ADVENTURE SPORT SCRAPBOOK
Australia- COMMENTS
For six weeks during February and March, 2003 8 students and faculty cycled, surfed, snorkeled, hiked and drove their way throught the East Coast of Australia. The following are comments by the students who attended this course on "Leadership In Adventure Sport".
Australia is simply a wonderful place. There's no other way to say it. The country is beautiful, the people are fit and friendly, plus it's summer there when it's winter in Iowa. -J
The Blue Mountains are magical. The hillsides looked like giant, scrunched up rhinoceros skins. Their expansive scale is just incredible. -J
Sydney is the first big city that I could actually see myself living in -- you'd never know that there are four million people there. It's just too clean, relaxed, and beautiful. There's none of the typical city-buzz and chaos. Everything about Sydney is charming and well-cared for. -J
The thing that made the biggest impression on me during the Australia trip
was sometime near the beginning of the trip when Ken said to us, 'if you
don't get it together and start acting then you could lose the whole trip',
meaning the trip would be over and we would not have accomplished anything.
After that point everything changed and the group as a whole began to
progress. Even now I am applying this principle to my life and I find myself
much more progressive and dynamic in my action. -M
"There's nothing quite like coming around the corner on your bicycle and
seeing the tree above the road literally explode into color as a hundred pink parrots burst to into life and take off in tight formation. Really spectacular! In the U.S. we have robins and sparrows and blue jays, etc.; in Australia the common birds are all birds of paradise! -M
On this kind of trip, you don't just see Australia's sights or meet people who live in Australia - you come to know the country through living on the land, which is a more intimate thing. There is a quality to the land that presents itself when day after day you aren't shielded from the elements - if it rains, it rains on you - and when you don't move too quickly - wherever we were, we spent at least several days in that region. We got to see the culture too, which is equally important to me, but it takes time to assimilate into a culture. It takes less time. -G
Looking back, it is the lifestyle that I appreciate most. Things become very simple. You bike, you eat, you meditate, you cook. You laugh and comiserate. The days ended before we knew it, and a day's accomplishment had never been so concrete. Not so much the number of K that we biked, but the expanse of beautiful land that we saw, the animals and other adventures we ran into, created the feeling that the day was fully spent. Also, WE were fully spent. It was lovely. -G
There was this one afternoon when we had some big hills, and at the top of one (the traffic had been light, so we switch-backed our way slowly to the top), in the misty rain, we ate mangoes off the ground near two huge trees. That was the pinnacle. How much better does it get? Pumping endorphins, rain that makes you feel so close to the earth, and all the mangoes we could eat. Jesse would later tell us that he ate ten in that one sitting. The greatest thing, though, was that about ten minutes after we stopped moving, we got really cold and had to find another hill to bike up. Like nature was saying, Yeah, it's beautiful. Get used to it. Keep moving. -G