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Published: March 7th 2015
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Another wildlife park; a baby crocodile (he also brought out a python) I never updated anything besides the Reef during the Cairns trip, so that's what this post is about. I'll get caught up with everything afterward in separate posts so this doesn't become my first book.
We went rafting the first day, like I said in the earlier post. The rapids were the best I've been on, and the rainforest itself had plenty of cool waterfalls and side streams flowing into it that we had some good views of during the quiet parts of the day (which were few and didn't last long, also a good thing). I was right up front, so I got blasted with all the water and everything the whole day, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I fell out of the boat once, but it was because of another boat that had gotten caught on a rock; we slid on top of it and flipped over. Stupid boat. Though at a spot where the raft guides intentionally wanted to push us out of the boat, another guy and I were the only ones who stayed in, so I was pretty happy about that. Our guide was a tall, skinny American who had been a raft guide in Africa
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wildlife park; these spiders made their webs and were hanging out over the trail (Uganda, I think) before packing up and doing it again in Aussieland.
Skydiving was tons of fun; after I'd landed I immediately wanted to go again. I wish I had asked my tandem instructor if we could do flips and stuff, but that will have to wait until next time. We jumped over some sugarcane fields and had a great view of the ocean and surrounding countryside and rainforest. Bungee jumping was a bit more nerve-racking, especially during the climb up the staircase. I went backwards, but I wish I'd done just the regular swan dive. On your first jump you can only do certain types of jumps, and they reserve the more intense ones for your later jumps to suck as much money out of you as they can. So instead of actually jumping backwards, they just leaned me over the side while holding onto the rope, counted down, and let go. It was still fun and I got wet up to my chest in the pool beneath the tower, but when I do it again in New Zealand I'll just do the regular jump. The third thing I did that day was one of those giant swings.
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A better picture of a mother with a joey in her pouch. I still think the pouch must be awfully uncomfortable if the joey's feet are sticking out in front of its face. My roommate and I lay down in a harness, the pulley took us backward to the top, I pulled a ripcord, and we went swinging along on our merry way (at somewhere around 100 km/hr or around 60 mph) to eventually have another good view of the rainforest down a small mountain. It was cool, but it's something you only need to do once.
Probably my favorite part of the trip now that I've gotten to digest it all was our trip to Cape Tribulation somewhere in the Daintree Rainforest (which they say is somewhere around 140 million years old, compared to the 15,000-year-old Barrier Reef). Once we arrived our group split up to do whatever, so I naturally took a hike to what was called Emmagen Creek, about four kilometers, mostly uphill, but not both ways. It was certainly tiring, but worth it. At the end was a nice little watering hole with some good jumping-off trees and a rope swing. I took full advantage of them. Once I got back, I took another short walk along the beach with one of the Cape Tribulation Resort employees. There were tons of little crabs scurrying around on the beach
and an empty lobster shell. That night was completely clear, and I had never seen as many stars as I saw then. The Milky Way was right overhead and looked like a huge cloud streaking across the sky. Sirius had a ring of light all around it about a centimeter wide from our viewpoint, and we could see Mars (the reddest light in the sky) and Venus. I wanted to camp out on the beach, but there was a king tide the next morning, which is the highest tide of the year, so there was no beach by eight in the morning. While there was a beach in the morning, many of us got up early to see if we could catch the sea turtles coming in. We saw them out in the water, but I never saw one land on the beach. Later, I went sea kayaking with a guide and a small group. We saw a white-bellied sea eagle flying away as we rounded the edge of a bay, and later saw him nestled in the forest outside of the bay. We took a detour into a side creek the guide called Jurassic Park because it looked like
the creeks in the movies. It deadened all the noise from the ocean so that it got chillingly quiet. Halfway through we went a short way down another creek with tons of little whitish rocks floating down it. The guide said they were pieces of pumice that had floated to the coast of Australia after an underwater volcano had erupted near New Zealand. I picked one up that was as big as my hand and it was as light as a feather. I kept it and plan to bring it home with me because throughout the entirety of my stay in Australia I'm positive I will find nothing more exciting than a lightweight whitish rock that had been floating in the ocean for an innumerable amount of days.
Besides that and the reef day, we did a few more things that I'll save and can talk about once I get back to the States. Stay tuned for some posts about orientation and school. I have an internship at a newspaper called The Eastsider, and I hope to meet some Aussies through that as well as a potential job (maybe at some outdoors store since that's more realistic than sailing
would have been),
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