Charters Towers: Showtime

After getting pretty well and settled in Charters and going into the 2nd week of august, we heard that Charters Towers was having their annual 'show' or fair. It's a great time for everyone in the municipality/county/shire or whatever to get together and see the newest developments in farming technology, some good rides, food and entertainment, and little showbags for the kids. Showbags by the way are little bags, as partially defined in it's name, and for an accurate description the second half of the word should state 'filled with a buncha crap so that parents spend 20 bucks for crying kids to have cheap plastic'... it's a big deal around here. Showbags are quite big (in this state atleast), that they are seemingly the main event in Brisbane's version of a show called the "EKKA". It's a very close rendition of the PNE back in Vancouver, but slightly smaller I think. However the CT fair was not even near the same scale of the previously mentioned events, although they did have some familiar rides like the Zipper ( shown), and dodg'em (bumper) cars. The scramber, and a version of the skyscraper were also at the fair. The main attraction of the night though wasn't the rides or even the riveting display of farm equipment that had all the scraggly men with beards turned on... no, instead it was the monster trucks. Two monster trucks had made a journey from the coast to put a little bit of excitement back into the boonies for all these folks out here, and made quite a show of the rarity what with fireworks and all. Overall it was a good night to experience a bit more of the Aussie traditions, not dissimilar to our own really, and to get better acquainted with our new community. Another bit of the show I forgot to mention was the display section. As with every fair, displays of local artwork and such were to be shown for the more casual of attendees to gander at, rather than take a risk on 'the zipper'. The schools each had a large section of the covered bays in which to showcase some of their young talent and the work they were accomplishing with the kids. One thing you have to understand is how many schools are actually present in a town of only 9000 people... many. There are three boarding schools that I know of: ASSG, BTC, and CCC. There are also Kindy centres, and a couple of state schools. Understandably, this breeds a sort of competitive feeling in Charters, and so when given a chance to show up another school, ASSG naturally made a big effort in gathering and assembling the best of what was accomplished in the past year. Fun as it was spending hours organizing the display in the best possible way, we unfortunately didn't win a prize for it; although some of the children's handwriting pieces brought home many 1st and 2nd prizes.

Charters Towers: More Pics

So these are just a few more pictures of the area of Charters Towers. A couple of shots of myself in the pool, and some of Marco...I really don't have any individual ones of Katie, but when I do the Townsville entry, there are a couple group photos there. The one at the top left is from the Charters Towers show (which is essentially a fair, but if I said that over here they'd correct me and say 'show') , which was something like the Saanich Fair back home, but a little smaller. That was one of my better posing pics for the sole reason that I was giving a thumbs up sign instead of the gangsta backhanded peace sign... apparently down-under and world-wide this is equivalent to the bird and 'f- off', but I didn't actually realize this until at after posing for at least 15 pictures other people took of me....somewhat explaining the semi-offended look they had afterwards. So now i'm sticking with the safe thumbs-up, it's universal (except for in diving when it means that you need to surface as opposed to 'a-o-k' which i've discovered as well). Woops

Charters Towers: Gappie Set-up

So here I've finally arrived in Charters Towers. The flight up from melbourne was particularily good since it was the only flight I caught so far which I actually managed to catch some sleep on! It had a layover in Brisbane of only a couple hours, so no tourist stops there, and then we were on our way to Townsville pegged to arrive at 10 pm or so. Getting at the airport Katie and myself (Marco was to arrive the next day) met up with Mac Horne who is Dean of Students at All Souls St Gabriels and is the bloke in charge of the gap students. We had a pretty serene and quiet bus-ride up to the campus, which lasted for 1.5 hours heading towards Charters Towers, all the while being quietly excited at the possibility of seeing a kangaroo on the side of the road. Arriving at around 11 pm at All Souls we were introduced to the headmaster, and then thankfully to our new home (above). The rooms I've forgotten to take pictures of, but maybe I'll remember later on. ASSG has a pretty good setup for it's Gappies over here. Upon hearing all the war-stories from both orientations in Vancouver and Melbourne, I didn't quite know what to expect... but we were lucky as hell to at least end up with 2 bathrooms, 3 seperate beds, a kitchen and in-house laundry. Also, relatively close, are a tennis court (30 ft) and a pool (120 ft)....and dining hall is only a 3 minute walk. My specific duty as a GAP student, is to work closely with students age 5-12 in the junior school and assist the teachers in whatever tasks the require. Sometimes i'll take over a class for a little while, but more frequently i'm asked to assist small groups of children if they're having learning difficulties and try to give them the extra attention that teachers often can't when dealing with large groups of kids. Since it's volunteer work, I get paid the equivalent of 2 dollars an hour, which works out to be enough sustain yourself with the extra little things that come up as requirements for the week... aka beer and chocolate. For me peanut butter is a big thing too, and if any of y'all want to mail me at all, pls send some Reece's Peanut Butter Cups...they don't exist here!! Address is PO Box 235, Charters Towers, QLD, AUSTRALIA, 4820.

Arrival in Australia: Melbourne

Hong Kong was a great and satasfying trip and, to be honest, I felt like a left a large piece of something that I needed to discover behind me when taking the 8 hour flight to Melbourne. But once again I found myself on a plane heading towards a strange new place, and I suppose I could feel nothing other than excitement as I was edging closer to the place I was finally bound for. Melbourne, in many ways, reminded me exactly of Vancouver before I left. The lay-out of the city was much more sparse and it seemed much lot smaller because of that, but predominately the buildings and history and time-frame were all too similar for me to actually get excited about being in the city. Add on top of that, the terribly cold weather in comparison to Hong Kong and a Victorian summer before I left, and a complete lack of the sunnie Australia I'd first imagined. Upon arriving in the early morning, we caught a taxi to take us towards the University College campus that was awaiting us near the university of melbourne. There we would find out that us Canadian gaps were first to arrive, with the Brits expected later in the day and the Germans to be coming the following afternoon. I was also much relieved to find a kingly sized room that would completely contrast my lodging in Hong Kong, and was eager to unpack all the gear that was starting to smell of mould, like clothes often do being packed too tightly for too long. Settling into the campus, we began meeting some of the other travellers that happened to be staying there, such as the pool-enthusiast americans, and then went to check out the nightlife of this new city. After going to a couple quiet bars, we finally opted just to drink and talk in our own rooms since it was cheaper and we got to choose our own music. We ended up staying there a couple more days, since we were waiting for the Germans, and the whole point of Melbourne was to have an orientation allowing us to recover from jet lag and to hear more advice about how to handle life down-under. It was soon that I would hear my destination of Charters Towers was a pretty good haven for some of the deadliest snakes and spiders in the country, and you could be sure that I was not smiling about that...however I did get off lucky since some of the poor gap chaps ended up a lot more in the boonies than myself. Moving on... in Melbourne I forgot my camera every time I went out, so I apologise for the lack of pictures of the city, but I did manage to at least get out and see the aquarium as well as the house of famous explorer Captain James Cook after undergoing a fairly dull tour. (At least compared to the entertaining ones of Hong Kong). It was sad to leave Melbourne because I had to say goodbye to some of the good Canadian pals that I got acquainted with in Hong Kong, but in the end it's all about meeting different people and seeing what else is out there.

Stairway to Heaven...?

Lentau Island Buddha Pictures

During the time of our visit, the people of Tai-O were celebrating the birthday of their god of war named Lord Guangzhou or something of that sort, and the village was preparing for a big celebration that night. Again, we'd felt slightly intrusive but that was the nature of things and we'd kept moving on at a slightly leaded pace.

After getting to the section of the island that held the buddhist quarter along with the statue, we were treated to a fully vegetarian meal that was prepared and served by the monks that worked and studied at the monastery. I'm not quite sure of exactly what I ate, but there were a few exotic pieces that perhaps I wouldn't normally try if it weren't for the chance of insulting the poor monks who provided it. One dish tasted like freshly dug dirt though, and it was the only thing left on the table after we were all finished. At the buddhist monastery, no pictures or video of any kind was to be taken inside because of it's classification as sacred ground, but inside you find statues and models of some of the gods that have come to represent buddhism and it's meaning. Everywhere you would find little mock models of the gigantic buddha that you could see simply by turning around wherever you were in the quarter and looking up. There were a few steps to climb to get to see the buddha, but there was also the cheat way, which was a drive up the other side of the mountain and simply walking in. Many people were found to be climbing the stairs though, I think simply for the metaphorical practise of 'climbing to buddha' for those who were followers of the religion. However, it doesn't matter what denomination of faith you are... this place definately exhudes spiritualism (aided in part by the burning incense which fogs the square) and you will leave the mountain with a very exhausted inner-self.

Lentau Island

Perhaps the best experience I had of Hong Kong was when I visited the island of Lentau for a day visit. During this time I got to see, along with the other Canadians, the rainforest countryside (right), a remote fishing village by the name of Tai-O, and one of the largest bronzed buddha's in the world. To get to this island the lot of us took a fast ferry through Hong Kong harbour for about a half hour before docking in the Mai-O port, or something close to that name. After landing and eyeing the McDonalds restaurant that polluted the view at once, I wasn't sure how great of an experience this would prove to be thinking that a tropical island really shouldn't be scarred by such a sight...but it managed to pull through later in the trip. Our tour included quite a nice bus trip down Lentau's cramped winding street and we got a first-hand view of the mountainous landscape that held some of Hong Kong's most dangerous inmates in the prisons dotted along the hillside. What a juxtaposition I can tell you that (Hoora eng 12). We then visited one of Lentau's receding beaches, which was also a little more violent than usual we heard because of the tropical storms that Taiwan was experiencing at the time and was throwing our weather out of whack as well. I got a good video of some of the waves, but I just can't figure out how to put it on here so... no luck. Then I came across the little village of Tai-O which turned out to be the real eye opener since it was really my first glimpse of something that could give me culture shock. Walking down the streets, it was Bryan who pointed out the guilt we'd felt at taking pictures of these people's poverty. It was a tourist stop, so it was very obvious that they'd seen many more of us before and weren't too abbrasive about us essentially walking into their homes and interrupting their daily lives, but it felt disturbing to realize that these people have birthright into very little potential to do something with their lives other than fish from the same waters that they throw their waste into. Very sad, but also eye-opening.

Downtown Hong Kong

Here are a couple views of the downtown region of Hong Kong. It was very well kept and maintained as compared to where I was staying in the region of Kowloon, and didn't have the same "shanghai" feeling as the back alleys did on the peninsula. Only had a couple experiences of visiting the region... one night on visiting downtown we went to the ladies market and spent a couple hours wandering the streets and doing cheap bartering with the traders. And another time was a couple of us Canadians taking up a tip to visit the drinking quarter of the city, which was just a 10 minute rail across the bay and further west. It was a very busy place to visit, since every tourist in the city seemed to be out enjoying the partying at the same time. That night we meet a bunch of americans and other backpackers, but ended up on our own in some shifty club that we bribed our way into since all of us guys were stupid enough to wear shorts out. Though in humid 30 degree weather it's hard to blame us. The picture there of the big chinese style building that is on the water is a picture of the largest floating restaurant in the world in a section of Hong Kong called Aberdeen.
To see it so up close we took a bit of a harbour tour in some rickety craft which toured us around to see absolutely nothing but this restaurant and some of the rotting boats in the harbour. Getting into the boat and paying 20 HKD I figured that we'd at least get to see the Tsing Ma bridge or something, but no. Just this restaurant at the very beginning, and then 15 min up the waterway passing other vessels and back. But hey, not a bad shot.

City View

These are just a couple of views of the Hong Kong city that were taken the day of arrival... this region was called Kowloon, and was just a short tunnel away from the heart of the city which sits on an island all to itself. On the first day I wandered around with the buds, and we ended up finding some food in a dodgy side-street restaurant which obviously had very limited english capabilities. Ryan ended up ordering duck which was capable of winning a staring contest against him, and the rest of us were content to suck down some authentic noodles after having 3 airplane meals which were lacking to say the least. Anyways... I hope you are able to see at least a bit of the busyness of the streets around there. It gets extremely crowded however in the downtown region during the market times at night. It was a game of 'spot the white person' once getting into those crowds, and standing room only made it very easy to get lost in the 16 block radius.

The Beginning: Hong Kong Hostel

Alrighty there... thought i'd just lend a shout out to me friend Kirsten Sweetland who graduated with me and who just won the world champs overseas somewhere and is making all of Canada proud at the moment. Also, a big big big figurehead of my home country at the moment has just died, so if you could all say a little prayer for Steve Irwin, the man with the most enthusiam in the world. Crikey. Well I thought that I'd start at the beginning and try to throw in some pictures whenever I can of Hong Kong and my travels so far, so that you all could see them and finally know what I've been talking about. To the right here is a picture of my HK hostel. It doesn't appear to be bad, except we had some wacky rain and then all the critters started appearing a ways after this picture. This was taken around July 14th...after my 13 hour painful flight of watching V for Vendetta 6 times in a row and not being able to find sleep. Well there's one, I'll keep em coming.

Arrived in the land of OZ!

Well mostly this is just a trial to see if this blogspot works for me...but I may as well type a few words in case this works for those of you who might visit this site. My name is Logan, and I'm an 18 yr old recently graduated Canadian highschool student who's doing a GAP year working in Queensland, Australia as what essentially sums up as an assistant teacher. My school is called All Souls St. Gabriel's School, and it's a pretty remote place about 1.5 hrs from the coast. Hopefully most of you know this already because you're all friends and family... Anyways, my stay over in HK proved to be a very enlightening experience, I loved all of Hong Kong except for the intensly shitty hostel and the predominant smell of fish. After 3-4 days there, I flew to Melbourne for an orientation with German, UK, Russian, Iranian, and other nationalities of GAPpies who were to spread out all over the country. I landed over here in Charters Towers with a German fellow by the name of Marco, and a Scottish girl by the name of Katie and by this point we're all preparing for our September 2 week break from school to travel around and see the rest of the country and the coast. I think that's enough of an introduction/test, but i'll keep you all posted! Keep visiting!