Saturday, November 29, 2014

Hello lovely readers! It's funny that despite how much I journal and write verbose emails, I'm actually not really sure how to get started on this whole blogging business.

But here goes! I'll start with a bit of a recap of my trip down unda to Australia in November 2014.

World Parks Congress (WPC) in Sydney

This was my first trip to Australia, and I was so excited to see what my Australia-phile friends are always raving about. The slightly less enjoyable part was that I was heading straight to China afterwards for my year of fieldwork, so I was forced to lug 160+ lbs of luggage across 3 continents. I also lack the ability to travel gracefully, which means I was grunting and sweating and pleading/cajoling/crying with airline officials about my overweight luggage the whole way. To the dismay of those sitting beside me on the planes, I also packed my deodorant in my check-in luggage, so needless to say, I didn't smell too great either.

I finally managed to get my stinky and bedraggled self to Sydney by noon on the day the conference opened. I threw on some deodorant and made it only an hour late to the opening ceremony after a cursory 1.5 hours of being lost on Sydney public transit.
WPC's opening ceremony was really cool! They had fun nature-themed circus acts, which I appreciated. They also had a cocktail hour afterwards with dim lighting and romantic dance music, haha I guess to help people start the conference networking process.

On the first actual day of the conference, I felt really out of place and lost. It was so hard to focus my attention on anything, and it seemed like an entirely plausible outcome to show up at a monstrous conference like this (6000+ people, once every decade) and come away without digging into anything, which is not what I wanted.

Then as the individual streams started, I felt better. I really liked my stream, Respecting Indigenous Traditions and Cultures. They actually had a lot of indigenous representatives speaking, and after being in the ivory tower at school for the past while, these personal interactions were a really good reminder about why I am doing my research. I also had a lot of fun giving a talk for the session on Asian Sacred Natural Sites. (For those who are curious, I gave a similar talk at the FES Doctoral Student Conference in October 2014. My talk starts at 31:00 in session 2 at http://new.livestream.com/YaleFES/2014-doc-conf)

I will say that the Russians definitely won first place at the conference, hands down. They had a giant booth with people dancing around dressed as large cats, plus a special selfie station with a Russian bear. If I ever organize a stand for a large international conference, imma roll like this too.


Most importantly for any conference, I also made lots of new friends, especially among forest rangers. One very kind ranger named Chris offered to take my friend Julia and I out for a fun trip to Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park over the weekend. We got to see really cool petroglyphs left by Aboriginal peoples from over 2000 years ago. My favourite is the little platypus -- isn't it adorable??

I keep forgetting that Christmas here involves no snow. Chris pointed out a little island where he likes to spend his beachy Christmas BBQs, so I posed in front of it.


But of course, the best part of WPC was getting to see old friends, long graduated from FES with their masters and scattered around the world doing all sorts of amazing things :)


Tasmania: Land of Absurdly Adorable Animals!

After the conference, my friend Julia and I headed off to Tasmania for some well-deserve post-conference relaxation. There are so many animals at night, so I was driving at half the speed limit because I was terrified of hitting something, especially since we had to drive on the left side of the road and we were still not too comfortable with that. I don’t think I’d ever forgive myself if I hit a wallaby.

See? I can't even describe how much I love wallabies. As Julia says, their cuteness causes actual physical pain!

We met a bunch of wallabies at Freycinet National Park -- this place is GORGEOUS and I absolutely recommend a visit! I have beautiful landscape photos, but I'd prefer to focus the post on cute animals, so instead of the idyllic waterfront, I will show you all the selfies I tried to take with wallabies.








Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park was also breathtakingly magical! I pretty much exploded with joy during kangaroo feeding playtime.

Plus the Tasmanian Devils (obvi!). Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park is on the Tasman Peninsula, which is home to the LAST remaining wild population of face-tumour-free Tasmanian Devils. (For those of you who haven't heard, Tasmanian Devils has been decimated in recent years by Devil facial tumour disease, the poor little things... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease)

I also got to hold a tawny frogmouth, which is such a cool bird!! They have giant gaping mouths, which is where I think they got the name "frogmouth." This little lady I'm holding was born with a genetic condition that prevents her from flying, so her mom tossed her out of the nest. A hiker found her and brought her to the park, which is where she's grown up. She likes people so much that she clucks when you pet her! Also adorable is how spherical these birds are when they are resting during the day. Also also spherical and adorable is the giant head of a kookaburra.

Last but not least, we found an echidna crossing the road on our way back to the airport. The little shuffle is sooooo cute! The poor little guy or gal got scared and mushed its face into the ground for protection. Doesn't the furry little lump look so fearsome?

We didn't get to see a koala or wombat in Tasmania, so we headed back to the Sydney Zoo to rectify that issue. Apparently, my role model Kimora Lee Simmons has had a koala photo shoot before, which I was trying to emulate. 
We aren't allowed to touch koalas in New South Wales (uugggghh should have flown to Brisbane where the laws are different), so I sniffed the koala because I wanted to know what they smell like. The closest part was his bum, and I can report that koala bums do not smell good.




We waited for ages, but we also managed to see the wombat too. Haha he's sleeping like he's drunk.
Weird fact: wombat poo is square-shaped! They literally poo little cubes out. How weird is that??
(Some have proposed an explanation: http://www.ibtimes.com/wombat-poop-why-it-cubed-reason-australian-marsupials-square-droppings-1438518)


Hmm, I know my mom is reading this, and I know she's gonna ask about the scenery more than wombat poo, so I'll throw some landscape pics on after all. Shout out to Freycinet and Mount Field National Parks in Tasmania.






Arriving in Xishuangbanna

I have just arrived at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, where I will be based for my fieldwork for the next year. It's still a little surreal that I'll be away for so long, but it feels more and more real now. Haha mainly the bathrooms are a rude awakening to reality.

That's for now! I'm hoping future posts will be shorter, or mainly that I'll be better at updating regularly. See you then!

Much love,
Lily

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