From Reef to Rainforest

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Hello again,

On returning from the diving course I decided a lie-in would be a good plan, and in accordance with all previous good plans, I ignored it completely and got up at 7 to go sailing 😊. This time Troy wasn't around so I went out on a J24 with 4 others. I was put in charge of the headsail, one of the others helmed, one did spinnaker, and one was ballast. As it turned out I ended up doing the headsail, mainsheet, traveller and occasionally tiller because the guy on helm was incapable of multi-tasking, which made it a bit more interesting. We did the first half of the race with few issues, and were coming 3rd, until the crew decided it wouls be a good plan to cut across the main channel in front of a tanker, and ended up getting stuck on the sandbank the other side. We eventually got off, but had to turn the motor on to do so, and were subsequently disqualified. When we got back in we met up with the other J24s, and discovered we weren't the only ones with a DSQ, as one of the others failed to go the right way. We followed the race with free pizza back at the yacht club, and I headed back to the backpackers where me, Consty, Pitt, Julian etc chilled by the pool for the afternoon before eating the hostel's free BBQ.

The next day I was up crazy-early again to get the shuttle bus up to Kuranda - a little village in the rainforest. Despite all the advertising to attract tourists there wasn't much to do up there, so I went around all the markets and then did a boardwalk through the rainforest. By this point it was only about 11am so hiked over to Barron Falls which is a massive cliff with lots of trees around and a pretty waterfall. From the info-boards I think it would've been more impressive in the winter, but it was still very beautiful. After that I hiked back and had a very healthy lunch of ice-cream and the biggest (and nicest) vanilla slice imaginable, and went to one of the many wildlife parks around. I had a choice of venom, butterfly, bird or koala park so I chose the koala one. I started off by a lake with lots of salt-water crocodiles in it, and very little fencing. Next was an equally unfenced dangerous lizard enclosure, though they seemed more preoccupied with sunning themselves than eating me. After that was the koalas, who were generally chilling out - either sleeping or eating - though one did come close enough to the edge to pet it. Then, as I was taking pictures of the kangeroos and wallabies, one of the park staff began feeding them, and invited me in to help. They were all really cute, and very placid, and when I went up close they would eat the food straight out my hand, thought they could never be bothered to come up and find it for themselves. The final part of the park was the venomous snake enclosure, made ever so slightly worrying by the significant lack of any form of enclosure. You basically walked into a greenhouse like structure with a railing round the path, and snakes everywhere - some were in their designated spots true, but most were either chilling out above me on the ceiling or on the path/railings. Luckily the heat of the day seemed to make them fairly chilled out and most of them appeared to be sleeping.

I followed this with a trip up to Cape Tribulation for a couple of nights. The journey up was okay, though it took forever. Halfway up we stopped off at the Daintree River to go on a crocodile cruise for an hour, during which we saw 3 baby crocs and a big 2m male called Scarface. Scarface got his name by beating up and killing Gummy (the croc who owned the territory before him), and then going up to a local farm and butchering and eating a full-grown bull. Despite this everyone on the tour seemed to think it would be a smart idea to run across to port when Scarface was sighted, making the boat tip right up, and leaving the guide rather pale. The next part of the tour was a fast-paced walk through the daintree in which we saw barely anything and if you stopped to take a photo you got left behind. Finally we reached Cape Trib where we were dropped off and made our way down to the beach which was beautiful and sunny and had amazingly fine white sand, though unfortunately big warning signs anouncing there were box jellyfish in the water kindof ruined our plans for swimming. Instead we chilled out on the beach for the afternoon, and took about a hundred photos.

The following day most of my tour group went back to Cairns, so I went down to the beach by myself for a bit, covered myself in anti-jellyfish suncream and went snorkelling, but after about an hour the weather decided it was bored of being sunny and instead poured with rain solidly for about 3 hours whilst I went and had the nicest chips ever for $2 at the only takeaway in Cape Trib, and looked around the "shopping mall" (a building with an overpriced food shop, a pharmacy and some toilets). Then I went over to the bathouse, which in itself was fairly crap - basically the guy's pet bat in a corner and a bunch of posters about bats and coral, but outside there was a little golden-orb spider chilling on it's web, and, when he saw me take a picture of it, the guy from the bathouse "helpfully" pointed out the big version, which was literally as big as my hand. Eventually I got bored and walked back up to the backpackers to chill by the pool in the rain. That evening we decided that the night croc-spotting tour was a ripoff as they are hard enough to find in full daylight let alone with a torch, and so me and another girl wandered round the rainforest near the backpackers instead and were rewarded by nearly treading on a massive snake chilling out on the path, and a few random rodent-like animals scuttling about. Luckily we didn't discover any more golden-orb spiders in the dark.

My final day in Cape Trib was fairly dull to start with as it was raining again, but once we were all back on the tour bus it became more fun as we had another mental Aussie guide who kept putting on very loud gangster rap, and insisting we were on the "most radical tour bus in the daintree, duuude". Our first stop was at "the sweetest icecream shop ever, man", where we got little pots with 4 flavours of icecream - Yellow Sapote, Wattleseed, Blueberry and Coconut, which were delicious. Then, halfway back, we stopped at the Mossman gorge which was very pretty, and we all went swimming as our guide assured us that the "danger of death, strong currents and flash floods" signs only applied after it had been raining. Apparently he hadn't been outside recently. Then he dropped me and 2 girls off at Dougie's in Port Douglas, and I wandered down to the beach, which was deserted as it was so windy. I stayed there for a while as it was very pretty and nice and cool unlike the rainforest which was really hot even when it was raining, then headed back to the backpackers.

The next day I headed back down to the beach and did about 3 hours body surfing in the awesome waves with a random guy called Steve who offered to take me diving ($7 for an air-refill, and a few beers for the boat ride out is quite a lot cheaper than the $245 tourist trips!), though unfortunately I don't have the gear yet.

Then, unfortunately, the tour was at an end so the next day we all piled back into the bus and went back to Cairns, where I spent a day relaxing, and going round the markets (which sold some awesome samosas, 50cent melons, and delicious fresh-squeezed sugar-cane juice) before heading out to Yungaburra in the Atherton Tablelands.

Katie x

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Comments

[GDM]

super piccies again!