For the first day of Orientation Week, Gustav and I had signed up for the Sand and Shark Tour. We biked to Uni from our apartment for the first time that day. The bus went at 10 am from Uni to Port Stephens, which took about 45 minutes. We had heard beforehand from Jenny and Grahame that Port Stephens is well worth a visit since the beaches are even whiter there than in Newcastle.
The first activity of the day was sand boarding, so we arrived at the sand dunes in Port Stephens that at first glance looks a lot like a desert. The bus driver shared some interesting facts as we were driving, one of them being that the triangular stones you see in the picture above were made and put alongside the coast in Australia in fear of a military attack with tanks. So the stones would prevent the tanks from getting across.
After a very bumpy bus ride getting out on the dunes, we were ready to go sand boarding. We had a quick instruction how to either sit or stand on the board, and most people decided to try the boarding sitting down first after seeing how steep the hill was.
It was very fun going down actually, but I kept thinking how incredibly easy it would be for someone getting seriously hurt by doing this. And for my second go, I decided to take on the steepest part of the hill, on the right side in the picture above. That was a mistake. When I just had a few meters left of the hill, I did a somersault and face planted hard getting sand all over my body. The sand even went up my nose and into my ears, I discovered afterwards trying to brush it off. I didn’t get hurt, though. At 0:30 in the video you can see me getting up from my tumble unharmed.
When we felt finished and quite exhausted going up and down the hill, it was time to head back over the dunes on one of the small buses and get back on the big bus for the second activity of the day, which was a visit to Murray’s Brewery.
There we first got a guided tour of the brewery, the man in charge explained the whole process their beer go through from malt to finished beer. The nicest part I thought was that Murray’s aren’t trying to become a huge producer of beer, they are more into exploring different flavour and according to the tour guide, they have a new beer for you to try every week. That means that they are constantly making small changes in their process and trying new things.
An interesting fact was also that they let their beer self-carbonate in the bottle after filling it up instead of artificially carbonating it straight away like many of the big companies do. This means that it takes Murray’s about five weeks to make a beer start to finish, while the big companies have their beer done in five days. That’s a classic example of quantitive vs. quality according to me.
Murray’s Whale Ale was actually the first beer Gustav tried when we got here; Grahame said it was one of the best local ones if I remember correctly.
When we were finished with the tour, we had a beer and wine tasting, which was a nice surprise to us. We tried three different kinds of beer and three different wines. I’m more of a wine person (I know, shocker), and the rosé we tried was so delicious I’m looking into buying a couple of bottles when we get back to Sweden.
After getting a bit tipsy from downing all the beer and wine, we were finally served lunch. We got a pizza buffet with french fries; nobody says no to that! The group had people from all over the world, and at lunch, we got talking with a bunch of new people. The conversation naturally focused on languages, for some reason we ended up talking about what mushrooms are called in Norwegian, German, Swedish and Cantonese (which is the main language in Hong Kong). During the whole day, we also talked to students coming from Denmark, USA and the UK.
With our bellies full and spirits on top we went back on the bus heading to the third and final activity of the day, the Irukandji Shark and Ray Encounter.
We were given the option of either getting on waders or a wetsuit. Since I had never worn a wetsuit before I wanted to try it and Gustav went with the waders which you could wear over your regular clothes.
Once I had squeezed into the wetsuit, I was eager to get in the tank with the rays. First, we learned how you’re supposed to feed the rays. They were not shy at all, and you could pet them as much as you wanted as long as you didn’t grab on to them because it could damage their skin and kept your fingers away from their mouth.
Once we had learned that we could go in the ray and shark tank, I made the discovery of that there were sharks in the tank half way down the stairs, but I quickly discovered that they weren’t so bad as their rumour says.
Now we can check petting rays and sharks off our bucket list! Experience from the encounter is that rays feel much slimier than sharks which have a rougher skin. At the end of the encounter, we also got to go in the tank with the huge sharks. The only difference was that we had a thin plastic wall between the sharks and us then. The largest one they called Gigantor, and you don’t feel very cocky with him swimming towards you. After feeling the rough skin of Gigantor (mind you, we had gloves on), we got changed and tried our best to get the fishy smell out.
All in all, a packed day and a very long post to reflect it! Hope you made it through, we’re very happy that we did anyway.
Lots of love / Linnea