Reefs, Rivers and Rainforest

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January 3rd 2006

Published: January 11th 2006

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Sheila Spanner

Snorkelling

Scaring the fish

Quirky Factsheet No 3!

The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest reef and spans more than 2000km of Queensland's coastline. It is the only living thing on Earth that can be seen from space. Tropical North Queensland is the only place in the world where two World Heritage Sites - the Reef and the Tropical Rainforest - share a border.

"Finding Nemo" wasn't totally accurate...Clownfish all start off as males, but as they mature some become females (unusual as most marine creatures change the other way). The female is much larger and continually harasses the male, preventing him growing and becoming female. However, if the female dies, the male's hormones kick in and he becomes a she. Perhaps Disney thought Nemo's dad becoming Nemo's mum would have confused young audiences....

The Daintree Rainforest is home to Fan Palms. These trees have near circular fronds which, as the name suggests, are pleated like paper fans. Ingeniously, a few days before the onslaught of a cyclone, these concertina folds allow the trees to close up their leaves and thus provide as little wind resistance as possible. This provided a cyclone warning to the local Aboriginal people in

Babinda Boulders

The power of water

the past

22nd to 23rd December

My office in Adelaide shut down for the entire Christmas period so I decided to take off to Far North Queensland.

I arrived in Cairns on the evening of the 22nd December to balmy weather similar to that I experienced in Hong Kong. The driver told me the farmers were looking forward to the tropical rains coming after a particularly arid dry season. Luckily for the farmers, but not for me, I experienced my first tropical downpour while walking through the town the next day. Unlike British rain, which dribbles from grey skies and continues for days, tropical rains start off with a couple of spatters before a vast bucket of water is tipped out of the sky. Within the space of a minute, I was drenched through, yet in another few minutes it was over and the hot sun was beating down again.

Walking through the town, it was blatantly obvious how important the tourist dollar is to the economy. A plethora of advertising boards, for everything from skydiving and whitewater rafting to luxury safaris and koala cuddling, jostled for space on the Esplanade pavement. I

Josephine Falls

Wanna be surfer

lost count of the label beachwear shops where surf dudes and babes can pay good money for tiny scraps of fabric held together by dental floss, or clothing that has been ripped, shredded and faded to look like it has been worn for years.
Apart from shopping, not much action seems to happen on the Esplanade. Decades of land reclamation have turned the former sand bars of the foreshore into a mud flat. Any lingering desire to take a dip in the turquoise waters is banished by the crocodile and stinger warning signs. Luckily, the authorities have provided a free saltwater swimming pool for people to cool off in safely.

24th December

For Christmas Eve, I'd booked myself onto "Uncle Brian's" tourbus to the Atherton tablelands. The tour turned out to be the best I've taken in my travels so far. Cousin Ben had taken over from Uncle Brian and kept us entertained as we completed a circuit to the south of Cairns that encompassed Josephine and Millaa Millaa falls, the Babinda boulders and Lake Eacham. On the way, we passed the highest mountain in Queensland - Mt Bartle Frere (5438 feet or 1622 metres) and

Water Slide

Releasing my inner child!

its neighbour Mt Bellenden Ker. We had several welcome opportunities to swim in the rivers and lakes over the course of the day, and everyone had the opportunity to release their inner Timotei girl at the Millaa Millaa falls. For the uninitiated, Timotei is a fairly well-known brand of shampoo in the UK, and their ads in the 80s featured a blond sylph-like model washing her hair in a waterfall and flicking it back to release a curved spray of water. Millaa Millaa was where they filmed the ad. Despite being neither blond nor sylph-like, I gave it a go (see photo for result). As dusk fell towards the end of the trip, we parked up by a little pool of water and settled down to watch for platypuses (platypi?). They were much smaller than I expected them to be - about the size of small cats. The platypus occupies a special place in Dreamtime stories as it shares something in common with several different types of animal.

25th December

As became routine throughout most of my holiday, I was up at the crack of dawn for a 6.30am pick-up time on Christmas day. I’d decided

Millaa Millaa

The falls themselves

to forgo my kayak and try out whitewater rafting on the Grade 3/4 Tully River. Unfortunately, there were lots of equally crazy people wanting to do the same thing for Christmas and there were at least 18 rafts going down the same stretch of river. I did enjoy it, particularly aiming for rocks in order to spin off them and head down rapids sideways and backwards, but we had to keep pulling over and waiting for long periods in eddies for other rafts. It didn’t feel as exciting as I thought it would, but I would have struggled in the same river in a kayak - rafting seemed like the luxury option!

26th December

On Boxing Day, I was picked up by the Pro-Dive bus and taken to their training centre, looking forward to becoming a qualified scuba diver. Things went well at first, we were shown training videos, and I passed all the theory questions with no problems. However, we then had to go through a medical at lunchtime…I passed the lung capacity test but then made the mistake of admitting to the doctor that I had an inhaler. Instant Fail! I had no idea

Waterfall

Natural Power Shower!

that, in Australia, if you have used an inhaler or admit to having wheezed once in the previous 5 years, then they won’t let you dive! In all my years of swimming lessons, lifeguard training and watersports, it has never affected me, so it really came as a shock. However, I decided to go ahead with the trip out to the Barrier Reef on the dive boat for two nights, as it was somewhere I had wanted to visit since childhood. The boat picked me up at 6am on the 31st and I spent Hogmanay lighting sparklers with a bunch of divers on the deck of a boat on the reef! It was pretty magical. In the end, I saw almost as much as the divers just by snorkelling every day, including turtles, a white-tipped reef shark, rays, giant clams, wrasses, surgeon fish…..and lots of “nemo” (clown) fish sheltering in huge anemones.

27th - 30th December

Dropping out of the dive course meant I had a couple of free days on my hands, so I joined another tourbus up to the rainforest at Daintree and Cape Tribulation. This provided postcard-style tropical views of pristine sandy beaches,

Shampoo

My Timotei Moment

framed by palms and forest. Again, though, danger lurked beneath the surface of the turquoise waters, in the form of box-jellyfish. These jellyfish can kill humans easily, and the driver told us of his friend who had been stung in the neck and remained in agony after two doses of morphine. We had a picnic lunch in a forest clearing next to the beach, and had the novel experience of having to fend off a large lace monitor (harmless lizard) who had his eyes on the chicken wings. As part of the trip, we had a brief stop at the Rainforest Habitat park, and I got the chance to stroke a small carpet python and feed some kangaroos and little swamp wallabies - very cute! We also had a short cruise down the Daintree River. This time of year is the worst time to spot the resident saltwater crocs, but the best time to get eaten by them, as it is nesting season and the water is very warm. We spotted one female, but she was well camouflaged. A little tree frog hopped into the boat for a ride and a snooze, and we also saw lots of fruit bats

Xmas Day

Not a Santa hat in sight!

and a tawny frogmouth, which looked like an owl doing a good impression of a log.

After the trip, I arranged to meet some of the other passengers for a night out in Cairns. After all the other long days, all I had wanted to do was go back to the hotel, have a dip in the pool and chill out for the evening, so I was interested to see what the nightlife was like. Unfortunately, Wednesday night is not the best night to go out in Cairns if you are a lone female. The first stop was PJ O’Brians, which was like every other PJs I’ve been to in Oz, except that they have the “Coyote Girls” - three blonde sylph-like types who jiggle (I hesitate to say dance given the small working surface of the bar) their stuff in the little triangles of pink held together by string I saw in the surf shops, and, er horseriding chaps. The Woolshed was our next stop, and I held out my arm to receive the stamp at the door. I then looked down to see it read “Woolshed Wet T-shirt Competition”! It was yet another meat-market, and I spent

Rafting Congestion

Not all the rafts are visible either!

the night fending off the original “we can just go back to your place and talk” type lines from desperate weirdos. Probably a great place to go if you’re a guy though and everyone gets on top of the tables for a boogie after about midnight - it takes a while to get started at the beginning of the night. I spent the next two days trying to scrub the stamp off my arm though!

The next day I slept in, and had 5 mins to grab my stuff and get out of the door to meet another bus pick-up (next time I’ll maybe think about hiring a car!) to the Karunda Skyrail. This is a relatively new attraction, which takes visitors up to the mountain village of Karunda in gondolas high above the Rainforest canopy. The views were stunning and there were opportunities to alight and join a rainforest guided walk and to look across the gorge to the Barron Falls. Karunda itself was a bit of a tourist trap but had several interesting visitor attractions, such as the butterfly sanctuary, where I had a chance to take a snap of the beautiful blue Ulysses butterfly, which is

Cape Tribulation

A beautiful beach...

a symbol of Queensland. There was another girl travelling on the bus by herself, and we had lunch together before catching the scenic railway back into the centre of Cairns. I had another early night in preparation for the trip out to the Reef the next day.

Last Day

I had a half day in Cairns to spare before flying back to Adelaide, so I spent it chilling, eating and drinking freshly squeezed tropical juice on the Esplanade, while trying to shake the disconcerting feeling that I was still on a boat!

Additional photos below

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