A day with the Amish

While we were in Cleveland, Ohio, our friends took us out for the day to see something of the nearby Amish communities. You can find out more than you need to know about the Amish on wikipedia etc so I’m not going to bore you with those details here.

We enjoyed our day out. The weather was gorgeous and the countryside was beautiful too. The Amish keep their communities beautifully and it was lovely to see washing hanging out to dry. Even in Dallas, where it is stinking hot much of the year, people use clothes dryers bizarrely. None of that for the Amish who had some of the biggest washing lines I think we’ve ever seen.

We visited a cheese dairy, saw how it was made and ate plenty of samples. We had lunch in what was supposed to be an Amish restaurant but was just run of the mill fare it turned out. Then we walked what we were told was “half a mile” down a hill to a place that sold ice cream. We’ve since coined the phrase “an Amish half mile” to describe something which you initially think is a good idea but turns out to be much more effort than you anticipate. The ice creams were more than welcome when we got them!

Cairns’ Botanical Gardens

One of the best things about Cairns is its wildlife. But if you say this, 99% of the time, people think of the Great Barrier Reef. It’s aptly named because, yes, it is Great. But it also costs a Great deal (at least to us) to get out there and there are such a Great number of tourists, touts, boats, trips, tours, blah, blah, blah connected with it that, in all honesty, was pretty off-putting.

For now though, we were looking for nature in abundance on the cheap. The answer is Cairns Botanical Gardens. These are huge and fabulous. They’re extremely well-designed in that, there’s something for everyone. If you just want to wander around some flowerbeds and lawns and barely break a sweat seeing some gorgeous flowers and astounding plant life, you can do that. If you want to hike miles through rainforest and get hugely sweaty in the process, see more gorgeous flowers, more astounding plant life and some fascinating animal life too, you can do that.

We did both.

Cycling there in the morning, we left our bikes near the gate and began the Blue trail climb up to a look out that overlooks the airport runway. It’s quite bizarre to see planes take off below you. And Cairns airport has a ton of traffic of all shapes and sizes so it’s an interesting place to hang out. It’s also where all the locals go who want to keep fit. A brisk jog up here and back will, in Cairns’ tropical temperatures, certainly see you shedding pounds.

We’d just arrived at the lookout and were seated at a picnic bench up there looking at the view when an Aussie woman comes jogging up. With typical brash abandon, she says, “You don’t have to get up. I just want to do some exercises here.” She then proceeds to lie down on the table with her head virtually on my lap and do a series of sit ups and tummy crunches. Bit strange really.

We then headed off on the Red trail. As we were doing so, a woman said, “It’s a long way that way.” I think she was trying to put us off. We took it as encouragement.

We saw only a few people on the 3 mile walk. The path was pretty rocky in places and wound up and down through the rainforest. As not many people come this way, there’s more chance you’ll see some wildlife. We did indeed.

Rounding a corner, we came face to face with this splendid yellow monitor lizard. He seemed as shocked to see us as we him and we stared at each other for ages.

Later, I came across this bizarre walking leaf thing.

And later still, I disturbed a snake which, thankfully, was not the aggressive kind. It shot off across the path just slightly faster than I shot back away from it.

We wandered back to the Botanical Gardens proper and, after some refreshment in the cafe, browsed the more sedentary section with its fabulous examples of God’s creative genius.

Freo

Perth’s nice and everything but, to be honest, it’s a bit stale. In this part of the world, if you want a bit of culture, history and entertainment, you drive out along the Swan River until you hit the sea.

At that point, you’re in Fremantle. Andrea took us out here in a car crammed with her, us, her son, her sister and her mother. We’d met the latter two when they’d visited Andrea in South Korea. In fact, Andrea’s mum had even worked teaching in South Korea while we were there.

Rachel (Andrea’s sister) and Sheena face the day’s toughest task

Fremantle is where it all started for Western Australia. By the way, when I say ‘old’ here, I mean United States old, not United Kingdom old. As someone said to me only yesterday, “A hundred miles in Britain is a long way, and a hundred years in the US is a long time.” The same applies to Australia… only more so.

Of course, I’m talking about white settlement. Both these nations have history that stretches back illustriously an immensely long way, and both nations seem incurably myopic about this fact. Regrettably.

So, Fremantle is where the whites gained a foothold in the west. They did this by carving out a living from what was, let’s face it, not the best real estate for people who know nothing about getting food from arid grassland and can’t be out in the sun without SPF50 sun block on for more than 20 minutes.

Some of the buildings are elegant timber framed colonial numbers.

Many more are heavy stone to weather the ocean wind. In fact, if you kind of form a rectangle with your hands to shield out the odd anachronism or two, you could be looking at a terraced street in some Georgian town in the UK.

Then you notice it’s sunny, the harbour’s full of expensive looking yachts and there’s people sitting on open terraces at the wharf eating their lunch. No restaurant on the British coast would risk an open terrace. It would be unusable for around 300 days a year.

The seagulls in particular appreciated the al fresco cuisine. I mean, they eat this way quite regularly anyway so I don’t see why the tourists and restauranteurs on the wharf should object if they just continue as they started. Paranoid diners kept a wary eye on the sky.

There are some good museums, it seems, in Fremantle detailing some of the more recent history of the town. But we didn’t really have time for that. What we had time for was coffee and shopping.

The indoor market is a big pull. I’ve never seen so much stuff I don’t need in my life. The number of coffee shops is sizeable too. Either everyone’s addicted to caffeine or there permanently nursing hangovers from the not too few bars around.

As it was a Sunday, the op shops (opportunity shops) as charity/thrift shops are known here, were shut. But what little disappointment Sheena suffered at this limitation was more than balanced by the coffee shop culture and the indoor market. Good busking too. I’ll bet the live music scene is worth a listen.