More photos!

[lizzie_and_ari]

Caves: We went to see 2 lots of caves in Tassie, the Marapooka Caves and the Hastings Caves. The Marapooka ones were cool because they had glowworms. Glow worms are fascinating. They (as you may well know) glow in the dark. Below where they glow they have a thread, sort of like a spiderweb. As insects are attracted to the light, they fly towards it, only to get trapped and eaten by the glow worm. It remains a glow worm for several weeks, matures and turns into a fungus gnat. Once it has done this, it has about a week to find another one, mate and lay eggs before flying towards a pretty light they see..and getting eaten by their own children.

How cool is that?!!

The Hastings caves had fewer glow worms but were much older. The first lot were a few thousand, maybe million years old. The Hastings caves were over 500 million years old They knwo this because there are absolutely no fossils, of bones, leaves etc, meaning that the caves were created before anything on the planet had any kind of solid structure. No skeletons, no trees, just lot of mush. That's mind boggling.

Unfortunately I've mixed the photos up a bit so I'm not sure which caves are which, but here are some photos (the one with the foot shows a part, in the really old caves, where they actually still have people walking directly on the cave floor. Mostly it's all balcony-ed)











After we left Tassie, we went to Adelaide and went to the fair!




(That one of Ari and the cnady floss is one of my favourite ever photos!(

The Adelaide Fringe Festival is the second largest in the world after Edinburgh, yet still tiny in comparison. We had a fabulous time seeing a few free shows and a couple which we paid for. We saw one excellent clowning show, which was technically a kid's show but was magical (I actually had a sex dream about the clown a couple of days later.)(Sorry Rich, Tristan, Alex etc..) and a burlesque cabaret show which promised to be great things but wasn't. Perhaps our standards are too high for that sort of thing after Edinburgh!

We also saw The Man Who Breathed Through His Eyes He was this crazy Dutch guy who stood outside a tent thing all day, in his dressing gown, saying "See the man who breathes through his eyes, I breath through my eyes, air comes, in air goes out, I breath through my eyes, I breath through my eyes, no trick, if trick, no pay, $5, I breath through my eyes, air comes in, air goes out, I breath through my eyes.." He was pretty much an old fashioned freak show, and though he ws the laughing stock of the place he was also making a shitload of money. Thing is, $5 is about 2 quid, and people can't be bothered to argue. We got very drunk one night and decided to go in and see him (we spent hideous, hideous amounts of money in Adelaide and are now all indebted)

We went inside and he took off the gown reaveling a roman-soldier like leather outfit, and launched into a speech about how this was going to be a wonderful, life changing experience. Children, he told us, are constantly amazed by everything they see, so they react physically to new exciting experiences. As adults we lose this sense of wonder and amazement and the closest we get is to make love. Having threatened to make us orgasm, he removed all his clothes except a small pair of latex underpants. He tols us that when he got into the water, some bubbles may also appear from within this pants, but it's ok, it's just latex, please concentrate on the eyes.

So, he breathed through his eyes (only out, not in) then told us that 1 in 250 people can do that and $5 please. We were too drunk to argue the point that air only came out, no air goes in. It was very very funny though.

Ah, fuck it was a good trip.

Lxxxxxxxxx