FAREWELL AUSTRALIA!

ODDS & ENDS

Monday, February 24, 2025, At Sea, 4 AM, Temperature 84 Degrees, Humidity 74%, W – S 6.3 mph

We’ve turned the clocks back too many times recently, one hour again last night. John was asleep at the new time of 7:30 PM (we never wait until 2 AM to move it when the ship does) but awake two hours later, in time to go out on the balcony and see the Southern Cross. He came back to bed but was up at 4 AM this morning!

As we’ve left Australia, we wanted to share some interesting things that didn’t make it into previous blogs.

BIOSECURITY ALERT –

Every country we’ve visited has had a policy about not bringing anything from the ship ashore – no plants, food, animal products, etc. No cookies from the Lido deck, no bananas or apples in case you get hungry. They were all trying to protect their country from any invasive species or plants. In some countries, HAL would just make an announcement over the PA as we arrived. In French Polynesia, they were required to make the announcement over the PA every hour that we had passengers going ashore. Australia took it to a whole higher level with posters about a Biosecurity Alert. If you had been on an Excursion to a farm with possible animal contact and possibly had dirt on your shoes from that farm, you had to report it. Large plants surround the pool area on deck nine. While we were visiting Australia, those plants were totally covered. Now that we’ve left Australia, they’re back in the sunshine. Australia’s not the only country with a strict approach; there was a story on my Tablet on 2/22/25 that a single male Oriental fruit fly had been found in a surveillance trap in New Zealand. Controls had been ramped up significantly, restricting the movement of any fruits and vegetables from that location.

TIME ZONES –

We’ve almost gotten used to moving our clocks back an hour and back and back…! But when we left Sydney (before arriving in Darwin), we got a notice to turn hour clocks back one-half an hour; that was a new one! Never heard of such a thing! When we left Darwin, we received notice to turn our clocks back another half hour, so we were back on the same hourly basis as we were at home. Australia, like the USA, has several time zones. Like the USA, Australia has daylight saving time; like the USA, some areas participate, and some don’t. Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane are all in the Eastern Standard Time Zone, but Brisbane does not adopt Daylight Savings Time, so in the summer, although it is further East, it is one hour behind Sidney and Brisbane. In addition, Australia has both 30-minute and 45-minute offsets determined by local authorities, i.e., Darwin.

ANIMALS –

We didn’t see any kangaroos in Australia, but we did see Wallabies running loose in Darwin (too hot there for the larger kangaroos). Fortunately, we didn’t see any snakes in Australia (there are lots of poisonous ones there) except on display at Hartley’s Crocodile Adventures! You had an opportunity to pose with a snake- we passed on that but did pose with an adorable Koala!

SOUTHERN CROSS –

John mentioned he saw the Southern Cross when he was sailing on the USS Tripoli out of Tasmania in 1979. He saw it again last night from our balcony as we sailed one day out from Komodo Island. The four main stars were bright enough that he spotted them through the glass door from the bed. He could not resist, so he got up and went out to admire them. Most of the sky was crystal clear, and he even saw the fifth minor star. The one 570 light years away. Epsilon Crucis is the minor star in the Southern Cross. The Wardaman people are a small Aboriginal Australian group that lives in the Northern Territory. They named the star Ginan, their description, "a small dilly bag full of knowledge." The International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially recognized the name. Off our Port rear quarter, which would be 200 degrees relative bearing, a lightning storm was putting on a continuous cloud-to-cloud show. In King Neptune’s domain, there is always something interesting to enjoy.