the Daintree

---

OK, so I wanted to go to the Daintree area, mainly for Bennett's tree kangaroos but also some other little bits and pieces. I don't like bus tours in general, I prefer doing things my own way, but apparently its cheaper and more convenient getting up to Cape Tribulation and the Daintree via an organised tour than by just hopping on a bus. So I signed up for one of the idiot tours.

The bus tour was all right although the commentary was seriously messed-up factually (especially in zoological matters). The first stop of the inbound tour was the Daintree River cruise, and it was as bad as I feared it would be -- and indeed as bad as I'd heard it would be from other tourists I'd met. The operator was Croc Express and the skipper was a true Crocodile Dundee wannabe with cowboy boots and leather jacket with zip-off sleeves, bellowing things like "I AM a croc expert; I studied crocodiles at University", "the most dangerous animal on the planet", "every habit you develop in croc country is a bad habit", etc etc. Although billed as a wildlife cruise it was of course just a croc spotting trip that went maybe 300 metres up the river bank then turned around and went back again. There was a green tree snake (which was black with a yellow belly) and three crocs. Every time one was spotted the boat would be manoeuvered up to it, reversed, turned around, repeated, so everyone could see it a multitude of times. There was also a primo view of a crested hawk gliding in to land on a handy branch but that didn't even rate a mention. Extremely lame tour. Of course there are proper wildlife cruises that focus on all the river critters but you have to be able to be there first thing in the morning for the good ones, and I cannot so never mind.

The first place I was staying at, for two nights, at Cape Tribulation is called Ferntree Rainforest Lodge -- oh I'm sorry, did I say it had "rainforest" in its name?
"So where's some good rainforest nearby that I can get to," I asked at reception as I checked in.
"There isn't any"
"Oh"
"Not on your own anyway, you need a guide to go into the rainforest"
"Oh"
"The only place you can go on your own is the Mt. Sorrow walk." Then she started to give me a lecture on how it wasn't SAFE in the forest . I enquired about the night tours they had advertised: were there tree kangaroos in the areas the tours visited? "No"
"What kind of possums are there then?"
"Striped possums"
"And...?"
"That's all"
"Oh." I booked it anyway. Striped possums are pretty hard to see on night tours because they're very shy and don't like lights at all, but I figured there had to be something of interest to be seen. How wrong I was.

But before the night-time commenced, I took a wander along the Dubuji Boardwalk through fan palm and mangrove forest. An information panel by the track reminded me of why I had wanted to visit here, to find the peppermint stick insect, which lives amongst the pandanus and squirts a peppermint-smelling liquid at its attackers. It took a while but I found one eventually and while I was taking some photos it squirted me. It really does smell very strongly of peppermint, and the odour stayed on my hand for several hours. It may not sound like much of a defence, giving your enemies a minty freshness, but if it gets into your eyes or mouth it is very nasty and caustic. And that evening I discovered a tick burrowed into my thigh. It was very exciting because its my very first tick. I've been mosquitoed, flead, bed-bugged, sandflied, mited, even monkeyed on one occasion, and now I've been ticked too. Apparently the only tick I need to worry about up here, disease-wise, is the paralysis tick and seeing as how I'm not paralysed I'm guessing it wasn't one of those.

So the peppermint stick insect was a highlight but everything else at Cape Tribulation sucks. Despite what the tourism brochures would have you believe there's no forest here to get into on your own, and there's very little else to do. All the other tourists here that I've talked to who are booked in for three or four days are all dismayed at what they're supposed to be doing for that length of time. There's a general air of despondancy around the place and its not pleasant.

So, anyway, I went out on the night tour, with nine other unfortunates. It was absolutely the worst night tour ever; a complete waste of $42. Do not bother with Mason's Tours if you are stuck in Cape Tribulation! The spotting started off with a spider's shed exoskeleton, moved onto a cockroach, then another spider, a cricket, and so on for the next two and a half hours. I'm completely serious, every single thing we were shown I could have found on my own in the daytime for free. If they called it an Insect-finding Night Tour they would have been being more honest, but then they wouldn't get any customers. There weren't even a lot of insects, maybe fifteen total if you don't count a couple of ant nests. The only non-invertebrates were a frog in a stream and some baby cane toads, which aren't exactly hard to find in Queensland. The guide summed herself pretty quick for me when she went "Eww eww eww!!" and ran out of the way when one of the baby toads hopped towards her. There was lots of grumbling on the walk and not just from me. "There's a cricket here," she would say, and from somewhere down the back would come a muttered "oh yay, she found another cricket." Now I know that animals don't always play fair and come out when you want them too, but in this case its more that there aren't really any animals to be seen. If you're going to start up a night tour company you do it where there are public-pleasing night creatures like possums or whatever, not where there are just insects and maybe a mouse or rat if you're lucky. Very very disappointing tour. The funniest bit of the night, apart for the cane toad incident (and a similar one involving a cockroach), was when she found a peppermint stick insect and informed us that the spray TASTES like peppermint. Normally I just keep my mouth shut when tour leaders are talking nonsense because otherwise I sound like a right prat, but in this case I felt I had to speak up so nobody there would end up in hospital!

The next morning it was a choice of reading a Star Trek Next Generation book or climbing a mountain, so I took on mighty Mt. Sorrow. In 1770 when Captain Cook holed his ship on the Great Barrier Reef at Cape Tribulation (hence the name it was given) he sent some men up a nearby mountain to scout out the lie of the land. One of the men didn't make it back alive, so Cook named the mountain Mt. Sorrow. Its 680 metres high and I did manage to make it back alive, although there were precious few birds in the forest. For most of the walk it was quiet as a morgue in there. It was like someone had gone through and sucked up all the birds with a giant vaccuum cleaner, along with all the moisture -- it was as dry as a bone in there, and for the bottom half-an-hour of the track every single surface in the forest was literally covered in dust kicked up from the road and blown into the treeline. Fortunately on the way back down from the wind-swept summit I happened across some fern wrens which I had been hoping to see somewhere because they are pretty restricted in their distribution, a noisy pitta which was something I was also very much hoping to be able to find but didn't know if I would given my history with pittas, and a green tree snake. No cassowaries though...

The pick-up the next day to take me to Cow Bay down the coast a-ways to a hostel called Crocodylus wasn't till 1.30 and because there really was nothing else for me to do, I read the Star Trek book. It was called "Imbalance" and was, shall we say, as bland as the TV series. I couldn't wait to get out of Cape Tribulation. Crocodylus on the other hand turned out to be much more my kind of place. The cabins are set in rainforest and the walls are made of green mesh so you can see the trees all around you. And its easy to do day-trip transfers up to Cape Tribulation from here so, with the benefit of hindsight, what I should have done was just stay at Crocodylus for the whole four nights. There are loads of birds all over the place; in fact one morning the first bird I saw was a noisy pitta foraging in the leaf litter outside my door! There are night tours here too, led by a guy named Possum who's as mad as a cut snake. Unlike Cape Tribulation the forest here actually does contain some nice mammals for night-spotting, including Bennett's tree kangaroos supposedly, but the night we went out was unfortunately a no-show as far as mammals were concerned. Part of the problem was that there were 15 people on the walk resulting in far too much noise and way too much light. I was planning on going out the next night by myself but my big torch chose that night to die on me, and the two little torches I had spare weren't powerful enough for effective spotlighting, so I ended up just sitting outside my room in the trees and still managed to see a northern brown bandicoot, two fawn-footed Melomys (that's a very cute little forest mouse) and a sounder of feral pigs. I should have just done that the first night and saved myself $25!

The first day I had at Crocodylus I walked the 3.5km along the road to Cow Bay itself. Cow Bay is said to be named after the dugongs ("sea cows") that live there and the lady at the reception desk had said you can sometimes see them from the shore if you're lucky. It was worth a shot. After a while sitting on a rocky head overlooking the area where I'd been told the sea-grass beds were (which the dugongs feed on), I saw something dark poke out of the water and disappear again. Same thing happened again about ten minutes later, and then again, but each time too briefly to get a fix on with the binoculars. I was troubled by the small size but I figured it had to be a dugong snout breaking the surface to breathe. What else could it be? After about an hour I eventually managed to get a lock on one well enough to identify it. It was a green turtle. No dugongs for me after all. Later in the day I took a wander around in the patch where we had done the night walk, which was very instructive because you could see that it was actually a very small area wound all the way through with a spaghetti-tangle of trails to make it appear that you were covering a large area, and there were little piles of seeds and fruit cached here and there for the guide to "discover" as the walk progressed. As for there being tree kangaroos there I sincerely doubt that. The area's too small and the forest is the wrong type, so the only way you could potentially get one in there is if it was a subadult passing through while looking for a new territory to occupy. So no Bennett's tree kangaroos for me this trip, and it looks like no cassowaries either. It seems everyone is seeing cassowaries except me. There was one on the Marrdja Boardwalk the day before I was there; some people at Crocodylus had seen two on the road on their bus trip up there; and there were two separate people in the Crocodylus guest book saying they'd been chased by them in the forest outside the place. The closest I've got is a big blue pile of cassowary droppings.

Tomorrow I'm off to Undara to try and find some rock wallabies.

---

Photos

"hey, I can see our ship from here!"
view from the top of Mt. Sorrow, possibly as seen by Cook's men [ship added to photo through technical wizardry! My genius knows no bounds!]

example of cauliflory on Mt. Sorrow
(cauliflory being the term for when flowers and fruit develop from the trunk of a tree rather than from the branches)

noisy pitta (Pitta versicolor) at Crocodylus
these were all over the place at Cow Bay, but were generally far too sneaky to photograph well

wompoo pigeons (Ptilinopus magnificus) at their nest at Crocodylus
they were facing the wrong way to get their brilliant breast colouration in the photo