The next morning Marianne took us on a trip - a mystery trip. She wouldn't breathe a word of where we were going, just got all us WWOOFers into her car (with cameras, she told us cameras were important) and drove us through Childers and out of town. I ventured to suggest that she might be taking us all away to ditch us at the bus-stop, but luckily the reality was somewhat different: she was treating us four to a trip to Snakes DownUnder, a reptile park near Childers, run by snake-expert Ian Jenkins, who kept a taipan as a pet (taipans are the most deadly snake in Australia - well, the Eastern Brown is deadlier per unit of venom, but the taipan injects much more venom and strikes prey multiple times. Anyway, a bite from either would kill you pretty fast. Luckily anti-venoms are widespread and taipans are rarely, if ever, seen.) It had a much better feel - and much, much better crocodile pens - than the Port Douglas place, and many of the snakes on display were caught by Ian when they were found on domestic properties.
Because we arrived early, we got a private guided tour by one of the handlers, round the reptile pens, holding blue-tongued goannas, turtles, frogs, and lizards of the desert, tropics and garden. Understandably, it being a cloudy day, the desert lizards were sulking under rocks in the below-par heat. There were also two snake shows, one packed with irrepresibly noisy pre-school children who were absolutely focused on what was in the biggest box in the small arena (the handler made them wait and wait. It turned out to be a baby crocodile), and one, hosted by Ian, with the Six Deadliest Snakes In Australia, including, of course, the taipan, and Eastern and Western Browns, as well as tiger snakes, which are incredibly well-camouflaged and also, not unexpectedly, pretty damn poisonous. Even those domestic-bred and oft-handled snakes frequently shot out of their carrying bags at a terrifying speed - Ian explained that if they had been wild-bred, they would "have bounced off each wall [off the arena] in under three seconds".
Given the turn of speed that snakes have, then, the advice of how to avoid a bite when confronted with one is quite against all instrincts: stay still. Snakes see by movement, so if you stay as still as possible, an agigated, confronted snake will [hopefully...] slowly relax and move awat, Easy to say...probably quite hard to do, unless fear is freezing you in place. Luckily, the only time we've seen an Eastern Brown (on our mountain hike... in the future, coming soon), it was slithering away from us at quite a speed, saving us having to do anything at all.
After the shows we got to hold the resident boa constrictor python, Kit, and the rather grumpy baby croc (I'd be grumpy too if I knew I'd be going back to the crocodile farm when I got too big - I didn't ask what the crocs were being farmed for, but I'm fairly certain it's not for a life of frolicking in swamps). The croc had an amazingly hard back, and a very soft underside, which is probably the way round they'd want it, in the wild, when they have to defend themselves from bigger crocs (often their parents!) looking for a snack.

Lastly we saw the crocodile feeding, which was dramatic - even Ian, in the pen with a giant adult male croc lunging at him, seemed a little disconcerted by 'Macca's' energy on that particular day. He couldn't have been hungry, since crocs need very little food, especially when they don't have to exert energy hunting for it. Maybe he was just playing....? Well, luckily no one lost any limbs that day. It's a risky job, that's for sure, but I suppose if you're confident enough to keep a taipan as a pet, then you have to pretty sure of your animal-handling skills. Despite all appearances to the contrary, I think he's mental, personally!

written by  LizIsHere on August 5, 2010 from Childers, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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In between pruning we take time to be shocked that it's August already. It's August. It's winter here. And yet it's hotter than summer back home. I'm not complaning!

In between our third and final days of pruning, we got to go on a day-trip to Brisbane with Ed. He was going there for a dental appointment, and also dropping Anna off at the meditation retreat where she was WWOOFing next. It's a 3-hour journey so we get up early for the drive, carried along by 60s classic pop and Ed's fascinating collection of country music - ranging Creedence to Cash, and from the weird and creepy to the downright crass. It's brilliant, and I laugh quietly to myself in the back seat at some of the lyrics.

Ed dropped us at the CityCat ferry stop furthest our of the city centre so we could enjoy the (windy! a skirt was not a good choice...) river journey into the city. Although Brisbane could be any-city, any-where, it's pretty enough, being on the river, and after so long in small country towns and on rural properties it was nice to be somewhere cosmopolitan again - although the sheer volume of people baffled us for a little while, as did negotiating road-crossings!
We wanderered along the cultural SouthBank area, past the museums and galleries, the faux-lagoon and beach area on the riverside, and then cross over the bridge to check out Queen's Street. This is where we ran into two of Nik's friends from Busselton. We were all bowled over by the coincidence; similar to when he ran into another of his friend's in Tully - although this was greater since we weren't even staying in Brisbane, just passing through for a few hours!

In the afternoon Ed picked us up again and took us up to Mount Coo-tha to check out a panoramic view of the city. You could see as the conical main-peak of the Glasshouse Mountains, and to New South Wales to the South. It's always interesting to see a city from above, so to speak, to get a real idea of the scale and layout. We'll be back in Brisbane in a month or so, to explore it properly, but the day-trip gave us a taster, and a welcome dose of city-life to make us appreciate arriving back, late in the evening, at the rural peace of Vintner's.

written by  LizIsHere on August 4, 2010 from Childers, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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Anyway, we arrived in Childers at long last, and Marianne from Vintner’s Secret Vineyard drove to the bus-stop to pick us up. Almost immeadiately upon meeting her our worries were dispelled – a chatty, warm, retired school-teacher, she put us at once at ease. And when we arrived at the property, a large house with pretty gardens, 5 acres of vines, three large cattle pastures, and a shimmering dam (a small man-made lake, in Pom-language), and were greeted by her son Matthew, and three other WWOOFers in the warm, bustling kitchen, we realised we’d found a place, and hosts, who would be the perfect cure for all our Townsville-ingrained negativity. After a tour we sat down to steaming bowls of home-made pumpkin soup, and everyone had a little meeting to discuss current projects happening at the fledgling business (bought the couple two years ago and revamped with new cellardoor, cafe and shop). We also got to meet Theo, their cheerfully scruffy white 'bitsie' ('bit of this and bit of that') dog, who likes to sleep wombat-style with all four paws in the air.

In addition to Marianne, Ed, and one of their grown-up sons Matthew in the house, there was also a Venuezelan WWOOFer, Anna, and a French couple, Elodie and Sebastian, who were staying in their van outside until Anna left and there was bedroom free. So the house was always busy and alive; either Anna or Marianne, or both, always seemed to be cooking something, whether for the cafe downstairs, for dinner that night, or for morning tea (Marianne’s much more civilised name for ‘smoko’), and our meals were taken round the large table in the diningroom/library/living room area, with much tasting (read: drinking) of the new seasons wines. Our room was at the front of the house in a converted verandah, meaning that half the walls were windows, giving the room massive amounts of sunlight and fantastic views over the gently rolling grazing fields of Vintner's and the opposite property, far away on the next hill. It also gave us a close-up view of the birds which sometimes flew unsuspectingly into the glass - and we could hear, perfectly-high-pitched, the crows of the three cockerels kept in the chook pens out back, at varied hours between 2am and 7am. (The chooks vary from the normal russety-brown types, to insanely fluffy things with 80s hairdos, to polka-dotted varieties that would provide the perfect accesory for the glamourous greenie with an eye on co-ordination their egg-layers with their outfit. There are even minute baby quails - the quietest and most retiring of all the fowl on site).
Thankfully we were spared the noises of the two boisterous and highly anti-social geese who lived on the other side of house, beneath Anna and Marianne&Ed's bedroom windows.

There is always something to be done on the property - from simply raking leaves, weeding and general upkeep to maintain the large grounds of orchard, cafe area, lawns and flowerbeds for visitors to wander and picnic in, to bigger projects such as the establishment of a raised veggie garden. But the biggest project in the coming days after we first arrived, and the reason so many WWOOFers were present at one time however, was pruning - preparing Vintner's 5 acres of vines for their spring 'bud-burst' by removing all the old, dead or surplus wood. We had to wait for a 'master pruner' to arrive to tutor us in the art of pruning, so in the meantime we raked the lawns, weeded (easy, hand-weeding this time!), planted cover-plants in various empty beds, collected the chook eggs, and, in a massive all-farm team effort - inside the shed during an epic rainstorm - unloaded hundreds of bottles of wine which Ed had recently brought back from their winemaker, located a few hours away in Kingaroy. It was a little disappointing that we wouldn't get to see any wine-making facilities on-site, but since it's completely the wrong time of year for that anyway, it didn't really matter either way. Nik and I also spent one morning hand-labelling bottles of white wine, spurred on by...let me say...interesting music on the local radio station (one stand-out lyric: "Are you a rockstar, or do you party in a gaybar?"). The music was mostly popular old classics and songs which had topped the UK charts four or five years ago, but the DJ was even so daring as to play a single by the Hoff himself. Strange.

The sun came out properly on the 30th July - perfect since the master pruner was coming that day to tutor us. We all went down to the vines, to the verdhello grapes, and had a lesson on pruning, before trying it out ourselves (Ed seemed remarkably relaxed about us practicing with actual sectauers on his actual vines!). It all seemed very complex to start off with, but the basic rule is to leave the best and newest wood on each spur coming off the vine. This meant the wood had to have very little bark, ideally, and be very green inside. Also, the pruner explained, though it would be possibly to make a slightly-less-good decision over which bit of spur to cut, there was only one real BAD DESICION to be made in terms on pruning on each spur, and as long as we could avoid leaving the very worst, oldest bits of wood in place, the vines would sort themselves out in time for bud-burst in spring. Still, it was slightly nerve-wracking knowing we were dealing with at least a part of Marianne & Ed's livelihood! Afterwards the pruning team repaired to the cafe off the cellardoor, for capuccinnos and some of Marianne's tasty homemade cake.

written by  LizIsHere on July 27, 2010 from Childers, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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We'd decided to spend two nights in Agnes Waters, both to break up the bus journey just a little, and also to make ourselves feel less bad for skipping a quite hefty section of the Queensland coast. We weren't really bothered about missing the tourist spots, but Agnes Waters, a tiny beach community revolving about sun, sand and surfing, was probably the perfect place to recover from the bus journey and get ourselves sorted for our next wwoofing place. Our hostel, Cool Bananas was a leafy oasis - when we stumbled in sleepy eyed from the bus we were greeted with a peaceful hostel, hammocks, free tea (and milk! this is very important. very, very important!), and even two dreadlocked guys plinking away on an acoustic guitar and ukulele, respectively.

It was another beachy-stop... we spent most of our time on the long sandy main beach, walking down it, spinning poi on it, reading on it. We caught a nice sunset at the historic town of 1770 (the first place in QLD that Captain Cook struck upon in...1770!) too.

...And that was it, really... very nice to do but fairly boring to read about, probably!

From Agnes Waters were moving on three hours further south, to our WWOOF hosts in Childers, and perhaps justifiably nervous about it, after our last experience!

written by  LizIsHere on July 25, 2010 from Seventeen Seventy, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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Longer update coming soon!

p.s. I also got to see koalas in the wild yesterday! They're very cute, but when asleep mostly resemble 'grey motionless bundles', as the guidebook put it. But we were lucky enough to see some awake too!

written by  LizIsHere on July 23, 2010 from Magnetic Island, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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Our original plan had been to chill out for a few days and then to go to a wwoof host on the island, but that all fell apart a bit (it's becoming a sort of theme of our wwoofing organising!) when this host had to cancel for family reasons. Fine, so we would chill out for five days, and then go to our next host near Mackay. Nope - these had to cancel too. Cue a day of frantic panicking and emailing, until we suddenly recieved a response from a vineyard near Childers asking if we could come on the dates we had been meant to go to our Mackay host. Ace, and it sounded like a lovely place, more to the point! And so what if it was...gulp... a sixteen hour bus ride away.

Putting such thoughts aside we settled down to enjoy our time on the island properly. This mostly involved either relaxing on the beach at Picnic Bay, the quiet (a whole lot quieter since the ferry terminal moved to Nelly Bay) township at the end of the island's paved road, wandering the jetty there, or catching the bus to explore other beaches on the island. The first day we were there we were lucky enough to see a turtle, just swimming in the sea next to the jetty - I didn't even get to see one of them when I was diving! We visited Arcadia to relax on the beach and pose by the sign (there's an Arcadia at Glastonbury festival, the sign of which we also have photos posing by... anyway).

But on our second-last day our mission was Koala Spotting! This required doing the Forts walk on the other side of the island, in the cool afternoon when the koalas, who sleep about 20 hours out of 24 due to their energy-low eucalyptus leaf diet, are most active (active may be a strong word). So before hand we took another walk which branched off the Forts track, walking in the midday heat and then relaxing with a picnic lunch at Florence Bay, an almost unbearably picturesque bay fringed by rocky cliffs. Then we took a short, slightly muddy walk through a stand of mangroves to Arthur Bay, an even more pretty bay, with a rocky outcrop on which perched, as if placed there by the tourist office, a little rock wallaby.

When the day finally began to cool down, we walked back up the hill to the start of the Forts trail, which weaves up a ridge through eucalyptus forest, passing through the site of an old WWII military encampment. The track finishes at the top of a rise, where the observation post and controls post, along with gun emplacements, still remain. It was fascinating to think of the troops stationed there balanced the mental pressures of being constantly battle-ready (though they neve fired a shot in anger, only in, as the info board put it, 'mild surprise', at an American ship paying an unexpected visit!), yet living in such a lush tropical environment.

And, yes, we were also fascinated by the koalas! Starting out the walk I expected to see one at best, they're famously hard to see when asleep - the guidebook described them as 'motionless grey bundles', a surprisingly hard thing to see in a forest of trees. The first two were saw were pointed out to us by other walkers - one, living up to the guidebooks description perfectly, was nestled in the crook of a tree, sound asleep - though this didn't damped our excitement at seeing it one bit. The next one actually stirred, probably roused by our (ok, just my) hissed 'Look, look, a koala', gave us a sleepy, slightly baleful look out of it's round, grey, furry face, and promptly settled back to sleep. The best koala sighting though was definitely when we were tipped off by a family coming up the track as we came down that a mother and baby had been seen, wide awake, in a tree on one of the side paths. It was adorable - the mother lazily reaching out for pawfuls of eucalyptus leaves as the baby, clinging on tightly to it's mum, gazed down at us curiously. We stared enraptured for about ten minutes before deciding to leave them in peace. And, finally, on the last stage of the track before the carpark and bustop, we saw a koala in action, moving more than a few languid millimetres and actually clambering up a tree. We were buzzing for hours - in fact I still am a bit - to see them actually in the wild, and going about their business careless of the dumb people staring at them.

written by  LizIsHere on July 23, 2010 from Magnetic Island, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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Unfortunately from the day we arrived we realised we'd probably made a mistake! But due to various factors - lack of money for a hostel stay in an area we weren't particularly interested, no other wwoof hosts organised - we ended up sticking it out for two generally tense two weeks.

It was our host who was the problem, being generally an arrogant, money-obsessed person who seemed to see his wwoof-ers as free labour rather than volunteers on an exchange. This was demonstrated in the fact that 85% of our time was spent weeding, and that we worked 8 days without a day off, before awarding ourselves with a relaxing day when he went away for the weekend. Our host even boasted to a friend, within earshot of us, "Guess how much my workers cost? Nothing!" Charming he was not.

But enough of the negatives, despite the fact that it was, erm, mostly negatives!
There were positives, obviously. We got our own rooms, the house was nice, the wwoofers had their own bathroom and computer with internet. We had free rein with some things in the kitchen and could cook as long as we cleaned up (using our host's patented teatowel method), and were even allowed to compile our own shopping lists for food when our host went off working at the weekends. And once we all warmed up to each other, the other wwoofers there were ace - a French girl who was stuck at the house for two month as part of her international business degree language internship, and an Israeli guy.

And aside from the dullness of the almost-constant weeding, the lack of days off and the, erm, difficult to live with host, the property was pretty ace in itself. With 32 horses paddock’d and stabled there, often with two in the paddock that doubled as the front garden of the house, I was in my element. Often the horses – many of them gorgeous thoroughbreds - would wander over as we weeded, hungrily and curiously sniffing at us, the clippings, the secatuers, sledgehammer and our 3 litre water bottle. And there were chooks, eleven of them, with four young, friendly ones who would follow you about and even run after you if you ran. They would also try all manner of tricks to escape from their run, and occasionally leap flapping onto your back as you fed them or topped up their water. And there was a goat. Or should I say, The goat. He became my nemesis, from the moment I discovered him, his chain wrapped around the fence, his water empty. From then on I took it as my responsibility to top us his water and make sure he wasn’t tangled; he in turn liked to reward me by rearing at me in an attempted headbutt, or by pawing the ground and charging head-first at his just-filled bucket of water. A charming animal, but I could see where the rage was coming from – being chained up all day alone couldn’t have been good for him,

And there were kookaburras aplenty, cackling away in the trees, hawks circling low overhead on the thermals, blue skies and tall, white eucalyptus trees; mountains with low cloud in the distance, kangaroos and wallabies to be seen grazing and drinking from the pool formed by the dam at dusk. We took a walk along the creek that bordered the property on our ‘day off’. We clambered through the grasses and bushes, stamping and clapping (well, I was the only one clapping actually…) to scare away snakes, led by the intrepid Israeli guy with his bouncing afro. It felt free, and adventurous, though we were hardly a K/m from the property, because of the way we had to bash our own pathway, and the ever-constant threat of snakes hidden in the undergrowth.

So there were good times, but mostly only when our host was away. The fantastic and enlightening conversations with the other wwoofers, communally made dinners, watching films together, drinking cold beers in the front paddock under the mid-afternoon sunshine, our creek-walk…. If there hadn’t been other wwoofers, though, the place would have been kind of a nightmare! Suffice to say 'sticking it out' won't be a mistake we make again, but here's hoping one bad host is enough for one trip!

And then we left, in a cab... and headed off to the blissful peace and weeding-free Magnetic Island...

written by  LizIsHere on July 15, 2010 from Townsville, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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I’d been keen to dive the GBR (or anywhere, really), since I’d begun planning to visit Aussie, and had decided not to take a trip in Cairns when both Suzanne and one of her friend’s had recommended that I go from Mission Beach instead, since the trip out to the reef would be shorter and the amount of people on the boat likely smaller. However it was a bit of a shock when I went to book my trip through Absolute Backpackers in Mission Beach and found out that the snorkeling plus two introductory dives would cost about three hundred bucks! But I had to go for it – it was the GBR, after all, and if I didn’t do it I knew I would regret it; maybe not until I go home, but definitely then. So I booked it, and in two days time I was ready at 8.15am for the pick-up from the Calypso Dive Company. We drove to the jetty/boat launch area and the twenty or so guests already waiting on the jetty were ferried along with us.

There were a small group of certified and would-be divers among the forty or so people on the boat. The rest had come on the trip purely to snorkel; many were families with young children. The boat ride out to the Eddy’s Reef, an hour and fifteen minutes from the mainland, was pretty rough, and the vessel was soon scattered with groaning, sleeping and quite green-looking people.

Luckily we soon arrived, and after a briefing, and some form-filling (basic safety stuff, and if-you-die-you-can’t-sue-us stuff), we got fitted with wetsuits, and the certified divers went off for their dive. Us four introductory divers wouldn’t have our turn underwater until late morning, so we went off for a snorkel with everyone else, getting our first glimpse of the gorgeous reef, teeming with life.

Finally our time for a dive came around. It turned out that I’d get a one-on-one dive with an instructor, since the ratio was supposed to be three-to-one and there were four of us. Lucky me! Mike helped me get into the heavy flotation vest and air-tank combo, gave me a final run-through on using the regulator, and then I stepped out into the water, flippers first. The first step in the water was to do some ‘skills’ while holding onto the anchor line which we would follow underwater. The first, taking the regulator out of your mouth and blowing out air, was easy as. But the second, where you have to let some water into the face mask and then blow it out by exhaling through the nose, caused a lot more problems. Thankfully, after choking on a fair amount of seawater and rushing, panicky, to the surface a few times, I got it together and we could start descending deeper than a snorkeller could. Everyone scuba-diving had been told that it was essential to keep breathing at all times underwater when diving; specifically, to not hold your breath. Maybe that seems painfully obvious, but often panic or amazement could cause people to hold their breath, and if this happened for too long the different pressures involved in being deep underwater could literally cause your lungs to explode. So that was something to think about while I was inching down the line, a little mantra going in my head as I tried to keep calm and trust the air supply…. Keep breathing. Keep breathing.

Scuba diving is incredibly odd to experience at first, at least for me. You’re underwater, yet you’re breathing easily, with almost as little thought as you would breathe on dry land. It took some getting used to, and I had been underwater a good five minutes before I accepted the fact that the air supply in my tank was highly unlikely to shut off anytime soon. Even on my second dive, the sight of another nearby group of divers floating eerily through the water jolted me away from gazing at the coral and again made me appreciate the astounding feat of even being able to breathe six or seven metres underwater, let alone also being able to glide about at whim and see the mysterious creatures that live there. The coral itself was impressive enough, all different colours, some moving into currents, some utterly still. Anenomes dotted some pieces of coral, darting back inside holes when a hand wafted through the water above them. Giant clams with mottled purple and blue lips sat majestically, clamping shut as they felt the movement of us passing by, or sensed a tasty morsel landing on them.
And there were fish, of course! Huge, bulbous lipped grey fish swimming ponderously; tiny shimmering fish like those in the huge shoal we had seen in Fiji; brightly coloured fish in blue, orange and yellow; clown fish; ‘nemo fish’ hiding into the fronds of anenomes; stripy zebra fish; and probably the prize, a lion fish, or butterfly cod.

It was a brilliant day, something so totally new and alien and fantastic to experience, like (cliched but appropriate) going for a short time through a window into another world.

written by  LizIsHere on July 4, 2010 from Mission Beach, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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But the main reason we had returned to Cairns was to visit the Daintree rainforest and Cape Tribulation, north of Cairns. The Daintree is 120 million years old, and has the most species in any single place on earth. So it's a fairly special place to visit, and about a million little buses go there everyday from Cairns holding eager visitors. Our daytrip - the only way we could see Daintree and Cape Trib without hiring a car - took us first to the Rainforest Habitat Centre at Port Douglas, about 40 minutes north of Cairns. Although we did get to meet kangaroos (and pademelons - not a type of melon, as I'd though, but actually small kangaroos) upclose in their large grasslands enclosure, it wasn't a very nice place for the other animals. There was a giant crocodile living in two tiny interconnecting pools, and the koalas barely had a couple of branches to, well, sleep on. I'm not sure how much 'roaming' space a koala needs, but the crocodile obviously needed more space. So that was a fairly depressing experience overall, and left me wishing we hadn't given our money to them, conservation projects or not. If they can't provide proper 'habitats' for their 'exhibit' animals then how can they do anthing effective for wild ones? Keeping wild animals in cages has never seemed right to me; safari parks just about get by because they have so much more space, but this place was closer to 'zoo' than 'habitat'.

But moving on. We continued up the coast to the Daintree, crossing the river on the cable ferry and into the national park itself. The rainforest is ancient, lush and green, and although people do live in there, and there are concealed hostels and some tiny settlements (powered by renewable power), it still remains a fantastic place. We walked along Cape tribulation beach, in the actually quite atmospheric cloud and slightly drizzle, past mangroves and the apparently shark, jellyfish and crocodile infested sea (not a place for a nice swim, then..). 'Cape Tribulation' was named by the great explorer Captain Cook on one of his bad days, when his ship had run aground on the reef nearby.
We also went on a wildlife cruise, which really might as well have been renamed 'crocodile cruise' on the Daintree River, where rainforest cascades down to the bank edges on either side. Despite the tide and the weather (meaning it was warmer for the crocs in the water than on the banks) being against us, we managed to see one tiny baby croc, a couple of medium size females, and a quite large female; the last in full view on the bank. They looked stunning up close, powerful and undeniably terrifying if you ever found yourself in the water with one. Not that you'd get very long to be terrified before it made you it's once-monthly meal! We also saw a tiny nectar bat curled up inside some leaves on an overhanging bush, and tiny, purple&green pencil-thing treesnakes.

It was an eyeopener into the beauty of tropical northern queensland, and seeing crocodiles in the wild was fantastic.

written by  LizIsHere on July 3, 2010 from Cape Tribulation, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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But the main reason we had returned to Cairns was to visit the Daintree rainforest and Cape Tribulation, north of Cairns. The Daintree is 120 million years old, and has the most species in any single place on earth. So it's a fairly special place to visit, and about a million little buses go there everyday from Cairns holding eager visitors. Our daytrip - the only way we could see Daintree and Cape Trib without hiring a car - took us first to the Rainforest Habitat Centre at Port Douglas, about 40 minutes north of Cairns. Although we did get to meet kangaroos (and pademelons - not a type of melon, as I'd though, but actually small kangaroos) upclose in their large grasslands enclosure, it wasn't a very nice place for the other animals. There was a giant crocodile living in two tiny interconnecting pools, and the koalas barely had a couple of branches to, well, sleep on. I'm not sure how much 'roaming' space a koala needs, but the crocodile obviously needed more space. So that was a fairly depressing experience overall, and left me wishing we hadn't given our money to them, conservation projects or not. If they can't provide proper 'habitats' for their 'exhibit' animals then how can they do anthing effective for wild ones? Keeping wild animals in cages has never seemed right to me; safari parks just about get by because they have so much more space, but this place was closer to 'zoo' than 'habitat'.

But moving on. We continued up the coast to the Daintree, crossing the river on the cable ferry and into the national park itself. The rainforest is ancient, lush and green, and although people do live in there, there are only some concealed hostels, some tiny settlements (powered by renewable power), and, oddly, a small tea plantation.

We walked along Cape tribulation beach, in the actually quite atmospheric cloud and slightly drizzle, past mangroves and the apparently shark, jellyfish and crocodile infested sea (not a place for a nice swim, then..). 'Cape Tribulation' was named by the great explorer Captain Cook on one of his bad days, when his ship had run aground on the reef nearby.
We also went on a wildlife cruise, which really might as well have been renamed 'crocodile cruise' on the Daintree River, where rainforest cascades down to the bank edges on either side. Despite the tide and the weather (meaning it was warmer for the crocs in the water than on the banks) being against us, we managed to see one tiny baby croc, a couple of medium size females, and a quite large female; the last in full view on the bank. They looked stunning up close, powerful and undeniably terrifying if you ever found yourself in the water with one. Not that you'd get very long to be terrified before it made you it's once-monthly meal! We also saw a tiny nectar bat curled up inside some leaves on an overhanging bush, and tiny, purple&green pencil-thing treesnakes.

It was an eyeopener into the beauty of tropical northern queensland, and seeing crocodiles in the wild was fantastic.

written by  LizIsHere on July 3, 2010 from Cape Tribulation, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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