip.  We were positioned in front of a green screen.  At the end of the tour John Roy looked at the photos and got really excited.  He had been wearing his usual green Ireland jacket and look what happened in the photo:

You can call him the "Phantom of the [Sydney] Opera [House]!  We had to succumb to make the purchase of the photos this time.

After our tour we had a nice harbour view lunch, and it started to pour.  In fact, Alan wanted to name this entry "Sydney in the Rain."  They boys headed back to the apartment, but Mark and I continued in the afternoon by visiting the "First Encounters" area of the Royal Botanic Garden.  This area shows native plants and describes how they were used by aborigines in the area.  The displays also tell the tragic tale of the first encounter.  Starvation of the native people, because of the disturbances of the Europeans using resources in more reckless fashion, followed their arrival.  By far the most decimating effect though, was that the English brought smallpox.  Within a few years there were only three identifiable aborigines from the original population left in the Sydney area.  The culture died as well.

I began thinking about what world history would look like if these infections had run the other way:  What if the native American and Australian peoples had given the Europeans a deadly infection instead of the other way around?  Mark explained to me that smallpox is present in human populations due to the domestication of animals.  Smallpox in particular, originated as cowpox, and "jumped" species to humans. So, indirectly, it was domestication that led to history working out the way it did.

We also visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales to view the Yiribana Gallery, which shows modern aboriginal art.  No photos are permitted, but if I could I would show an installation of wooden flying foxes, each painted uniquely with traditional dots painting, hanging from a clothes drying tree.  That piece had a touch of whimsey, but overall, the art was quite solemn and sad.

We walked back through the city in the rain, stopping for warm, rich chocolate at the chocolate bar.  Then we visited Coles market to get bring Alan one more chicken schnitzel for dinner.  We are packed and ready to leave in the morning.

Blue Mountains with the Botanists

We had a very restful night at our Blue Mountain hide-away, The Waldorf.  After two days of being on the road by 7:30 it was luxurious to leave at 8am after a hot breakfast. 

Our first stop was a little walk through temperate rainforest near Mt. Wlison.  This was a short walk, but there were three interesting plants for me. (I think more for everyone else.).  Because of a recent wind storm, we saw some branches that had blown down from the canopy above, fairly recently.  They are doomed, now, unfortunately, but we could get a good look at how the orchids live on the branches of the host tree way up high where they also receive much more light than on the floor.  The next interesting  plant is called Tasmania , and it has crazy fruit that are very "primitivve" (ancestral is the correct term) where the style ends up outside of the fruit as it develops.  Finally, we saw a little fern called Tmesipteris.  It would be hard to find without someone pointing it out.  When I was in college, this little fern was thought not to be a fern, but something ancestral to all the vascular plants.  This little fern is very simple-- no true roots or leaves.  Since its DNA has been sequenced, it's true relationship to other ferns has been determined.  They are pictured above, and what you see are highly specialized stems serving as the photosynthetic surface AND as the root surface.  Through their evolution, they have lost their roots and leaves.  (Don't let this shake you, just think of snakes that are reptiles that have lost their limbs through evolutionary time).  They are growing on a tree fern stem.  This may not excite you, but look at just part of the crowd it drew.  I haven't drawn a crowd with that many cameras since I was halfway through my single digit birthdays!

Our next stop was further into the mountains.  To get there, we took a road with a name that begs explanation.  The name of the road is "Bells Line Of Road."  It looks like a mistake on the road sign, but it is a very deliberate name.  Bell was a surveyor who laid the road line, although the road was not built right away, for political reasons.  Folks were well aware of his road line, though, probably because it was so superior to the road that was in use, so when the road was eventually built, it was named Bells Line Of Road. 

At this stop we climbed part of the way up Mt Banks.  At least, the map names it as Mt Banks.  At the trailhead, the historic marker says "Mt Banks or Mt King George."  I am sticking with the Mt Banks name, in part because I am pretty sure this George was the one America fought a war against, and also because it was named Banks, after a famous botanist, by the explorer who climbed the mountain.  We had beautiful views from the near top.

And a close look at some tiny plants.

We drove to our lunch and afternoon spot after our descent.  This was the lovely Mount Tomah Botanic Gardens, part of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney.  Since Mount Tomah is in the Blue Mountains, it can host the cold climate collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens.  It is a new garden--really only about thirty years old, although you would never know that by walking amongst the beds.  It has a nice geographic arrangement as well, with a creek separating plants of the northern hemisphere from the southern.  We got to see Wollemi Pine, nearer to its wild home, in this gardern.  (There is a specimen growing in the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney.)  The Wollemi was thought to be extinct, but then found by some bushwalkers in the Blue Mountains about ten years ago.  Although there is a small cluster in the wild, its location a closely guarded secret.  Public, private and botanical gardens are its refuge.  It is a cool looking tree.  And, it has its own Facebook fan page.

Male cone.  The Wollemi has very soft needles.

The parking lot of the Mt. Tomah Botanic Gardens was our good-bye location, since some members of the trip didn't come directly back to Sydney.  We had a pretty quiet van ride back; I think passengers of all ages were thoughful and a bit tired.  Murray Henwood (University of Sydney) and Barry Ponns (Royal Botanic Garden) did an excellent job planning this trip, and especially exercising patience and high, good humor with the trip participants.  Believe me, telling a group of botanists that they have to ceasing looking at and photographing plants in order to get to the next stop, is quite a challenge.

We have a city day tomorrow.

A Vacation While on Vacation

We left almost everything in Sydney and departed the city at 7:45am for a Blue Mountains field trip.  Tonight we are sleeping in Leura, New South Wales, near one of the national parks that Australians are most proud of.  The point of a field trip when you are botanizing, is not the destination, but the journey. So, we made a series of stops.

The first stop was a couple of hours out of  Sydney along a road cut to an old quarry.  The quarry stone was used to build "the oldest sandstone bridge on the mainland."  This means there is an older one in Tasmania, and by my calculations, that makes this mainland bridge the second oldest bridge in Australia.  However, I don't want to offend anyone by not referring to it as "the oldest sandstone bridge on the mainland."

The interesting plant on this walk was an Astrotrichna that had two distinct forms even though they are a single species.  The forms had likely been separated for a long time, but came into contact with each other due to the disturbance of the road cut.  If you saw the plants in the forms, you would assume they were different species, and if Linnaeus had received the samples in the eighteenth century, he likely would have given them two names,  The modern definition of a species is based on the ability of members of a population to reproduction with each other.   The even more modern definition of a species is based on looking directly at the actual DNA.  By these definitions, the plants are all the same species, in spite of how they look.

Why is this interesting?  The diversity of life fascinating, whether you like flashy animals or subtler life forms like small plants or slime molds or beetles.  Remembering that Darwin's most famous book was called On the Origin of Species,  we realize that most of the time we consider why there are so many different species.  Finding an example of the opposite--looking different and actually being the same, is just an interesting.  It begins to tell a story of local adaptation and the amount of time and natural selection needed to make a population into more than one species.

While the botanists were looking at plants, JR and Alan explored a little more quickly and in a slightly wider range.  Alan found a skeleton.  Trevor, one of our accompanying botanists, and who has a wide knowledge of natural history in general, thought that it was a bush rat.

Our next stop was in the Blue Mountain National Park. The area had dwelling areas of the aborigines that were 20,000 years old. The area we wandered around felt like being above treeline in the northeast, but it wasn't. The vegetation type is refereed to as "heath." The exploring boys dropped out of site for a few minutes, and re-emerged to pull Mark and I out of the open and underneath a rock where the wind erosion had created a very striking honeycomb in the rock. The photo at the start of this entry is an example. Above is a wider view of the rock. With another short walk we came to a dwelling place that had some ancient symbols etched into the stone. This semi-circular symbol probably meant safe camping place.  These etchings were very hard to discern because they are subtle, and also because they are 20,000 years old.  It is humbling to look at them and think, "In my whole lifetime, will I every communicate anything, in any way, that will be looked at and understood 20,000 years from now?"  I don't expect to--in spite of this blog!

We stopped for lunch at a mountain tea room-- and had excellent sandwiches on very homemade tasting bread.  Alan ate three in the time it took most folks to consume their first.  His appetite has returned in force.

We've all been like kids on a family vacation these past two days.  We don't know a lot about where we are going ahead of our arrival, although we get a few timely clues along the way.  This doesn't matter too much since we sort of don't really know where we are anyway, and none of us visitors is driving.  Australia, New South Wales, is a big place.  So, we tamely climbed into the van after lunch, and exited at the next stop a few minutes later reading a sign that said "Scenic World."  Barry, the Royal Botanical Garden botanist who is driving our van told us we were going to take a little railroad ride, walk around and then come back in a sort of gondola skyway.  If you've been reading the blog, this sort of sounds like our day in Kuranda.

We quickly received our tickets, and loaded into a car.  Railway, I would suggest, is a very broad term, that mostly describes the tracks--not the car that sits on the tracks and certainly not the incline of the tracks.  We found ourselves sitting in fairly open cars, though with a cage top--and even I had very little head clearance.  As we move forward, the soundtrack from Raiders of the Lost Ark started to play.  We were plunged into utter darkness and pitched steeply forward.  We were on a railroad, but it was a railroad that had been used to take miners to the entry of the mine shaft.  In less than a minute we had descended about the length of six (US) football fields.

How would that be for a commute each morning?  The point of a field trip when you are botanizing, is not the destination, but the journey....

The bottom was very interesting too.  More tree ferns!  And, quite a lot of remnants of the mining and information about the history and culture of the mine.  (A 'random' example: boys started work at age 14.)  The boys and I had a long walk along the boardwalk, and ran into Trevor and a pair of lyrebirds that was fun to watch for a while.  They scratch at the leaf litter on the ground with a fierce concentration.  Meanwhile, a different species altogether, the scrubwren, followed in its tracks to glean whichever smaller invertebrate morsels had been left behind.  The male lyrebird we were watching also called to the female.  Lyrebirds are incredible mimics.  John Roy and I saw a tape of one at the Melbourne Museum that sounded like an ambulance, a chainsaw and a camera all in the space of a minute.  (This tape segment is part of David Attenborough's Life of Birds.) Today, the one we watched sounded more like a bird.

We did take a steep gondola ride back to the top, and it didn't have quite the thrill or the soundtrack of our descent, but it was scenic.  Then we were off to our next stop, a view of the famous rocks, The Three Sisters.  This area has rocky faces below a table, and the three rocks that remain were once a group of "Seven Sisters."  We had just enough time before dark fell to climb down and stand in the niche of the sister on the furthest left.

Standing in the shelter of a sister.

We've all had a splendid dinner with champagne and four wines.  It is getting quiet in our Blue Mountain hotel room.  Alan says his most vivid memory from today is finding the bones.  JR says his is the railroad ride.  Mark's most vivid memory is seeing the really tall tree ferns in the mining area.  All this, and we still have the journey back to Sydney tomorrow.

South of Sydney

The botanists were off on a full day field trip to some natural areas south of Sydney, and the boys and I went with them.  We stopped throughout the day, and the main areas we saw were rainforest.  Above are two photos from my walk on "The Fly," a spectacular walkway in the canopy in Illawarra natural area.  When I got out onto the catilevered terminal end, JR was bouncing up and down.  He swears he was encouraged to do this by one of the graduate students from Russia.  I am not sure who to believe...

From the rainforest part of the trip, my absolute favorite was seeing tree ferns.  We don't have them in the "new world," and Australia is my first old world rainforest, so I was quietly excited. They are ferns, so they look like ferns, except that they stand as tall as small trees.  The are old, as a group--- older than any seed plants.  There are lots of ways to define success, but the photo above shows one way.

We went to Minnamurra rainforest next, which has both subtropical and temperate rainforest.  The area has been saved from too many human footsteps with an extensive boardwalk.  We had an excellent botanist/ecologist show the group around.  This area was carved out by a rivulet which added to the diversity.

In the latter part of the afternoon we drove to Royal National Park, stopping at a scenic overlook for a photo along the way.  Here are a pair of photos from what looked to me like the edge of the world.

 Boys on the Brink

Botanists on the Brink

We arrived at our last stop in Royal National Park very close to sundown.  Royal National Park is the oldest national park in the world, ahead of Yellowstone in the USA.  We were out of the rainforest and into a desert-like habitat, with sand underfoot, not because of the current coast, but because of an ancient coast that became sandstone under pressure, has now had uplift and erosion turning it back into sand particles.  We saw the biggest diversity of plants in flower.  Before I had even set foot from the van, though, John Roy, who had alighted first, was on his way back to me with a Banksia pod in his hand.  In our family we know this plant and its pod because my father, who is a wood turner, makes vases from them.  Banksia is highly dependent on fire, at a high temperature, to reproduce, and the seeds also seem to require a drenching rain after the fire.

Banksia under a sliver of the moon at sunset

We have been accepted into the clan now, and have another trip tomorrow, to the Blue Mountains. We leave at dawn....

Alan has read four books so far on this trip Down Under, and I am hoping that the fifth book lasts until we are home!