Fords Down Under

Over Easter Break in March I went on a ten-day camping trip across Western Australia with the Melbourne University Outdoors Program. There were 23 international students on this trip from all over the world, yet strangely enough I found myself one of five students on the trip from Haverford. Before leaving Haverford those of us coming to Australia figured we would rarely bump into each other by chance in a city of millions at a school many times the area of Haverford with tens of thousands of students. We were wrong - instead I have seen someone from Haverford by chance almost every day. But sitting in a desert in the middle of Western Australia - about as far from Haverford as one can get and remain on Earth - surrounded by people from Haverford definitely pushed our coincidental encounters with each other into the range of comical.

It was an early start the Thursday before Easter Break at 3.30 in the morning for a 6 o’clock flight to Perth and our meeting location. Once we were assembled we began with marathon bus driving. Western Australia is big, so to get to the really interesting places you have to drive. A lot. So that is what we did our first day for about 10 hours, but not without stopping to play in big sand dunes, which were welcome activity:

These are big - note the person way up there pondering whether or not they want to roll down (we did).

On the second day we visited a field of stromatolites that stretched as far as one could see. It was dry and oppressively hot with no clouds in the sky, and as each of us walked in our own direction I started to feel like I was on a different planet surrounded by these testaments to ancient microorganisms that lived here hundreds of millions of years ago:

These structures have taken a long beating from the wind and feel exactly like rough sandpaper. They rise up in stark defiance of the sand around them that is just a few shades courser than flour.

The third and fourth days we spent in the aptly named Coral Bay, a small town 1200km north of Perth home to coral reefs, beautiful beaches and a feeling of blissful isolation from the rest of the world. We snorkeled, swam and sat on the beach during the day and barbecued at night. Some of us kayaked out away from shore to explore the bigger reefs while others went diving with whale sharks. Coming to Melbourne, flying to Perth, driving to Coral Bay, walking to the beach, kayaking out to the reef, snorkeling out of sight from our kayaks and then diving beneath the water happened for me like a series of removes from the common experience of everyday life, culminating in the home of these creatures, courtesy of our guide who brought along an underwater camera:

These reef sharks are harmless, but they don’t look that way.

Dasyatis kuhlii.

We saw three or four sea turtles, also.

Anyone know what this is? Not I, but it is pretty magnificent inside.

After leaving Coral Bay we continued north to Exmouth, where we visited Mandu Mandu Gorge and Turquoise Bay, the latter being a beautiful series of reefs where we snorkeled from a beach littered in coral:

Across the globe, more than fifty-percent of their living counterparts will likely be dead by 2030 due to climate change.

After this we made our way inland to Karijini National Park where we spent the remainder of our trip exploring gorges shown in the pictures below, often hiking for about an hour or so to reach them, which made the fresh (and cold) water swimming even more enjoyable:

For scale, a person standing near the bottom of this waterfall would barely reach the second layer of rock.

A cyclone in the Indian Ocean meant it rained most nights while we were camping (sometimes catching us tentless and unprepared) but this was more than welcome since it kept the air cool and the dust on the ground. Inland Western Australia is blanketed in fine red dust that stains any clothes it gets on. If you are walking around Perth and see a brand new yet strangely red van know it is the affectionately named Big Red:

Just kidding, we think it mostly came off. The most uncapturable aspect of our trip were the stars we were finally treated to bushcamping on the side of the road on the last day of our trip after the rain cleared. We sat around a campfire and soaked them up before returning to Perth and finally Melbourne.

 On the week-end of my first school week I went for a day trip to Philip Island. The trip was organized by the university’s outdoor program. We were 23 students many of which lived at International House. We left early morning on Saturday and went to a sandy beach and hikes up a cliff near it to see the view. We then drove to a koala preserve. There was a boardwalk built in the trees so that we could walk around at the same level as the koalas sleeping in the trees. We got to see many of them really up close. They sleep up to 20 hours a day because their Eucalyptus leaf diet is low in nutrients and so they have very little energy. Also Eucalyptus leaves have toxins in them that very few animals can ingest but koalas have special enzymes to break the toxins down so that they do not harm koalas. Koalas have very long sharp claws that help them climb trees and even though they seem very cute and cuddly they are known to not be so friendly. We then went to a wildlife preserve where we got to feed and pet kangaroos, wallabies, wombat, swans, emus, cassowaries and many other animals. It was a huge enclosed area where the animals could just roam free and you could go right up to them, feed them and pet them. Some of the less friendly animals such as dingoes were enclosed and could not be petted . A lot of female kangaroos had joeys in their pouch which were adorable. They would pop their heads out of the pouch to see what was going on. A couple of the older joeys would be roaming around and come back to drink milk from their mother. There were also not so cute and really imposing emus that would peck at your hands even if you didn’t have any food to offer them. They would also chase you around. I did not like them very much. We also saw cassowaries which are prehistoric looking animals that have the same general shape of emus but with blue and red neck and head (you should look them up). After the preserve, we waited for sunset by the beach and once it got dark enough we saw the penguin parade. It is when fairy penguins get out of the sea and waddle onto the dunes for the night. They were very cute and small. It was the end of mating season so they were about to stay 2-3 weeks on land to grow a waterproof coat. Because they would not be able to feed during that period, they had to build fat storage and eat a lot, so most of the penguins were too full and kept stumbling and falling over or taking breaks while walking across the beach.

The next day we decided that after petting and feeding kangaroos we should know what they tasted like and so most of the Haverford people got together to have a big barbecue! It was nice seeing Haverford people after so long. I then went with others to see “Donnie Darko” in the last screening of the open air movie theater located in the botanical gardens.

The following week-end I went on the Great Ocean Road for the whole week-end. This trip was also organized by the Outdoors Program. But that’ll be for another blog entry! =)

In Melbourne I live in what Australians call a ‘college’ which is similar to a dormitory except that you eat there and you have your own sports teams and events. My college is International House. The University of Melbourne has twelve. During my first week there I was considered a ‘fresher’, meaning that it was my first year in that college and so I had to participate in the orientation week which is called ‘O-week’ here. It allowed freshers to get to know each other. We had some very fun events planned for us. O-Week started with a game of human fussball where we were all attached together in a huge moonbounce. It was very fun. We also ran around the city with our faces painted, yelling chants which we had been forced to learn earlier all 150 of us crammed into a 20’x16’ room! They called it room cram. It was pretty disgusting because it was so hot. We also did pub crawls, nightclub crawls, had a toga party, went to the beach, had a champagne breakfast (oddly enough our dining center has a liquor license and is allowed to serve people over 18 alcohol). We also made a deal with a dim sum restaurant to get an all you can eat dim sum meal for $10 because our group was so big. It was delicious! We had a cocktail parties, we had a bush dance where we had a band and dance instructors teach us dances from the Australian Bush areas. The university was also hosting O-week events which included the student fair which had a lot of ‘freebies’ and bungee trampoline rides. I did not attend many of their events because I was doing the ones planned by International House.

After that first week of fun and play school started. It felt very weird to go back to a fixed schedule, classes and homework after a winter break of about two and a half months. It was weird being offered so many classes. After a week of shopping classes I finally decided to take Australian Wildlife Biology which is a zoology class that studies Australian animals. It is so interesting because I learn about animals I never knew even excited and it makes me pay attention to wildlife everywhere I travel. I love every minute of that class because the Australian animals we learn about are all fascinating. I am also taking two biology classes to fulfill my Haverford biology major requirement. I am taking ‘immunology’ and ‘gene technology and protein expression’. I am also taking a management class called ‘organizational behavior’ which is very new for me but which I find interesting. I am also working in a laboratory at the Bio21 institute which is related to the university. The lab I work in studies prion diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and ‘mad cow disease’.

Before coming over to Australia I worked in a translational research lab at the University of Pennsylvania that specializes in tumor antigen discovery and the development of novel vaccine strategies to fight cancer. This work got me interested in basic immunology inasmuch as I came to realize that cancer immunotherapeutics, something I found enthrallingly interesting, can only be as successful as our fundamental knowledge about the human immune system is extensive. The development of preventative and therapeutic cancer vaccines has thus far been largely a lesson in scientific perseverance, but holds enormous promise for the future. After all, one needs to look no further than a shortlist of the greatest achievements in modern medicine to see the power of vaccination in combating illness.

I took a quarter-long immunology class at Haverford last semester during which I was surprised by how superficial our knowledge of the immune system really is. Experimental immunology arguably began in 1890 when Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato demonstrated the existence and function of antibodies, leading to scientists’ first conceptualization of the immune response. Yet more than a century later, for instance, the mere existence of cell types now understood to be integral to immune responses was being heatedly debated. The full significance of these cells that ‘turn off’ immune responses, known as regulatory T cells, is still unclear. Understanding how immune responses are prevented and suppressed is as important as understanding how they are initiated and perpetuated, especially within the context of autoimmune diseases such as type I diabetes and, of particular interest for me, cancer vaccine design.

At WEHI we’re trying to understand how regulatory T cells are induced by dendritic cells, another immune system cell type, in order to piece together how immunosuppression is initiated and sustained. This understanding is a small part of the body of knowledge that will ultimately be translated into novel treatment of disease. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting about how this research is going.

Hello!

I hope you enjoy reading about the adventures of Haverford students abroad. Once again I am a junior biology major at Haverford College studying abroad at the University of Melbourne in Australia. If you would like to ask me questions about my trip, about Haverford or if you have general questions you think I can answer feel free to e-mail me at tanastas@haverford.edu

I flew out of Washington, DC on February 6^th 2008 and arrived in Sydney after a very long flight on February 8^th 2008. I was surprisingly not jetlagged. I got to my hostel by 10am which was in the center of Sydney (located right next to central station), dropped my luggage in the hostel’s storage and joined a guided beach tour. The beach tour took us to every main beach in Sydney, basically from Coogee to Bondi beach stopping by 4 other beaches. The guide was telling us about the different areas next to each beach which helped us get to know some of the neighborhoods in Sydney. Bondi beach was our last stop so I relaxed by the pier and strolled through an aboriginal art exhibit there.

The next couple of days were rainy and cloudy. I walked around the city and by chance ended up in front of the Australian Museum where there were submissions for a photography competition. The pictures were so beautiful. I then walked through the Domain and the Botanical Gardens. The Domain had some very modern sculptures. One of them was of a match next to a burnt match that were about 20 yards tall. I stopped by the Art Gallery of New South Wales which has a wide collection of modern art. The botanical gardens were breathtakingly beautiful. Most of the trees and plants there I had never seen before. There were “peeling trees” (their bark just peels off naturally), other trees that had branches that grew into the ground and became roots… also all the trees were covered in flying foxes (a type of bat with an orange face that looks like that of a fox). I then saw the Opera house which was as architecturally superb, just as you saw it in pictures. When walking around the harbor I stumbled across a 25ft long and 15feet high artwork of a woman that was made of peaches. It was meant as a promotion for the fruit company Ella. Then I walked all along the harbor, through the Rocks (a historic area of Sydney with lots of colonial houses, shops and pubs), around Dawes Point and all the way down to the Darling Harbor.

Third day started of by attending the Chinese New Year parade which was really fun (I got to pet four of the parade dragons!). I then followed the parade to the Tumbalong Park where the Chinese New Year concert was to be held. That park is circular and surrounded by water. It is located near the exhibition center (it was closed then but it had just been hosting a backpackers exhibit) and the entertainment center (which hosts sports matches and concerts). For bigger concerts or events, the entertainment is not longer used, having been replaced by the Olympic Stadium. I then went to the Chinese Friendship Gardens which was beautiful and peaceful. That garden was a bicentennial gift from the Chinese community to the government of the NSW and symbolized the friendship between both nations. They had really big orange fish and beautiful water lilies. There were multiple pavilions, a bamboo forest and statues of Buddha. I then went to the Darling Harbor and over the Pyrmont bridge which has a middle rotating part (that’s how they let the big boats in instead of having the bridge lift up). I then went to the Sydney Observatory which used to be really important for navigation (it would let ships know what the exact time was). It is elevated over the harbor so that ships could see it in the distance it gave us a great view of the harbor and the harbor bridge. It has an astronomy museum and old observatory. I then went over the Harbor Bridge. I never realized how BIG it was until I had to walk it. It is 1150m or 3772ft long (which does seem very long when it’s very hot and you’ve been walking for 8 hours every day). Cool fact about the bridge: it takes about year to paint it and Sydney paints it every year! Once on the other side I strolled through Luna Park which is an attraction park…that burnt down 3 times already.

Fourth day was started off with a boat cruise which gave us a tour of the Sydney Harbor. Our tour guide was really funny. He kept mixing in facts with fiction. For example, he told us that this week-end Sydney officials were draining the harbor to scrub the tiles or he tried convincing us that you could see albino bats flying amongst the sea gulls or that the Opera House was once used by the Mayans as sacrificial grounds until it was discovered by settlers and then transformed into the Opera House…the sad part is that some people actually believed him… I got off at the Taronga Zoo which is built on a hill. So I took the lift up to the top where the view was amazing and then walked all the way down. That zoo was incredible. In many sections, the animals could roam around and there were no fences dividing them from the visitors. I went into an enclosure with kangaroos and wallabies and I could have easily pet them. It allowed us to see all the Australian animals and many others I were already familiar with. It’s a great zoo.

On our fifth day I decided to get away from the city and go to the Blue Mountains at Katoomba. (about 2hours out of Sydney). Once there I went to Echo Point where there is this rock formation called the 3 sisters (one of the main attractions). I hiked down the cliff and into the rainforest where the vegetation was abnormally large and green. It was really beautiful. The most memorable part of my trip happened there. As I was rolling up my jeans I notice something on my leg… a leech! yes I know… I almost died! (not from the leech but from the heart attack I almost had). Obviously, I just rip it off… for future references don’t do that (I was later told) because then it takes a really long time for you to stop bleeding… instead pour salt on them or use fire…none of which I had on us anyways. So after I ripped it off I realized that there were lots of leeches on the trail because it had just rained. So I was basically walking very fast and not stopping until I was standing on rocks where I knew the leeches would not be. At a point in time I got to a fork where I can keep hiking 2 more km through the rainforest or alternatively I can climb a staircase that was carved into the cliff all the way back up called the Giant stairway which descends or goes up 300m (1000ft) and has over 800 steps and which had a sign indicating that it was reserved for experienced hikers…well I figured after that leech experience I was enough of an experienced hiker to go up that (and besides you could not pay me more to keep going through that rainforest at that moment) so up I went for the biggest leg workout of my life. I then walked to the Scenic Railway where I took the Skywalk which had a see-through floor and which took us above the valley and right by the Katoomba waterfall. I then took the railway which was used to bring up coal from the mine. It’s the steepest inclined railway in the world (52 degrees). Going on it was like going on a rollercoaster ride…except that I had no bar or seatbelt or anything holding us back. I then walked on a boardwalk that took us through the rainforest and took the skytram (which is also the steepest one in the world) to bring us back where I started. I headed back to the Katoomba train station and right before catching our train back I bumped into other Haverford people! What a small world! So I sat down, enjoyed hot chocolate, told each other about our adventures and then parted ways.

On day six I went on a guided city tour offered by the hostel where I got to see everything for a second time… it was a nice recap plus I learned a lot (and I saw cockatoos in the botanical gardens that would drink from your water bottle!) I then went to the Sydney aquarium which had some fantastic marine life. The Sydney aquarium is especially known for its underwater glass walkways. That is they have a huge tank which holds many sharks, manta rays, sea turtles and other marine wildlife and visitors can walk through the tank thanks to tunnels build into the tank. So basically I had sharks swimming right on top of us, on either sides and in some tanks under us! It felt as if I were swimming with them.

Day seven I went to the Maritime museum and the museum of contemporary art. There were some really cool exhibits such as one on Ozti, a Bronze Age man found in a glacier in Italy. I relaxed and walked along the Harbor during the afternoon and then went to see “La Boheme” at the Opera house. The inside of the Opera House is just as beautiful and I loved the performance.

After a week in Sydney I went Canberra (the capital of Australia) to visit one of my high school friends. He gave me a great tour of Canberra. We went to the Anzac memorial (which I would recommend everyone to go to) to the Old and New Parliament, to Black Mountain and to its tower which gives you a 360 view of Canberra and which has a restaurant that revolves so you never have the same view! We also went to the Multicultural Festival where there was live music and great food.

I then left my friend to finally arrive to the city I would be spending the rest of my semester living: Melbourne!

Hey folks,

I’m Andrew Rech, a Biology major at HC, and am also on exchange at Melbourne Uni this semester. I’m taking a few courses in the Science faculty and working at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research investigating dendritic cell function in mice. Melbourne is a fantastically vibrant city that I’ve been enjoying over the past few weeks and I’ll be posting entries every week or so about my classes, research and experience studying abroad in Australia. Our semester here runs until the end of June so we’re just getting started!

Cheers.