Cape tribulation

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After spending one week in Mossman, we drove up North to Cape Tribulation, a National Park where the rainforest drops into the ocean. That was also our first real trip only with the van, but as we were in a National Park we couldn't sleep wherever we wanted, so we had to sleep in a camping (and obviously pay the night).

On the first day, we went to Daintree, where we were told we could see many crocodiles. The only way of seeing the Daintree River was to hop on a tour boat that would navigate up and down the river. We decided that we didn't feel like taking it, so we walked to the river, but there was no track to walk near the river, because apparently that would be too dangerous for the tourists. Luckily, as we reached the shore, there was a huge crocodile on the other side, like 4 meters long and 500kg, you can't imagine how big that is. It was far enough for us to be safe, but we had to use the binoculars to really appreciate all the details.

We then stopped to do a little hiking tour in the rainforest, which was a really nice board walk in the middle of the trees, but at some point we decided to go off tracks to see if we could get a bit more into the wildlife of the area. After having walked for not even 10 meters, we suddenly met with a cassowary (probably the most dangerous animal in Australia after crocodiles, snakes, sharks, jellyfish, scorpions, some spiders and crazy koalas). Cassowaries are big birds that cannot fly (the one we saw was as tall as us) but that can charge with their head first or jump and rip someone with their claws, and some deaths by cassowary have already been reported. So we of course tried to get as close as we could to take pictures to upload in the blog. The cassowary was eating and didn't really pay attention to us, and once he was done he just left in the dense vegetation.

Two animals that could kill us was enough for one day, so we found ourselves a camping where we could spend the night. The owner of the place also had a crocodile that had been bought by a pet shop that didn't know what to do with it and two kangaroos whose mothers had been ran over when there were young. In the morning, we got to see how he fed the crocodile, which was not as big as the one we had seen the day before but was much closer. It was quite impressive to see how fast the crocodile attacked the piece of meat just next to her mouth, and how inactive and apparently harmless she was the rest of the time.

Afterwards we also fed the kangaroos, and they were so used to humans that they embraced us when we came with the food.

We spent the rest of the day in one of the many amazing beaches of Cape Tribulation, again white sand, palm trees everywhere and that crazy sensation of not having anything to do but lay in the sun.

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Comments

[Luis]

..... scary
Hey Loup! Fais gaffe aux crocos, pls. C'est sérieux. (Il y a des hippopotames aussi?)

[tonordmenniaustralia]

t'inquiète...
les crocos on les a vus soit à la jumelle, soit derrière un enclos, donc ils ne risquent rien... (et les hippopotames, je crois pas qu'il y en ait en Australie)

[Anne Meunier]

and did you make it Erwanou?? :)

[tonordmenniaustralia]

No, not to the top. But some weeks later I did manage to open a coconut :)