Category: Travel

Captain Angus Steers for Madagascar; Gets Lost in Fiordland, New Zealand

Ships Log kept by Captain Angus.
Star Date: Have no idea. What stars? It’s raining. Have searched for amazing views and astonishing scenery in Madagascar. This doesn’t look like Madagascar. The charts given to me by hose chuckling penguins seem wrong. I did wonder if a chart scrawled with crayon would be reliable.

Ships Log: Star Date – Later than before. Still no stars. I have bravely steered where no bear has ever gone before. And it’s still raining. My hat is soggy. My beautiful captain’s hat. It’s soggy, I tell you. Bother those penguins! What’s that ahead? I can see something. Land ho!


Ships Log kept by Captain Angus.
Stardate: Still don’t know. Have reached Doubtful Sound. Possibly. Doubtful about it. Hard to see. Could be any old Sound. None of the pictures I ever saw of Madagascar looked like this. Where are the lemurs? Are we lost? Still raining. Forecast is for more rain. Oh look, another Sound up ahead. I’m tired. It isn’t easy being a small bear steering a big ship. I want to dry my hat. I need coffee.

Captain Angus Ships Log: Star date- still no idea. It’s been raining. Have steered away from Doubtful Sound. If it was Doubtful. Have my doubts. We are now seeking new mountains and drenched forests in Madagascar. Forecast is for more rain. Of course, it is.

LATER: HB Bear writing in Ships’s Log
Stardate: .. What? What the great sleeping bears is a ‘star date’? Today is today, of course. Captain Angus has gone below to wring out his soggy hat. Muttered something about, “Penguins, you just can’t trust them”. And, “Coffee, give me coffee”. The ship is now safely in my paws. Umm, How do you steer this thing? Who drew this chart? Oh look, green crayon and orange crayon and red crayon. Those are my favorites too. I wonder what it shows?

HB Bear writing in Ships Log.
Not raining so much. Starting to enjoy this. I’ve steered this way and steered that way and not hit anything yet. Maybe if I steer all the way through this wiggly gap in the mountains, we will come out on the other side at Madagascar.

HB Bear writing in Ships Log.
Just look at all these waterfalls. Wow, I love this place. Found a new chart. It is not scrawled in crayon. The proper chart says ‘Milford Sound’ and ‘New Zealand’. I wonder if Captain Angus will return to the helm? I wonder if Angus will bring me coffee? I wonder if Madagascar is close to New Zealand.

HB Bear writing in Ships Log.
I love steering this big ship. The rain is clearing! Oh look, mountains and waterfalls everywhere. I will just take my paws off the helm and run over to the rail to take a selfie. Oh yes! That’s me. Do you see me in my picture?. But wait … the land is getting closer. It’s getting closer fast. The land is coming straight for us really, really fast. Oh no! we’re running aground!

GRIND SCRAP GRRRRRRIIIIIINNNDDDD SCRRRRRRRRRAAAPPP BANGGG.

HB Bear: Oops. Perhaps I ought not to have taken selfies while driving. Angus will not be happy with me. Oh dear. If only we had run aground on Madagascar. 

What next: Will our small bears salvage the big ship from the fiords? Will they ever find Madagascar? Why did they ever listen to those penguins?

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You are at Mark’s blog called Baffled Bear Books. Mark is a dark coffee tragic, bibliophile and Guardian of Mawson Bear, a Ponderer of Baffling Things and one of this bright world’s few published bears.

Lady Elliot Island on the Great Barrier Reef: Coral and marine life

Welcome back to Lady Elliot Island, a coral quay on The Great Barrier Reef, Queensland, Australia. The Barrier Reef, as everyone knows, is the mighty reef down which Nemo’s dad swam to find his little son. We flew here from Perth

Out on the Lagoon: But what do you really want to see at a coral lagoon? The coral, of course. The glass bottomed boats leave from the beach at the end of the runway that runs through the middle of the island (see aerial viewing pic below)

Almost all the trees you see here have been planted in the past 30 years during the patient restoration process – it had been stripped down for the guano in the years before that.

Those buildings marked in this photo are cabins of the Eco Resort. See how close they are to the sea. We stayed in one of those. They are not fancy because this is a low-impact eco resort. Our glass bottomed boat took us further out to just above the main reef where the water gets more blue and you can see the whole island from here.

 Out and out we went. In the deeper water above the reef we went snorkelling with the boat crew keeping on eye on us so we felt quite safe. The staff on Lady Elliot Island must have the best job in Australia, in the world.

We saw all kinds of fish and a huge groper, beach sharks, a manta ray and more.

THE REEF WALK. The staff members of the Eco-restort at Lady Elliot Island lead the groups out at low tide. Of course, the first thing they tell you about is safety. If you scrape against the coral you will get a nasty cut and likely an infection. We put on our reef walking shoes. These are thick soled plastic slip-on shoes to protect your feet.

The protective gear for the rest of the body simply consisted of a pole to lean on, like one of those poles that nordic walkers use. We walked in the sandy bits that you can see in the pictures, staying clear of the coral. Staying upright while clutching a camera in one hand and a pole in the other was tricky to do especially when the tide turned and the water started surging.

There are all kinds of creatures, many best seen during the reef walk at low tide. We took these pictures with an ordinary camera aiming down at the water. The water was clear, as you can see, although later in our walk it got murky as the tide came back in.

The coral is not easy to see in the deeper water especially as the swell builds, and from the boat itself this is about all you can make out (below). The startling blues of the starfish are clearly visible though.

And coral of many kinds: ‘brains’, spiky ones, and some like manicured shrubs and huge ‘brocolii’ like creatures.

Once back on shore we saw this little fella. He was just turtling along right among the people on the beach! It is after all, a turtle’s home, not a peoples’ home.

” I’m just a turtle,
Turtling along,
A happy green turtle,
Burbling a song…”

We settled on a deck chair as evening fell. Would the big female loggerhead turtles clamber up this very beach in the night? Yes, they did! But that’s for another post.

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You are at Baffled Bear Books, brought to you by Mark, who is Guardian and blundering typist for Mawson Bear, one of this bright world’s few published bears. Mawson is the writer bear of It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In and of She Ran Away From Love and of Dreamy Days and Random Naps.

Lady Elliot Island on The Great Barrier Reef: Flying there

Lady Elliot Island is a coral quay on the south end of The Great Barrier Reef. The tiny island has featured on an episode of David Attenborough’s TV series, Great Barrier Reef  not only because of the bird life, turtles and manta rays there but also because it is a conservation success story.

Where is Lady Elliot Island? Zoom in on a map of Australia. Find Hervey Bay in Queensland. Lady Elliot Island lies 1230 km NE of Hervey Bay.

Map showing where Lady Elliot Island is relative to Brisbane
map showing where Lady Elliot Island is relative to Hervey Bay and K'gari

Just getting there was an adventure for us. We flew all day from Perth in Western Australia to Brisbane in a Boeing 737 (comfort and movies) then boarded a turbo prop aircraft to reach Hervey Bay (rattling and sandwiches). Then the planes got even smaller. We flew out from Hervey Bay on a Beechcraft B 200 and returned on a Cesna 210 Centurion.  

In the the photo below you can see the navigating thingy-gum. It shows our position and the red line shows our flight path. Yes, we were right behind the pilot.

Our flight from the coastal town of  Hervey Bay to Lady Elliot Island took 80 minutes. We headed out over the sea and then northerly between the mainland and K’Gari Island, the big one in the distance (below). It’s the largest sand island in the world.

Beyond Fraser Island is The Pacific Ocean where the turtles roam for years on the currents after laying their eggs on Lady Elliot and on many other islands of The Barrier Reef. Just look at those blues!

The colours and swirls and patterns of coastal seas are just too blue for words. And these pics were taken through slightly fuzzy perspex windows. In fact they looked even bluer. We flew past K’gari (formerly Fraser Island) and had a good view of the little islands and sand banks too.

See that little island in the foreground of the picture above? Imagine an island like that all for oneself.  You could just sit there in the shade by the sand all day simply being  stunned by the colours of the sea. Cyclones could be a bother though.

Thar she blows! Lady Elliot Island hoves into sight (above). You can see the main coral reef  where the deep dark blue ocean is breaking to white tops. Within the reef lies the lagoon. You can do reef walks at low tide and snorkel there at high tide. You see green turtles and reef sharks and all kinds of starfish and fish and lots of coral. The island is so small that, as you can see, the airstrip goes right across the middle, one side to the other.

If you look through the blur of the propellor (above) you can see two bands of blue at the end of the landing strip? That’s the lagoon, and after the lagoon you see the dark deep blue of the Pacific Ocean.  We were later to see turtles right there where the  runway strip ends. 

And there is the Eco Resort on Lady Elliot Island. It’s deliberately low key and low impact. No vehicles other than for the staff to do their work. The staff are very involved in caring for the island. They are always planting more trees and counting the birds nests and the turtle nests

The island was actually a conservation disaster until some decades ago, and since then it has been restored tree by tree. More about Lady Elliot Island in future posts.

PLEASE FOLLOW US At Baffled Bear Books .
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You can also follow on Amazon and on GoodReads. We are also on Instagram, and Tiktok, and Spotify and Mastodon (link is @mawsonbear@mastodon.au. )

Mark is guardian and blundering typist for Mawson, one of this bright world’s few published bears. Of Mawson’s first book, ‘It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In’, a reviewer said, ‘Reading this book is like receiving a great big hug of reassurance and a huge hot chocolate with fluffy marshmallows.’