Von 31. Oktober 1923 bis 7. April 1924 ist die Temperatur täglich auf 37,8 Grad gestiegen

Was also heisst, dass es an 160 Tagen verdammt heiss war . Powercorp baut dort gerade eine Solar/Diesel power station bei deren Inbetriebnahme ich helfen werde. Ein interessanter Job an einem relativ uninteressantem Ort (Hier in Google Maps). Aufgrund der Sicherheitsbestimmungen vor Ort werde ich den ganzen Tag in langaermeliger Arbeitsschutzkleidung unterwegs sein. Mit Sicherheit nicht die angenehmste Kleidung bei den Temperaturen. Allerdings auch eine einmalige Erfahrung. Auf jeden Fall werde ich fuer ca. 2 Wochen offline sein. Also bis dann!

Marble Bar

P.S.: Falls es interessante Bilder gibt im Anschluss, lade ich die natuerlich hoch.

Polkagris

Eigentlich sollen die Stangen im uebrigen ein “J” fuer Jesus darstellen.

Heute war ich dann im Tändsticksmuseet einem Streichholzmuseeum – ich muss ja auch mal einen auf Kultur machen

Auf jeden Fall ist Schweden bisher total gut. Wir haben richtig kaltes Wetter, viel Schnee, teilweise gute Vorlesungen und natuerlich auch wie immer viele Partys. Hat sich also bisher gelohnt!

Laura is excited about Uluru and wants to take it home...

...so I tried to squeeze it...

...but that didn't work. So I had to carry it home.

Luckily, I was to lazy to carry it. So it was still there for sunrise.

Well to be honest I have to say, that the Uluru is not as impressive as I expected. This is mainly because of the following reasons:

1) Everyone in Australia tells you about it. How big it is. How nice it is. How different it looks depending on daytime. How amazing the feeling is to actually see it. How different it looks from every angle. All nice and good, but people just overstate a lot. After all it’s just a massive rock.

2) You’ve seen it so many times. On magazines, postcards, pictures of friends, on the internet, on book covers, in books, in the newspaper, on shirts. It’s just everywhere. So when you actually stand there and see it, it looks just like you already knew. No different at all.

But anyhow, we saw it, and we could drive on

Anyhow, our aim for today was to get to Alice Springs! But first we wanted to stop at the famous Daly Waters pub. So off we were to explore the very special Australian outback pub culture. Yes, it’s kinda strange. They have nothing in the outback. Just endless spaces full of gum trees and … nothing. But then out of nowhere there is a pub. And even funnier there are people in the pub drinking (this fact does not correlate to the time of the day). Daly Waters is specially famous as a good example of such an outback pub, full of stuff. And I really mean stuff. They have everything there, starting from id’s over money to thongs (german: flip-flops) and bra’s of people who visited once and left something behind. Just have a look yourself:

IDs at Daly Waters pub

Money hanging off the walls at Daly Waters pub

They even had an original DDR numberplate there.

Original DDR numberplate at Daly Water pub

After we had seen enough of Australian outback pub culture, we drove on to Alice. On our way we passed a sign telling us that we were close to the so called “Devils Marbles”. We never heard of them, but decided to stop, as we were a little bit tired anyway. And what a good decision this was! These are big round rocks looking like marbles, standing just there as if the devil himself put them there to play with. I wonder though why they are named “Devils Marbles” . Some of them were stacked up high and I climbed on some of them.  From up there the view was even better, as you could see how many of those marbles there actually were. For those who are interested how they were created, have a look here.

One of the Devils Marbles

Laura also enjoyed the view, standing on top of one of the marbles:

Laura looking over the marbles

And after this nice stopover we drove on to Alice and almost reached it. We stopped at a parking spot 30km before Alice and set up our van for the night.

Katherine Gorge

Awesome, isn’t it?
Before we hopped into the canoe the instructor told us we were allowed to stop everywhere and jump into the water or onto the land, except where they had signs. The signs basically told every curious tourist that there are some crocs breeding and they may be aggressive if people come to close. Well, to be honest I thought “whatever…” and thought about going on land there. But after only 10 minutes on the water, we saw a 2 meter crocodile swimming right next to us. Not 10 meters away, or 5, or 2. It was just RIGHT next to us, maybe half a meter. I could have reached if I had tried. While Laura and I were fascinated and shocked at the same time, the croc didn’t really bother. So luckily we escaped without being harmed and ew could jump into the water a couple of hundred meters further down the gorge, to cool down. This place was just so amazing. We climbed up the rocks, jumped into the water and swam around. Soo relaxing.

But anyhow, we had to move on, so after half a day canoeing, we drove further down to Mataranka, which is famous for it’s hot springs. As we arrived we directly jumped into the warm water and had a swim. After jumping in, you don’t realise how warm the water actually is.

Mataranka Hot Springs

But I had a swim a bit further down in a river. In here you could feel the warm, or even hot water from the spring floating into the in comparison ice cold water of the river. It was quiet nice, but there were croc warning signs everywhere. This, the fact you couldn’t really see the riversides, and the croc experience earlier this day, made it clear to me that I had to get out of the water as soon as possible.

After this experience we just drove a few kilometers up the road and stopped on another camping spot to rest for the next day.

Ready to go

So we headed off to our first goal: Katherine. After driving more than 300km we found out, that it was a bigger goal than we thought – we were already running out on fuel! On the first day. Luckily we managed to reach the first fuel station in Katherine. With nothing to offer for Tourists we decided to keep on driving to the Nitmiluk National Park where we planned to stay over night. The reception was already closed so we just drove onto the campground and looked for a nice spot to stay. We did not only see some Cane Toads, but also our first wild wallaby:

First wild wallaby

After taking those pictures we went to bed, tired, but happy to be on our way! We had big plans for the next day…

I am back. After 4 weeks of travelling through Australia I finally made my way back to Darwin. It were awesome 31 days of travelling. I know that my blog recently wasn’t …mhh let’s say… well maintained as some time ago. I hope I can change this from now on. I will write some posts about my travelling, though I won’t start until I have the pictures ready to show you some of the stuff we saw on the trip. I also have to disappoint everybody who was waiting for underwater pictures from the great barrier reef – the underwater camera died one day before the diving trip in a pool (!). But more to all this stuff later, when I have some more time to write.

On Monday all Steinbeis fellows went to a traditional japanese tea ceremony. We were a bit early, so we had to walk through a (typical traditional japanese) garden and wait. It wasn’t that fun, as it sounds, because the temperatures in Japan at the moment are about 30 degree with a humidity of 80%. Just like Darwin during the wet!

Traditional japanese tea cereomny

After the tea ceremony we drove back to the hotel. After refreshing we went to a typical japanese restaurant and hat a great dinner. We had all sorts of raw fish, japanese beer, sake and of course sushi.

Japanese dinner

After the dinner was over, we went…. of course! To a karaoke bar We ordered lots of beer and sang together with the japanese fellows all kinds of songs.

Today we visited tmsuk, a company that builds robots. They have some quit impressive robots, especially the big search & rescue robots looked like out of a Terminator movie. Some others were a number smaller and were for home use, like this one, that acted kind of like a dog.

4 leg robot for home use

After a long day at the company, we finally drove home. On the way back to the hotel we also stopped at a japanese shrine. Very impressive I have to say. And a welcome change in landscape to the quiet boring city (everything is concrete, packed up and noisy and grey).

Me in front of a japanese shrine

That’s it for now. I try to upload the missing pictures to my picasa account asap.

On July the 1st the Northern Territory celebrates it’s self-government since 1978. This is the only day during the year that Australian people are allowed to lit fireworks. I also heard that no other state in Australia allows to shoot fireworks at all, but I am not sure about this. Anyway, although it is a big day, it wasn’t a public holiday, so I had to work. After work I went to the Mindil Beach and waited with thousands of people for the big firework to start. Meanwhile you could see fireworks all over the city or on the places at the beach where they were allowed (one area at mindil beach was fireworks free for people to watch the big firework). At 7:30 the 20 minutes long firework started. Although it was so long it wasn’t that good. In between there were a lot of breaks, were almost no fireworks were shoot in the air. But you can have a look on your own. I uploaded two videos of 10 minutes each on youtube:

Part 1 of 2:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 2 of 2:

Click here to view the embedded video.