Why did you go there?
I went for a business meeting, but I stayed for an extra week.

When did you go there?
April of 1998.

What was it like there? Were there any customs you found strange? Was the landscape different? What was interesting about it?
Well, the city I was in (Sydney) was very clean, it had a lot of sandy beaches, and it had really clear air and water.

One strange thing was one of the foods, it was called vegemite, and they ate it for breakfast or lunch. The only way to describe it is that it's like a solid soy sauce.

In my second week there I went to one of the beaches. One of the surprising things was that the women went topless almost as much as the men. The thing that interested me the most was the coral reef. I went scuba diving and snorkeling, and I loved the coral's color and the color of the fish in the reef. I saw a blue starfish, and I had never seen one that color before. Also there were so many fish that I could fill up two pages just talking about them.

One of the other interesting things was a museum about the aboriginal people, and what happened to them, and some of the problems.

And when I went on a camping trip into the rain forest, we had crumpets, and that was a food that I thought only people from the U.K. ate during teatime.

How did the people treat the environment?
Pretty well, as for as I could tell from only spending two weeks there. I did listen to a lecture about the reef and how to take care of it. I also learned about the history of the reef during the lecture. One of the things that people used to do and can't anymore, is use dynamite to fish. They would light a stick, throw it into the water, and kill the fish that way. Then the fish would float to the surface, and it would be easy to collect them. The problem was that the fishermen doing this were killing the coral as well as the fish. Without the coral the fish couldn't live, and soon either left to go elsewhere, or died.

One thing they wanted us to do was to not wear sunscreen when we dived, because if the oils from the sunscreen touched the coral, it could kill it. Most of the land there is undeveloped, because it's hard to live anywhere but the coast. This means they have fewer cars, factories, etc. to pollute the air and water.

How did you get around there?
In the city, I walked mostly. There was a monorail, but it seemed that only tourists used it. Also there were buses, and that seems to be what most people took. There were ferries, but to get to another town, I mostly flew.

When I first tried to call you, I got Jeff (her soon-to-be husband) and he told me to ask you about the leeches. So, I'm going to ask.
Well, when I went on my camping trip in the rain forest, it was really wet. The leeches got onto our boots, and then crawled up our legs until they found open skin. So instead of sleeping on the ground in tents, web slept in hammocks so the leeches couldn't get at us. It worked, except for the fact that I already had leeches on me. When I woke up some time in the night, I put my hand on my face and there were three leeches there! It was really disgusting, and I had to pull them off my face.

Some Facts about Australia
Even though few people live there, Australia is only slightly smaller than the U.S. The reason for this is that almost no one lives away from the shore. The reason it has the number of people it does is because it has 25,760 km of coast line. Australia ranges from Lake Eyre, 15 m. high, to Mount Kosciuszko 2229 m. high. It became a commonwealth of the British Empire in 1901 and was a big help to them in WW I and II, suppling needed resoutces like coal, iron, copper, tin, silver, uranium, lead, zinc, diamonds and petroleum. More than 50 % of the land is used as permanent pastures, but none is used for permanent crops. Maybe this is caused by the severe droughts they get. Speaking of natural disasters, they also get cyclones along the coast. They do have some major problems. There is soil erosion form overgrazing, industrial development, urbanization, and poor farming practices. Another problem is desertification. So even though it has good points, it also has bad.