Horsham, Victoria

After traveling 2 hours to LA to LAX,waiting 3 1/2 hours in the airport to board a 15 hour flight to Melbourne,

and then walking straight into a cramped bus for another 4 hours, I finally made it to our “home” for the next two weeks.

Horsham was the name of the small town in the state of Victoria in Australia. Yes, Australia is split into 8 states and Victoria is the state that is on the southern end of the country. But anyways, the first day in Horsham, i was able to get to know the 10 other people in my small volunteer group. We were a diverse group, all different personalities and ways of life coming together! It was exciting I was also able to meet the people we were going to be working with, the workers of the DSE. They held a “Bar-B” for us, and let me tell you.. i fell in love with their Aussie BBQ! Food was Sooooo goood. During lunch we also got the run down Orientation which stated all the business we were going to do for the next few weeks.

-Searching for rare plants

-Nest Box Making

-Fencing

-Tree Planting

-Tree Removal

.. were what was on our agenda.

One thing I grew to love about my group was that we were all pretty adventurous, and if we found any sort of hike to do, we did it. Right after our first Bar-B and Orientation, we all hopped into our family van and our volunteer leader, NINA, brought us to Mount Arapiles, which is a Random mountain that juts out of the flat land around it. It is known in Australia where expert Rock climbers go to climb. We drove to a parking area where we then hiked our first mountain up to the top. View made me feel like what i would’ve seen on top of Pride Rock on the Lion King! Pretty cool. On our way home we spotted our first KANGAROO! We obviously freaked out and stood next to it taking pictures of it. Luckily it was very still and didn’t mind us bombarding it with our cameras. Not long after that, we also saw our first DEAD KANGAROO as road kill. It was sad, but nina did let us jump out of the car and she gave us a run down on the anatomy of the Dead Roo. It’s leg was mangled by the car that hit it and most likely died on impact.