Ginger Without Borders

Part One: The SIM card. I realize I promised the readers of this blog to talk about the Vodafone SIM card saga in the last blog, but the successful redevelopment story of South Bank Park took more time and words than I expected. Dawn also wondered why I spent all that time on the history of the Park, but learning the stories of other places is a part of travel I enjoy. But before I am diverted again, lets get to the SIM card.

Every other time that we have been overseas, we just used whatever plan Verizon offered but watched our phone use carefully. In the case of Italy and Eastern Europe (interesting they share this issue), Verizon had no phone plan, so we just used Wifi where we could find it. Contact with us was a little sporadic but it worked for our purposes since most hotels, cafes and restaurants had Wifi for customers.

This excursion will take four weeks in each country, so Lena suggested purchasing a SIM card and short term calling plan for each country, instead of using Verizon. Having never done this before, I got directions to the nearest Vodafone (the Australian phone company) store from the kind lady at the desk of the Hotel Diana, who assured me it was a comfortable if somewhat long walk into Brisbane. The plane ride had caught up with Dawn and she decided to take a nap for the afternoon (her usual travel practice). So off I went to purchase the SIM card.

It was a nice walk (about 1.2 miles) over the pedestrian bridge (picture in the last blog), through the Botanic Garden and into the commercial district of town. Several blocks of Queen Street in the center of Brisbane have been closed to traffic and turned into what they call the Queen Street Mall. Raleigh (my home town) attempted this but nobody came and the Fayetteville Street Mall was eventually reopened to traffic. Queen Street Mall however was packed with stores and filled with people shopping. Vodafone was in the center of the Mall. I took my place in line. It was noon.

After a short wait, the nice and pleasant (everyone in Australia is nice and pleasant) store clerk announced that the SIM card and 35 day calling plan was on sale. He also tested my Galaxy phone to make sure it was not locked. This was going to be a quick and easy purchase! Then he asked to see my passport. My passport was back in the hotel room safe. So much for quick. So, I trudged back to the hotel room (silently cursing the terrorists and criminals for adding another burden to life’s complications) where I disturbed Dawn’s nap but got further instructions to get sunscreen and some moisturizer. Then back over the pedestrian bridge for the third time that day to the Vodafone store where the easy part (installing the SIM card) was completed. My 2.4 mile exercise had morphed into a 4.8 mile hike, so I decided to stop at the Irish Pub I had already passed three times (it was by now 4pm, so it was time for a libation to restore some of the calories I had burned). I sat on their upstairs balcony and savored the beer and the view. So there was a happy ending after all to the SIM card adventure.

Part Two: Wild Whales. Dawn and I have tried for years to see a whale in the wild and have only succeeded once, when we followed a killer whale pod for several hours in the Strait of Juan de Fuca between the US and British Columbia. But killer whales are not whales. They are Orcas (their actual name), and are in the porpoise family, so that event didn’t really count. To continue our quest to see a whale in the wild, we booked three whale watching tours on this trip – one here in Australia and two in New Zealand.

For our Australian tour, we drove about an hour north of Brisbane to a jetty in Redcliffe on Moreton Bay. Redcliffe as the first place Sydney tried to establish a penal colony because of the beautiful Bay, but Sydney soon moved the penal colony inland to the peninsula on the Brisbane River. Within about an hour of departing from the jetty on a large, specially designed and powered catamaran, the female captain announced that there was a pod of porpoise at three o’clock (imagine a clock face with 12 as the bow of the catamaran). Almost as soon as everyone on board rushed to the starboard side (right side of the boat), the captain then announced that some fisherman had alerted her earlier that day that there was a small pod of humpbacks with a calf in the area and she had just seen them directly in front of our boar. Our quest to see whales in the wild was about to end spectacularly. We never saw any dolphins.

Sure enough, it was easy to spot the pod just ahead of the catamaran. The captain cut back the engines and came onto the deck. Each side of the boat had small control stations where she could maneuver the almost still catamaran to accommodate the whales, which started to swim around us. She indicated that if the whales decided we were fun, they could stay for hours. Or, if the mother of the calf got nervous, they would quickly disappear. After circling us for about 20 minutes, the calf disappeared and then reappeared with a start for all of us:

He (or she) breached the surface at least seven times. The captain indicated that she believed the calf to be less than a month old and breaching was just a youngster showing off. As the humpbacks got more comfortable with our boat, they started swimming back and forth under the catamaran. They even swam alongside the boat at times in the clear water of the sound.

One of the crew told me that Moreton Bay remains one of the cleanest and purest bodies of water in the world. It’s waters are fairly calm most of the time and the Bay is home to lots of food sources for the whales. Mother humpbacks come to the Bay after giving birth to fatten their calfs in preparation for the migration to Antartica beginning at the end of October. Along with this mother and child was another adult humpback (barely visible at the top of the picture above), which the captain called the calf’s auntie. After several hours of following the humpbacks, it was time to head back. The captain told everyone to get their cameras ready because humpbacks like to say goodbye. The auntie then began to slap the surface with her tail and wave goodbye with her fins. We sadly had to say goodbye to our wild whales but were so happy to see this quest end (until New Zealand) .

PS. Lena, we had a really special day spending your inheritance. Mom was so thrilled, she didn’t even think of killing me.