We have just arrived from a 3 day sailing trip around the coral reef near Airline Beach.
We spent 3 days on this boat with 14 other young people. We split the time between snorkeling and sailing along the islands.
It was loads of fun, we have seen everything from small fishes to stingrays, sharks and even a gigantic humpback whale with a baby.
Mother teaching a baby how to jump from water. She must have been more than 10m long, larger than our boat.
Now we are staying in a hostel and tomorrow we’ll continue to the Freiser island, another 1000 kilometers to the south. We are going to spend about 5 days there, looking for dingos and learning to surf after that we have something really cool planed in the Brisbane.
Since I’m writing this from a phone I’m going to keep it short. It’s incredibly hard to edit or even add photos to the posts from it. I’ll come back to these topics when I ger to computer, probably not sooner than in Slovenia.
Ah yea almost forgot, I also managed to caught a cold, which is incredibly annoying for snorkeling, also I’m blowing through tissue like no tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll get better before Brisbane, since some of the activities require me not being sick.
On Tuesday afternoon we arrived to Cairns, far up north on the continent. On Tuesday we had a chance to walk about the city, since it was not safe to swim. How come? Well there are some animals swimming around that want to eat you.
On Wednesday we gor up early in the mornings in order to go on a whole day tour even further up north into a ancient rainforest. It is suppose to be the oldest forest on Earth, dating back as far as 120 million years.
After driving for a couple of hours we arrived to the Daintree river which marks the border of civilization. On the other side there is no electricity, no phone signal, no nothing.
Interesting moss formation
We crossed the river in a levi and drove some more on the other side. There we took a walk through the forest looking at the ancient flora and trying to spot some of the animals. Most of them were extremely well camouflaged, even after guide pointed his finger 2 cm away from them it was almost impossible to see them. After the walk we had a lunch on a nearby sandy beach, where another giant bird came to say
After the lunch we had another special thing planned. Sailing on a small boat up the river we crossed earlier. Well it was about time we saw some crocodiles, we heard so much about them. We did not have to wait long to see them. Few of them were sunbathing on the shores and few were swimming around. We were told these species is the largest, some males have reached length of over 8 meters. To top it off we also spotted some pythons in the tree canapies above the river.
After the river safari we departed toward home, stopping on the way in some gorge. Nothing to special compared to what we have in Slovenia.
I have finished my work on Friday evening. It was very interesting and informative conference but very tiring at the same time. Next year Sweden, hopefully! 🙂
In the evening Veronika and I decided to go see a rugby game on an enormous stadium near our hotel. I have never been in a stadium that big, it can accept 55.000 people, but during our visit “only” 48.000 people were present. The game on the other hand was interesting, I guess it would be more fun if we actually new the rules. It seems like some kind of mix between football and baseball.
Enormous stadium with capacity of 55.OOO people.
On Saturday we spent whole day on the Ocean Road and in the evening we had to prepare for our departure. I was pleasantly surprised by the city and it’s citizens. Everyone was incredibly nice to us, the city is relatively clean for it’s size and the architecture in the city center is nice. I still haven’t gotten used to the left side driving yet, but hopefully will soon, we are planning to rent a car later on our trip.
We left for the airport on Sunday 7 AM and arrived in Sydney at noon.
Veronika has some relatives living in Suburbs of Sydney so we are staying at theirs place. The city is enormouse, it took us over 3h to drive from the airport to their house, and we never left the city.
Yesterday we took an opportunity to explore the city, but more on this later as we are already at tge airport again, preparing to go to Cairns in the north for almost 17 days. This time we are traveling extremely light, only 2 backpacks 6kg each. Hopefully we wont freeze up there since we didn’t have space for warm cOpera and Opera and bridve
On Friday evening I have finished with work, so yesterday we booked a whole day trip to the iconic Ocean Road to the south of the Melbourne. After an hour travelling through the suburbs of Melbourne we have finally reached the beginning of the road.
The Great Ocean Road
We were driving on a small bus alongside beautiful sandy beaches. There is not much to the south except open ocean and Tasmania. The waves were incredibly large compared to the ones around Mediterranean sea.
Long sandy beaches, with about 2m waves.
Surfers beach
Almost makes you want to jump in, to bad it’s only 10 degrees here. Must be great during the summer.
We made several stops along the way on the numerous beaches and small towns. In one of the locations there were some native Australian animals living around the trees – to be precise some wild koalas, Cockatoos and some parrots.
Cockatoo
Cockatoo
Sleeping in the tree. They sleep for 20 hours per day.
They must be used to people feeding them because as soon as we got close one of the birds actually flew directly on Veronika’s head. Haha she got so scared she almost broke her neck. We soon got used to them and it was fun petting them a bit as they landed on our hands and even head.
First landing on Veronika’s head. The parrot really scared her.
Arr, like a pirate. They were actually quite heavy. The bigger ones were probably at least 2kg.
After getting used to them it wasn’t so scary.
Grooming eachother
Guy swarmed by birds. I think he had some seeds with him.
We continued our trip toward some kind of rain forest. I think you can’t say it was really tropical but it did have some large trees.
Enormous trees
Our last destination was 12 apostles, probably the most iconic cliffs in the Australia. After seeing the enormous waves probably 5m+ it is easy to understand how this rock in the middle of sea have formed.
12 Apostles
Well it wouldn’t be Australia without some dangerous animals around every bush.
One of the main reasons, probably the only one, why I came to Australia at this time was the IJCAI conference. Again I was lucky enough to have had a paper accepted to one of the workshops that are included in the conference.
The workshops have started on Saturday this week and I’ve been going to lectures and presentations since. It’s quite rough, I usually have to wake up around 7 AM to be at the conference at around 8 AM and we don’t finish before 6 PM, sometimes even later. This was especially hard during the first few days when I had full effects of jet lag. I almost fell asleep few times during the afternoon and despite going to sleep early, I usually got really tired afternoon. For some unexplained reason I also woke up sometime in the middle of night for no apparent reason, luckily I was able to fall asleep soon after.
I had my first presentation on Sunday. I was presenting a paper my colleges wrote, but were unable to come here, JSI Sound – paper about sound classification.
Me giving a presentation
During the Saturday and Sunday the conference was held at the University of Melbourne and wow, I haven’t seen more beautiful building yet. It can’t be more than 5 years old, it’s full of LEDs everywhere, strange shapes and stairways like Hogwarts. Must be really cool to study at such cool university.
On Monday we moved to the Melbourne convention center, that is just across the river from our hotel. In the afternoon I was presenting my paper Intelligent Assistant Carer for Active Ageing at BOOM workshop. Somehow we were lucky enough to have won: best paper award. It’s great thing and will look good in my CV, although I don’t think it will further my PhD research anytime soon.
Me and my colleges winning best paper award for our paper.
In the evening we had reception at the cricket stadium nearby. It was without doubt my best day in Australia yet. We had some great food, drinks and native Aborigine playing didgeridoo. But the best part was … they brought some native Australian animals to the reception. This included koala, kangaroo, dingo, snake and some lizard. I was even more surprised when I was able to pet the dingo a bit, not only that but I was able to feed him some meat his trainer gave me. The evening only continue to get better as I was able to scratch baby kangaroo behind his ears. His fur was surprisingly soft, like touching a cloud.
Me, koala and kangaroo behind me.
Kangaroo in pouch? 🙂
I was able to pet and feed tamed dingo.
Kangaroo and it’s super soft fur.
Kangaroo
Koala
Koala
Beside kangaroo there was also a Koala bear eating a bag of eucalyptus. Whole area smelt of it.
On Tuesday the real conference started. We started at 7.45 with introduction talk and welcome by some aboriginal representative. There are I would guess around 2 thousand attendees at the conference listening to around 600 papers that were submitted. Everything runs in parallel in 7-10 rooms and sadly every other presentation is done by some Chinese guy with almost impossible to understand accent. It is mentally exhausting trying to focus on problems they are presenting and the bad language doesn’t help at all. At the end of the day I can barely think or walk. Yesterday I fell asleep as soon as I came home, 8PM and slept until 7AM next day.
Main lecture room. Once the talks began it was full of people up to a last seat.
Food at reception.
Aborigine
Some aboriginal instruments.
Heating the grass at cricket stadium.
Robot League, I guess he wasn’t the best player.
IJCAI Melbourne
Melbourne Convention Center
I need to remember to take new photo here. It’s now full of stalls and people.
20 °C
6:11 am 
5:57 pm 
Leave a comment (0)
7 °C
