The Flora and The Fauna

Hi folks, prepare oneself for another epic essay. Checklist: tea: comfy sitting place; eastenders off; children in cage; bebel gilberto soundtrack? (I am listening to a lot of Rufus Wainright at the moment)

As usual, photos to follow. Some cracking ones too, natch. I am learning how to use my close up feature on the camera, so plenty of zooming into spiders' faces and the like. If you like that sort of thing.

I have spent a week in Cairns now and will take the midnight Greyhound bus tonight to Townsville, which takes about 6 hours with all the stops it makes. From there I'll decide how/if I can get into Outback Queensland via places like Mt Isa - which I really want to do, but from my research it seems difficult, but would be worth the effort as it backs onto the proper outback containing Alice and Ayers Rock though those are hours away) - or if I will continue along the coast south and stop by somewhere like Magnetic Island, so named by Captain Cook when his compass went mental as he sailed towards it. I bought my 6 month Greyhound pass last night so I have acess to the open roads.

Cairns itself is rather dull. It is a tourist town not unlike the chavvier parts of the Costa Del Sol, though it is pretty in its own way. It isn't on a beach, because it doesn't have one - it is built on the mudflats! The prices of food reflect its raison d'etre - the Barramundi and Mud Crab are famed here and much talked about, but to sample them you need at least $30-$130! $30 at the minute is a lot of money so I've been priced out of trying the local fare; I even sat down and did some thorough budgeting on what oz dollars I had withdrawn and what I had spent, and what I coulld afford to spend, in order to figure out if I could afford to try it, but no. So I settled on buying four days of pasta and tuna from the local Woolworths (here Woolies is like Safeway, with less rotting vegetables). Even better, the Bellview's kitchen has a large rack of free food from the stuff people leave when they check out, for all to use. (A hell of a lot of posh label Balsamic Vinegar there... posh people roughing it as pretend backpackers maybe?) So I added a large tin of beetroot to that and some posh olive oil, and have been living off it. It's actually very tasty and I havent had cause to open my own pasta yet as there was tons for free. So I've saved a bit which means I can afford to redirect that cash to do a load of washing (they have dryers too--mmm freshly tumbled clothes....), get on the net and update OneHorseTown, at $3 an hour. Last night after eating my pasta two girls from Bournemouth checked in having come from a month or two in Bali and Thailand, we got chatting and I went with them for a cold Coke as they chose pie and chips for $20 for their tea. Who could blame them for craving a good old pie - I can't afford meat much here so I'm a quasi veggie now (the Twins will love that!) though for them the prices must have been doubly shocking, coming as they did from a land where you can live on a dollar a day and like like a king, food wise. Even fruit and veg is not that cheap.

Budgetary concerns aside, this week has been all about the flora and fauna of tropical North Queensland. Not unlike Spain's own Costa Del Crime and the most stunning areas of Andalucia, Cairns is a brilliant base from which to discover all the stunning scenery and nature this part of the world contains, and there are endless tours to book onto that pick you up and drop you off, and make it all easy for a small fee. The Bellview also offered to knock off $10 from the tours I booked through them, which was good. So on Monday I took a day trip to Kuranda, a small town up past the Barron Gorge in the mountains behind Cairns. I went by the Kuranda Scenic Railway which was built by Irish and Ozzie hands, hand carved out of the rock, back in the gold mining days, somewhere around the mid 19th century I think. At the train station, I got chatting to the lady who manages the station, Susan. She was great. Turns out she and her husband (who is a Brit) were just about to go on a trip round Europe on their bikes (thats motorbikes), having done a trip to South Africa last year. She was raised on the Aherton Tablelands on a cattle farm and had loads of cool stories about the area, the Lava Tubes and so on, and she fed me free tea as we chatted. Ozzie hospitality!

The trip up to Kuranda took a couple of hours and was indeed very scenic, snaking round the sheer drops on the mountain range to provide stunning panoramic views of the coast with the plains behind them, flanked by the huge rainforested mountains around which a heavy mist was hanging most of the day. Kuranda itself was ok, again done up for the tourists of which there were many, but v pretty and villagy. The highlights were the butterfly sanctuary and the Venom Zoo. The butterfly sanctuary was marketed the least with minimum signpostage as opposed to the aboriginal art shop and the zoo, both of which sounded boring. I stumbled across the butterflies but I was so glad I did. Although not cheap at $17 to get in (I had a $50 budget for the day), they stamped my hand and told I could come back in as many times as I wanted all day. And I did because it was lovely in there. They house and breed a lot of threatened species that are native and unique to the North Queensland rainforest, such as the Ullysses which is huge and azure blue - bird love it and are attracted to the blue so they fly much faster than other butterflies to protect themselves by covering the blue, which is on the inside of their wings, and when they settle they fold up their wings to show the black outside. Because they fly so much faster, their wings degrade faster, so they live much shorter lives. Also the world's biggest moth...scary. And plenty of other beautiful and bird-sized butterflies. I kept ducking to let them past me. As it is late spring I turned up to mating season for the 'Flies, as the lady who gave a free tour round the sanctuary explained. So I saw a lot of love in that room, and I managed to get a few nice photos of their most intimate honeymooning moments when they stopped their heavy petting for a few seconds to eat, or loaf around on the palm trees. I went to a 'venom zoo' with the dangeous spiders, snakes and all that, and that was cool. The guide went round and explained what everything was, and went into some detail about their venom capabilities. The zoo is also the site of a lab where they are paid by the government to milk various animals' venom so they can make antivenins (not anti venoms as I thought it was), and they are using some aboriginal knowledge to devise lots of very important medicines, including a cure for arthritis which was found from the venom of a spider or a millipede - I forget now which one - that bit a bushman where he already been suffering from arthritis, and after a few days excruciating pain, he pulled through and found he was cured permanently of arthritis. I also learned that they are making the world's strongest bulletproof vest from the silk of one of the poisonous spiders there; it is 300 times stronger than steel in comparitive terms, and they are also injecting it into sheep to make their wool extra strong...but who wants wool that feels like a brillo pad... I also learned that the tarantula's fine hairs all over its body are so sharp and strong, they can climb glass upside down and hang there using the hooks on the end of the hairs, or something. Also there are many creatures that use trickery to ward off predators; a couple of things in the venom zoo had big thick tails that looked like their heads, and when threatened they can pretend their end is their head while turning full circle to bite the face off whatever is attacking their behind. Cool huh. While there our guide came to one of the tanks to show us some poisonous lizard and found it wasn't there; he shouted over to his mate who trundled over and explained that it was in the hidey hold bit hedind the tanks. But the guide was like, 'are you sure about that, I don't think so', and for a moment silent panic gripped the girls in the group (except me who was writing it down in my notebook to relay to you, while stifling laughter), but it was all fine - wherever it had gone off, it was back home by the time I left. The guys running the small venom zoo were clearly all hair metal/student types who definitely had a crafty smoke round the back when the boss wasn't looking. And not of a cigarette, folks. That's how accidents happen, not least when it involves managing a cowshed full of the world's most dangerous creatures...
On Wednesday I went for an overnight stay in Cape Tribulation, so named after Captain Cook waded in and claimed Oz for the Brits. The Cape was really, really beautiful. The mini bus on the way up took us through sugar cane fields, mossman gorge and over the river daintree into protected rainforest by way of the Captain Cook Highway which gives amazing views along the coast. It was only marred by the lady driving, Coral, playing her ipod mini over the tannoy - michael jackson's Earth Song, anyone? other than that Coral was a great guide, she explained loads of cool shit to us about the history of the region. On my arrival in the Cape at lunchtime I dumped my stuff in the wooden hut I was staying in which was nestled right in among the rainforest, and walked to the beach. It it the first beach I have seen in Oz. It was completely deserted. A huge stretch of sand curving as far as you could see into the mountainous distance, with mangrove trees behind it, and just me. So I walked. Kept walking for a few hours. It was paradise! Then when I saw some people and found out the time I made my way back (it was about 4k's round trip maybe) for an hour's sleep, before joining a small group for a night bushwalk. That was really cool too. A bloke in a Henry Rollins t-shirt who looked like Keith Richards but after ironing some of his facial creases out rocked up to pick us up and after a few high jinx on the mini bus driving us to the point of our walk, in which he pretended we'd run out of gas and rolled the bus into the side of the road in the pitch black (oh, the japes!!), frightening some accompanying irish people, we collected a flashlight each and he led us into the forest in the dark. We hunted around for a couple hours looking for stuff, climbing up and down over rocks, vines, huge prehistoric tree trunks, and on the way we came across some lizards sleeping and hanging off vines, big spiders, big stick instects, and a white lipped tree frog. we also saw some baby shrimp in a rock pool and some glow in the dark moss! Because the rainforest canopy is so thick no light gets through and whenever we stoped walking we had to switch out lights off, and stand there in the dark and the silence, listening to the rustling and the calls of the weird creatures. Then I went back to the hut to sleep in the middle of the rainforest. And I was absolutrly shitting myself the entire night, I am man enough to admit it. This particular rainforest is over 100 million years old, and is heritage listed because it is one of the only original parts that remains from when the world had only two continents, before oz split up from india, south america and the antarctic. It is like being in Jurassic Park, especially this night in particular because it rains like the end of the world every night here (it is rainy season - rains all night, hot and sunny all day) and in our little cabin in the rainforest I could hear lots of unidentified animals ramming the door and small things scratching around my bed. There were no proper windows, just large frames cut out of the MDF walls with mosquito frames on them. I was freaking out between the sound of rain pelting down and Cassouwaries trying to get in!It made for interesting conversation with Jacqueline, a half-Filipino girl from Holland who I met on the bushwalk, and who I was rooming with. We swapped emails and we may try to meet up around Fraser Island just before xmas as I think I will be there at that time, and so will she. Her tales of cockroaches trying to crawl into her ears in hotels in the Philippines were enought to make me pull my bedsheets over my ears that night.

Hmm what next. Friday I was back in Cairns and took my snorkelling trip out to trhe reef. I was a bit scared of that too as I'm freaked out by the sea and there are reef sharks, and it is jellyfish season so no one is allowed to swim in the sea yet. (Reefs have their own ecosystems and weather so they don't usually have a problem with jellyfish, though they are there as I found out when I saw two tiny ones bob past me.) It was a lovely dry and sunny morning and the ride out on the catamaran was only a little bit bumpy. We went right out to Norman Reef which is at the outer reef, with the end of the reef and the shelf into the deep sea in eyeshot a couple of miles off, behind the line of surf breaks. I had booked just snorkelling as I was afraid to go scuba diving, but on the boat they said anyone could join scuba and pay there, if they listened to the tutorial. I got chatting to a french boy who is studying finance at IESE, and he had lovely hair and persuaded me to listen to the tutorial and come scuba diving. But even he could not persuade me, it was too complex all the stuff you had to remember. So I stuck with snorkelling. Donning my bikini for the first time (a watershed moment) I got kitted out with a wetsuit (cool!) and fins and a snorkel, then after a short talk about how to snorkel ("breathe in, then breathe out") I threw myself into the sea. Then I freaked out. First off I couldnt adjust my mask to fit, and then trying to do that in chopy waters I took several moutfuls of salt water. Once sorted I looked into the undewater world for the first time and, upon making eye contact with the reef which is absolutely gigantically large, another world, a humongous water city, I felt the fight or flight thing and swam straight back to the boat, to the safety of the sun deck where all the other timid wieners who had freaked out were sheltering, with the same look of failure on their faces, in silence. But I hadn't paid $85 to sunbathe. After an hour and some lunch, I got back in. Then I saw the jellyfish and came straight back. I told one of the crew and she said: "you must be wrong, it isn't jellyfish season". I know this to be a bare faced lie!!! I noticed that loads of people were in the water so I decided to just go for it again. This time I managed not to freak out, and had a good hour or so (not using the snorkel, just holding my breath - far easier) inspecing the reef with all its amazingness, all the blues, the reds, the greens, the massive sponges growing dfown there, the crevices, the shadows, the different types of tropical fish, and one turtle. No sharks. Then I rewarded myself by sunbathing on the bow (bough? spellcheck- the front of the boat) with a thick layer of factor 30 though. Still got burnt. And a tiny bit seasick on the way back and the surf was extremely rough. But that was all worth it. I have seen the great barrier reef for myself.

Check out the largest version of this photo I took on the night bushwalk. The bigger fly thingy has little flourescent lights in the end of his wings. That's so cool. I like nature I do
x

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