Sydney – Walking Upside Down
“A peasant at the Australian embassy is asked: Do you have a criminal record ?, and he answered: And what, do you still need a criminal record to get an Australian visa?”
This joke has been spinning in my head all the days of my stay in Sydney. I could not understand why the British sent criminals to this oldest city in Australia, founded as far back as 1788, rather than sending the best people of the nation there? Probably something was wrong in their head then.
You can walk around Sydney for hours. A light breeze from the ocean knocks down the heat, and numerous parks and squares make it possible to lie on pure grass in broad daylight. Although the city is large, and about four million people live in it, it is somehow not felt among the abundant greenery. Continue reading
Passion around the kangaroo
Despite high-profile protests by wildlife advocates, the Australian government raised the quota for kangaroo shooting this year, setting it at 6.9 million animals. The Australian kangaroo meat and leather industry is booming, recently earning $ 128 million a year.
Australia has always had a difficult relationship with its marsupial shrine. She, along with the ostrich Amy, flaunts on the arms of the country, entire generations of children grew up in 1960 and 1970 on the television series about Skippy, like the series Lassie, familiar to Russian viewers. The Australians themselves call themselves “Wallaby”, just like not the largest kangaroos (as New Zealanders call themselves “Kiwi”).
But farmers consider them pests and complain that they eat sheep and poison crops. And drivers in rural areas are forced to stop with sunset on the sidelines before dawn, so as not to run into the swift symbols of the state. Continue reading
On Earth, nothing holds
Who said that a hotel must have a solid foundation? A sufficient number of hotels have appeared on the planet, ready to provide their guests with the most unexpected forms of accommodation.
Life in the maze
Underground hotels in their pure form are only in Australia. In the town of White Cliffs in the middle of the rocky wasteland of the New South Wales province – about a thousand kilometers from Sydney and Melbourne – is the Underground Motel, completely knocked out in soft sandstone. The main advantage of the place is its very low humidity and the almost complete absence of rain, these conditions provide the opportunity for a comfortable life underground, as well as the safety of structures. Continue reading
The birth of the Melbourne bath
When guests of Melbourne are interested in the sights of the city, residents primarily call … local baths. “Of course, these are not the famous Roman baths, where the fate of the ancient world was often decided, but on the scale of our country their footprint is very noticeable,” they say. “Although the history of our baths is not so long – only a century and a half.”
The first line in the Australian “bathhouse chronicle” entered the 200-ton Swedish brig “Nancy”, stranded near the Melbourne coast near Fitzroy Street. The place was called Green Hill, but immigrants from Europe, who mastered the new continent, dubbed it a bathhouse. It is here, as historical chronicles testify, that the builders of the young city hurried in special trailers in order to have a rest by the sea after a busy day, to wash off dust and dirt. In the cabins, they changed clothes and through the hole-hole in the stern entered the water, on the allocated “washing area”. Continue reading
Eucalyptus picks
Koalas are very similar to cute bears, and the name of the species to which these animals belong may suggest that they are relatives of clubfoot. Although in fact, this is completely wrong.
Australia is a unique island country spanning an entire continent. It separated from land, including Africa, South America and Australia itself, about 50 million years ago. Over the next 50 million years, this Green Continent, being completely isolated from other parts of the globe, remained in prehistoric prosperity. Charles Darwin, who visited the shores of Australia in 1836 on the Beagle, was extremely amazed to see there the oldest representatives of mammals, living witnesses to the evolution of species – marsupials and ovipositors. Continue reading
