Betsy’s Travel Journal

Yesterday Lauren and I went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Lots of interesting and beautiful animals, heaps of fun.

This is the view from the top of the park, Condor Ridge, down over all the African animal large enclosures. If you look closely, you’ll see lots of giraffes.

The cheetah was pacing.

These are Colobus monkeys. Lauren’s studying zoology, so it was fun to be with her going around a zoo. Any questions about the animals I had, she could at least guess at.

Of course, not being used to North American wildlife, I found some of the wild creatures wandering the zoo rather cute. We also saw hummingbirds and rabbits. Very cute indeed.

We also went to the “Lights of Africa” show after sundown with my grandmother. It was an amusing little video trip through Africa, with clips of animals in the wild and African-themed music (at least three songs from certain Disney movies), and accompanied by a laser-and-mist lightshow.

I’ve been to the Wild Animal P ark before when I was younger, but this is the first time I can remember fully exploring it. It’s a big place, and there’s lots of fascinating stuff to see. Definitely one of the most memorable zoos I’ve been to.

(Most of this was written in the old-fashioned way, with graphite and processed tree, on the plane from LA to San Diego, yesterday - the second of my two yesterdays, really.)

BNE-LAX

This was probably the shortest cross-Pacific flight I’ve ever taken - direct from Brisbane to LA, no stopping in Sydney or Auckland or wherever. A simple 12-hour journey. I was sitting between two American military trainees who’d been visiting the Kittyhawk in Sydney and were on their way home after a day in Brisbane. They both liked Australia, and it was interesting comparing the two countries with them. I read the entirety of the sixth Harry Potter book on the flight, and watched Bridge to Terabithia (hurray for Qantas’ in-flight entertainment!), and also the first ten minutes or so of Happy Feet, until I fell asleep.

I finished my book about twenty minutes before landing in LA, then looked out the window as much as I could, having another person between it and me. It was foggy in LA (we landed at about 7:20 am, I believe) - I could see the tips of hills and mountains poking out of a dense layer of puffy whiteness. Of course, being LA, there was a greyish haze above the fog. There were three distinct layers of sky - clear blue, haze, low cloud. As the plane descended into the fog, I could see that it wasn’t as white as it appeared from above. I could start to see buildings and enormous roads. Concrete and cars. I’m not a big fan of Los Angeles.

LAX

The Los Angeles airport is all over the place. The international terminal seems to be under major construction - cables and metal poles hanging out of the ceiling in places, posters on the wall with CG illustrations of the shiny future terminal. The people at LAX don’t seem to believe inefficiency for passengers - their pathing algorithms could use improvement. Even though it really wasn’t very busy, we had to go around large queue paths - backwards and forwards and roundabout - lining up in a queue just to be able to walk ahead ten metres and join the next queue. Eventually I found my bags (though it took a while), went through customs (amazingly quickly), found the next terminal, checked in, and after another very roundabout path (including a bus trip) found my way to the gate for my next flight, and had an entire five minutes to sit at te gate before boarding a tiny little plane for a tiny little flight.

LAX - SAN

The fog had cleared a bit by the time the plane took off, and we went up through the haze, over several rather large smokestacks, out over the ocean. Again, no window seat for me - I had to look across the aisle and around the person in the one seat on the left side of the plane, and then I had to look one row ahead or behind as well, as the lady across from me closed her window shade. I could see the tops of mountains. I didn’t have a very good view of them. The flight was very short indeed - I swear the plane wasn’t on the level for more than ten minutes.

SAN

Here’s where the complications found me. We landed on time, my grandparents and my cousin Chloe were waiting for me, the luggage came around on the carousel… but not mine. After waiting in another queue for some time, we were told that my bags were on the next flight from LA, as there hadn’t been enough time to put them on the one I was on. Marvellous. So we waited forty minutes, with Chloe making as many silly faces as she could (she’s seven). Eventually my bags arrived, and we could go to my grandparents’ house.

And so here I am.

Friday morning I leave for my Great Exchange. About two weeks with family in the US, then a semester of studying and travelling in Canada, followed by a month in Europe, finishing with a day in Singapore. A grand adventure, indeed!

I will be spending a semester on exchange at McGill University in Montreal. Just for interest’s sake, I’m going to share a comparison of McGill and UQ (my home uni). These are statistics from the website Facebook, which is extremely popular in Canada and only just really taking off in Australia. It’s a social networking site, and allows people to share all sorts of things about themselves. Tertiary institutions have networks, which all students thereof can be a part of. Now you’ve had the introduction, here are random facts about the two unis, as taken (on 16/07/07) from the statistics of the interests listed for people in the UQ and McGill networks on Facebook:

So similar, but still so different…