And now for something….
…completely different.
There’s been many monty python-eske adventures in the last few months and a few crazy ones too. Unfortunately I’ve been far too busy to document them all. There’s probably even a lot of stuff that I’ve done which I won’t even remember. That’s a bit sad, but whatever.
Two things which were really cool were long drives at night with Zoe back from the Mulgrave River to Townsville. We got a chance to chat and I always ask her weird questions like “Do you believe in God?”, “If you were reincarnated as an animal, what one would you be?”, “What’s the funnest thing you’ve ever done?”, “Do you remember when…” etc… etc… She always says “I don’t know” and then tells me her real answer.
She wants to be reincarnated as a little monkey that never comes into contact with people. I suggested that the mountains of Japan are probably nice to little monkeys. Very Zen and all. With cute toes and hot pools and so on. I think she’s already a little monkey.
I’ve also been doing a lot of physical work in the outdoors, on the river, getting wet and dusty and muddy and sunburnt and seeing hundreds of species of birds, and fish and trees and thousands of tons of sugar cane being hauled behind small gauge trains. It’s all very picturesque but,when you know what to look for, the environment can be a depressing place. Weeds, feral animals, badly degraded landscapes, pollution etc… etc…
Nevertheless there’s a good feeing of big-sky (although not the same as the snowy mountains or Tassie or western NSW, but a good ‘country’ feeling and high rainforest peaks) and heaps of tropical smells, including sugar being refined which is like a syrupy sort of organic pong. It’s kinda grose.
That’s one of the main reasons I got into environmental science in general, and freshwater ecology in particular. To get out in these places - and get paid for it. I think that it’s actually one of the ways that you get paid doing environmental science - by interacting with nature. It’s what you get instead of the paycheck from the big-end of town. Much better as far as I’m concerned too.
Now that I’ve been out and caught all my fish I’ll be in the lab analysing them for the next couple of months, seeing what they eat and so on. It’s actually very interesting once you get over the odours and the knee-jerk reaction of ‘looking down a microscope for two months will be really boring’. Someone once said that God’s greatest sights were reserved for the microscope and telescope. I think that’s pretty true when you see some of the ingenious little insects.
I’ve posted some photos of the field work on the left. They were all taken with my Olympus Trip 35.