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Published: September 13th 2009
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After sleeping with one eye open from the whole Heroes/pitch black shower incident, we started our day out right with some eggs and toast from the bistro and decided that we were tired of paying so much for food, so we scooted on down the dirt road to the country grocer and stocked up for the next 2 days. On our way we stopped at a lookout on the road that had a great view of the beach we were on. It just never gets old looking at a tropical beach with bright blue water and palm trees!
After arriving back at the hostel with our goods, we hit up the beach for a little while to soak up some rays and just to chill. For lunch we scarfed down some ramen like two broke college kids and headed out to a nearby fresh water swimming hole. Apparently this swimming hole is popular with people AND crocodiles, so we looking out for them! The water was pretty chilly so we only went in up to our ankles, but there were a ton of these black and green fish that were trying to nibble our toes and hung out with us.
Met a really cool girl who used to be a pro surfer for Australia and had lived in Cali, she gave us a contact for a dive master down towards Brisbane that could give us good diving advice. We keep meeting the coolest and most interesting people here! It's always somewhere random too, like a swimming hole in the middle of the rain forest...crazy.
After chatting with her for a bit we drove to a rain forest boardwalk that wound around the trees and palms and bushes and eventually opened to the beach. SO many beautiful plants. Giant fan palms, stinging trees (don't touch!), Ripa Rosas (smelled nasty) and HUGE fig and cinnamon laurel trees. Saw plenty of Scrub Fowl birds digging for food with their gigantic talons (Erin = not a fan), mangroves that were exposed during low tide and lots of ferns. It was so warm there that once we got to the beach, we turned right around and headed back to our hostel to go swimming in the ocean before the sun went down.
There are stingers (jellyfish) in the beaches out here, so most beach spots have a jug of vinegar lying somewhere on
the beach in case of a sting. Jessa got stung almost on her crotch (frickin OW) and Erin on her shoulder. Neither were bad enough to bust out the vinegar, but it still hurts! Goes away pretty quick though and we are tough cookies 😊
That night we made some seriously bare bones pasta using a jar of sauce and a can of peas and carrots, also had to eat it out of the pot since there we no bowls...classy. After dinner we relaxed until 7:30 when we were picked up and taken on a night hike with a bunch of other people from our hostel. It was 5k of walking through the bush with only a flashlight. The rain forest is NOT quiet at night! We saw sleeping birds, a couple kangaroo rats, heard a possum up in the trees, saw huge grasshoppers and several GIANT wolf spiders. Jessa is not a fan of spiders and Erin is a straight up arachnophobe, so this added a little "fun" anxiety to the hike in the pitch black. If you shined the torch at the trees and saw something that looked like a small green diamond shining back, it was
the wolf spider's EYES. GROSS!!! These things were bigger than our hands and could have been on trees next to us and we never would have known, so creepy. Other than being creeped out by the spiders, we learned a lot about the rain forest and got a good workout after all that spaghetti.
The moon was almost full so we walked to the beach and got a couple long exposure shots, very cool since the moon lit up the ocean and the clouds. We were pretty tired after our post-dinner hike, so we slept good that night!
So we're getting better at flipping between English and Metric in our heads. We've got temperatures down and Erin can do distances and weights easily (thanks Kettering) but for the life of us we CANNOT figure out how much gas to put in the damn car. They do it by cents per litre here, and so 1 litre is like 125.9 cents. Erin got yelled at by the gas attendant today for doing it wrong...and then managed to get about half a tank in...way to go "engin
We've also established that Jessa is the head chef and chief navigator
and Erin is the driver and communications officer. Jessa whips up some mean meals for breakfast and dinner and can pretty much get us anywhere based on what little information the maps have. Erin is used to driving on the left now and translates people's accents and slang for Jessa when talking to people. We're a good team and considering we have to still live with each other after this trip, intend on staying that way!
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Karen Moyer
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Hi again...
Whew! I'm exhausted catching up with the travel log but now I'm current except that you're a day ahead of me!