Day 2 - at home in Macin

 Last night we arrived in Bucharest, Romania's  capital. First discovery? Men still use suspenders here, even for jeans! 

I'm lucky! My best friend, Elena, picked us up from the airport and hosted us. We played with Peanut, her dog, in the wee hours of the morning, ate fresh bread with fish roe, 😳, and then went to sleep.  One important picture from Bucharest: that of the University where I studied! 

This morning, Elena drove us to Macin. Of the almost two hundred miles covered, one fifth was on a freeway, and the rest on small roads.  Holes, horse-drawn carriages, trucks, very old Dacia vehicles and luxury cars -- these were testing times... Sadly, Romania has still a very small number of freeways and transportation is primitive.  

Lots of sunflowers embellished the often primitive landscape of the Romanian countryside. 

We crossed the Danube at Braila on a ferry boat. Same old one that transported us for many decades before...

Finally, we arrived in Macin!

Best way to describe home is to talk about my parents. Tata, my father, is a retired Biology teacher and active farmer. His garden is a corner of paradise, which I don't even know where to start describing! 

Here are his beehives! 

And here is his best helper, Neluțu! 

I'll go through the garden tomorrow! 

Noapte buna! (Good night!)

Travels of the 2015 summer

Day 1 - Frankfurt Airport, in transit to Bucharest, Romania

Encounter with "bretzels" and "currywurst," large planes, huge planes and lots of Asian tourists. 

My Australia Chapter: The End

My time in Australia is coming to an end. What I thought was a journey to a place became a journey to a place and back, as I am returning to live in the US. While I write this post, my head is violently filling up with pictures of tawny frogmouths and rainbow lorikeets, low blue sky or countless stars on a black night sky, red dirt and immaculate white sand, friendly reef fish, and blooming gum trees and grevilleas. My heart feels like an ocean of emotions. I see ourselves wading in a stream in the MacDonnell Ranges when the brown snake comes to meet us. I see my husband and daughter chasing the shingleback lizards in the Flinders Ranges and playing with tens of small jewel spiders in Western Australia. I see the biggest orb and orb spider spread like an umbrella over our heads in Northern Territory. We swim in the water hole to which the crocs didn’t make it yet, but where flying foxes flock in the tall gum trees. I hear the waves of the Indian Ocean breaking onto Penguin Island while dolphins grab the fish at an arm’s length from the boat. I taste the rose Turkish delight, Greek rose jam, Cherryripe and honeycomb chocolates, passion fruit and honey, tens of kinds of mangoes, and of course, the scrumptious burger with beetroot. Kangaroos hop and bearded dragons bask on the roads I travelled seated in front of the Land Rover Defender. Green ants, bull ants, cicadas, huntsmen spiders, locusts and katydids follow me in the insect memories I will never want to forget. My friends, my neighbors and my peers, ah, I will miss all of you so much! Australia is beautiful. I’m just kidding: this is not the end. I will come back.

Rottnest Island (Western Australia)

I don’t know what this island, which is 19 km from Fremantle and into the Indian Ocean, looked like when the Dutch discovered it about 200 years ago, but despite being surrounded by a reef and white sand beaches (check out the picture), it was given the name “rat nest.” This is what Rottnest means in Dutch. Why? Well, the island is small, about 4-5 km wide and 11 km long, and has thousands of quokkas, a marsupial the size of a cat rather than a rat, but the Dutch thought they were simply rats. Especially if the Dutch descended on the island at dusk, maybe seeing so many of these creatures made them also think they were “another “ invader… You can see from my picture that a quokka looks a lot more innocent and (hopefully!) larger than a rat. But the highlight of this boutique island (round trip ticket for adult, $72.5; bus ticket for the day for a hot bus that runs only every 30 min in a one direction loop, $10; cup of coffee $4.5) is its natural beauty, as always. The water is diverse shades of blue, turquoise and green as if it’s block colors being mixed on a painter’s palette, and snorkeling in the reef is a deeper trip into that palette of colors. There is life everywhere and highly dense, from birds to fish and of again quokkas. Speaking of fish, we stopped at the island’s information center as soon as we arrived on the island and asked where to go snorkeling. We were told that any bay is rich in reef and fish, but THE Information Centre omitted to tell us that the day before a 5-m great white shark had been spotted in one of the island’s bays… I am writing this post using both of my hands, so yes, we didn’t encounter any shark! From an ecological point of view the island is paradise, too, as no cars are allowed, just the lame tourist bus and bikes. Birds nest on the island’s shores and salt lakes in thousands. Only the museum reminded us of just another penal colony of Australia and fishing that led to the extinguishing of some species…

The Pinnacles (Western Australia)

This is a difficult post. So many people used a lot of different words to describe the stone pillars you see in my picture that crystallize from the mustard-colored sand, how am I going to say anything new or appealing about them? I can only tell you how I felt in their presence, as this must be a unique feeling. I walked in the Nambung National Park, which includes The Pinnacles, with the feeling I normally have when I walk in a cemetery. I imagined that just like under each heavy stone is buried a body that one day carried a light soul, the same way under each pinnacle were buried thousands of marine life bodies, trees, and other forms of life, which one very ancient day ago thrived with the boiling spirit of nature. Of life. But unlike in a cemetery, here sand plays hide-and-seek with the remainings, uncovering them from the past (indeed, just about 6000 years ago the pinnacles were hidden under the sand) and remodeling them in the endless game with the wind (the shape and gently rounded corners of some pinnacles are the result of this game).

And as if this beauty is not enough, visit The Pinnacles at sunset, when the light palette is so rich, I was sure to be on a different planet…

Wildlife Crossing

This sign is no joke! From ducks to kangaroos, and centipedes of course included, wildlife very frequently crosses the road in Australia. Everywhere.

The three pictures were taken in Western Australia during a one week span, but the same abundance of wildlife intersecting paths with the humans is one of the signatures of Australian life.

Unfortunately, very often the wildlife crossing is in danger and gets killed, as we saw in Kangaroo Island, where more kangaroos littered the roads than jumped on the sides. My favorite picture, the one where the duck is crossing in front of the sign warning of ducks crossing, is not the best shot I could take, but is the most accurate warning I have ever seen on a road.

Western Australia Christmas

Without going back in time too much, I am posting today about my Christmas in WA. 8:30AM, breakfast at Maccas in CBD (only place open) with old pastries and the company of flies. 9:30AM, Drive from Perth to Bunbury only to find out that the Dolphin Discovery Centre was closed on Christmas day. HOPE that more tourists would convince the underwater Observatory personnel in Busselton to keep it open! Noon. Drive the 53 km from Bunbury to Busselton in the Geographe Bay. (These are coastline and beaches one would imagine the Paradise were embellished with them, so the trip and the walks were like floating in a warm and breezy white and blue land.) More disappointment… Busselton: the longest wooden jetty in the Southern Hemisphere has a big lock on the ticket booth. Walk the 1.8 km into the Indian Ocean, and find another big lock on the gate of the Underwater Observatory at the end of the jetty. I have a picture of that locked gate, but found it too sad to post! I hope all Western Australians who work in these places, and pretty much all places where we wanted to have a cup of coffee or something to eat but were closed, had a great Christmas and didn’t travel to any place where they also got disappointed with EVERYTHING being shut down. My lesson: don’t travel during holidays in Australia. My Christmas tree? The gorgeous WA Christmas tree, but if you read carefully about it, it’s a parasite to avoid as much as looking for coffee in WA on Christmas day…

White Christmas? YES! Let's see if this picture tricks you, too, into thinking that there is snow in the distance, the top of it being blown off by the wind... OR this is a dune of very fine and white sand whose top is being blown off by the coastal winds?

Finally, late afternoon, back in Bunbury, two cappuccinos and a milk shake, $22.50. I don’t even want to remember the name of this café where I got so ripped off… Best Christmas day event? A true gift and memorable surprise, Orfa Turkish Bakery! Open until 9PM and making the best kebabs and rose Turkish delight!