The snorkelling itself is great - the water is warm and absolutely clear, brightly coloured fish - electric blue, yellow, and stripey ones - dart about, and sinister-looking reef sharks glide below us with buddy parasite-eating smaller fish clinging to their backs. When I spot one for the first time I gasp in surprise, inhaling water through the snorkel tube, and all around you can hear exclamations, muffled by the water and the tubes, as two, then three, then four sharks appear. The guides from the village expertly spear small fish, ripping off the scales and placing them under small rocks on the seabed for the sharks to unearth and eat.
The most breathtaking thing we see though, is on the second trip, when a massive (no exaggeration) shoal of thousands and thousands of small silverly fish appears. I hang face-down in the water, my whole vision consumed by their tiny shimmering forms as they move, independently yet as one. My eyes and mind can hardly comprehend it, so I just gaze as them for minutes.

One night we also decide to tackle the guided hike up to one of the highest points of the island, led by Beri. It's a muggy, sweaty evening and the climb is steep, but luckily Beri is used to guests being much less fit than him (he does the hike morning and evening most days, barefoot!), and there are plenty of stops for water and to take in the views over to the island opposite, Kuata, and out to the ocean. We pass the island's plantations of root crops, and scramble the last 15 minutes of the hike up a rocky slope, clinging onto treetrunks and vines. The views at the top are pretty fantastic, down to the village and resort, across to the islands. We also spot swooping bats. Our touristy exclamations of surprise and delight are countered by Beri's wicked cackle as he gathers rocks and begins attempting to knock them out of the sky! At first we think they might eat crops or cause some other nuisance, but Beri informs us that actually they're just really tasty. He doesn't manage to hit one though, their sonar and speed being more than a match for rocks.

There's also entertainment in the evening; weaponry and clothing displays, traditional songs and dancing, all performed in a relaxed way with the rest of the villagers not performing gathering to watch, and mock loudly when mistakes are made. The guys doing the dancing openly crack up when they make mistakes - a lot like the guys doing the Maori show in Rotorua - and their lack of practice fire-staffing is slightly concerning only in that they seem to more often than not lose their grip on the staff when facing the us in the audience who are only a metre or two away! Luckily everyone gets away without getting singed. We also get a tongue-in-cheek all-resort lesson in Fiji dancing, with commands such as ''Rock the baby, rock the baby, wash your hair, drop the baby" to guide us along. The fact that everyone's had a couple of the massive, colourful cocktails produced by the resort barman, Moses, by that stage in the evening doesn't help our performance.

written by  LizIsHere on May 11, 2010 from Waya Lailai, Fiji
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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The Nadi airport is tiny, and the flight to Sydney was about three and something hours. My first sight of Australia was of a wet, chilly Sydney, and my first encounter with Australians on their home soil was with with a customs officer who saw fit to take away all 5 of my juggling balls because they 'contain millet seeds'. That was 50 quids worth of juggling balls going to the furnace (or, perhaps, to the customs officer's children's toybox, who knows?)! Needless to say, I wasn't left with a great first impression of the Australians as The Stealers of All Fun.

Then there was another four hour something flight to Cairns, which was, being a lot more k/ms further towards the equator than Sydney, really, really hot and sunny. May is late Autumn verging on Winter here, which is something that I can't quite get used to - 28C isn't winter! It's just NOT.

I met Nik at the hostel, Dreamtime Travellers Rest ('dreamtime' is something to do with the Aborigines, I haven't quite worked out exactly what yet), a great, chilled out, tropical hostel with an enthusiastic Irish owner. Nik had mostly heard that Cairns wasn't a place to linger, but the view I' d got of it from the shuttle bus window was ok enough - a slightly sprawling small city with wide streets, backing onto the (closed) man-made lagoon and the sea, which was preceeded by mudflats teeming with thousands of slightly sinister-looking crabs. We would be in town for a few days at least while we sorted out a working hostel to go to.

Almost immeadiatly as soon as I arrived I was drawn into the Hmm, Now What Do We Do?! panic that Nik had been embroiled in for day he'd already been in town. All the working hostels he'd called were either full or had no work, and work was a definite priority, so we could have a bed to sleep in and food etc. We ended up in Cairns for four days in the end, most of them spent on the internet or phone, contacting hostels, and WWOOFing hosts as a back-up, with occasional forays out to the waterfront and the cute but slightly tacky Night Market. We also went to the BBQ and fireshow that the Dreamtime held every Wedneday. I passed on the BBQ but Nik got to try kangaroo and crocodile. Apparently kanagaroo was nicer. So, the first kangaroo I got to see in Australia was on a plate, cut into small pieces and barbequed...
The fireshow itself was fantastic. It was put on by 3 performers from the area, with their individual routines co-ordinated to music.

Finally, after 3 days of slightly panicked looking, we found a working hostel in Tully, centre of banana-growing in Australia, which had two dorm beds free, with the owner also giving us the positive news that we'd be numbers two and three on the hostel work list (jobs are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis).
With that sorted we figured we could hit the beach or at least chill out in the waterfront park for our final full day in Cairns....

But there remained the rather disgusting issue of Nik's Knee. What had started out as Fiji-origin mosquito bite had over the past week morphed in something altogether more gross and infected. So our last day in Cairns turned into a merry exploration of all the different medical offerings in the Cairns Central Mall - the chemist, the doctor's, the chemist again, and, finally, when Nik was hit with the doctor's bill and penicillin prescription charges, the Medicare offices to sort out getting a rebate. Still, it was definitely worth it to ensure that his leg didn't fall off, which would have really mucked up the next day's trip to Tully to jobhunt...

written by  LizIsHere on May 20, 2010 from Cairns, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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Tully is small, rural town, population about 4000, situated between Innisfail and Cardwell. On the journey there you pass fields and fields, and fields and fields, and fields, of banana plantations and sugarcane. It's also one of the wettest places in Australia, and, aside from the huge and ugly sugarcane factory on the outskirts of town, it's main 'site' is giant gumboot with attached treefrog, build to represent the highest rainfall the town ever got in one year (it's something like 7 metres... i could walk the five minutes down the 'highstreet' to check, i suppose). So, Tully 'quite a wet place', and also one of the best places to whitewater raft in Australia.

Not however, a great place to find banana-related work in May, though. We arrive at the Savoy Backpackers, which is a bit dingy, but fit for purpose (sleeping, eating, not catching bedbugs or TB), and are informed by the wild-haired owner Jude, that while we are 3&4 on the workilist, apparently farmers have greatly reduced the recruitment calls they make to hostels in favour for having all would-be employees gather, Depression-era-America-like, at the Post Office in town at 5.30am. Once there, you basically have to run (yes, run) at the farmers land rovers and buses as they pull in to pick up legitimate workers, to ask plaintatively if they have any jobs that day.

The first morning we start of quite positive, but as each successive bus-driver and farmer shakes their head, we move on to depressed. Even seeing a pretty decent sunrise as the four of us unemployed from the Savoy wander forlornly the three minutes back to the hostel 7am, doesn't make up for the fact that it seems hopeless, and that we'll have to get up, put on our workboots, make our lunches and do it all again tomorrow, only to more than likely have to come back and clamber back into bed, again without work.

We stick it out for four mornings, in which time no one in the crowd of twenty or so hopefuls gets picked up. It doesnt' help that Tully is just incredibly boring. There's the library, the supermarket, the outdoor swimming pool, the park, and the 4 hour hike up the moutain. We spend a lot of time in the park, and read a lot of books. At the weekend the hostel-people with jobs invite us out, so we go for a fun BBQ at Alligator's Nest in a nearby national park ( no actual alligators were about, obviously), and to a bonfire and low-key beach party at Mission Beach. Those times are fun, but by the time the second Tuesday rolls around we've given our notice to Jude and sorted out a WWOOF place two hours south to escape to on the Friday - YES! LEAVING TULLY!

Then Jude wanders up with a jobslip to Nik: "Got you a job, finally!". Our reaction is perhaps not what she expected. We wanted to LEAVE Tully, argghhhh. Nik decides gives the job one day to sound it out, and although it's pretty awful - working on a water-filled production-line in an open sided shed, bending over for most of the 8 hour working day, splitting bunches of bananas by hand, all the while getting splashed in the face with water while frogs and cockroaches leap out of the bananas and onto your face and hair intermittently, it's pretty good hourly pay. Finally we decide that, since Nik can't really turn down the chance of money, I'll go off to the WWOOF place on the Friday and we'll meet up elsewhere in 2 weeks. Not the greatest arrangement but probably the most sensible.

So I'm off to look after bees for one week and then onto... somewhere else... for another week.
And I finally saw a (live) kangaroo!

written by  LizIsHere on May 24, 2010 from Tully, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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I was also lucky enough to arrive on a weekend when the family were going camping overnight at Mount Fox, a mountain about an hour's drive from Ingham. We loaded up the car, and trailer-tent, and drove through fields of sugarcane, over sealed and unsealed roads, finally winding up the narrow road up the mountain (which apparently collapses sometimes in the wet season) to the cooler airs of Mount Fox. A small community lives up on the mountain - mostly cattle farmers - and everyone has to keep stores of fuel and food in case they become stranded during road washouts. There is a tiny community school up there too, though older children are either home-schooled or packed off to boarding schools in Ingham or Townsville.
The campsite was run by the local LIONS and was lot less primitive than i was expected; there were toilets, showers with water warmed using a donkey-boiler (the suggestion that we 'spark a fire up under the donkey' as soon as we arrived left me confused on the drive until i worked out what a 'donkey' was), a cooking/bbq area and even an ancient rusty fridge. We cooked BBQ, drank Milo when the temperature dropped, and ventured out onto the small 'village green' area next to the campsite to gaze at the millions of stars. Earlier in the evening six kangaroos had visited the green to graze. I ended up sleeping on the backseat of the car, which actually turned out to be a much better deal than freezing in the the fold-out trailer tent like the others, though it was so cold we all had to sleep in jeans, jumpers, coats and socks!

written by  LizIsHere on June 6, 2010 from Ingham, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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The house took some settling into. There was almost-permanent noise: the bleep and electronic music soundtracks of computer games, on which all 3 boys are fixated, pounding bass-heavy music from the eldest son's impressive stereo, and, of course, yelling. Yelling for communication over all the other sounds, the kids yelling at each other, Narelle yelling at the kids. The youngest child didn't speak yet, and communicated with a grunts and half-words, which added to the cacophony. Still, once I got used to this, I found them friendly and welcoming - Narelle was relaxed about work, and she often joined me on jobs, when she wasn't working hard on her school PTA commitments. They family have had WWOOFers stay for up to 3 months at their house - though I think the ever present feeling that things were teetering on the edge of chaos would drive me away long before then!

The property was in a beautiful setting, too. Along a few km of gravel roads, over a concrete creek crossing, up a dirt track, and then suddenly the area opened up into a curving driveway with fruittrees along one side, the chook and geese pens, and the house. The backdrop was grey-blue mountains, which ran with myriad waterfalls during the wet season (during the wet season, and particularly after a cyclone, the creek would often rise up so high as to strand the family on their property - the longest they stayed trapped was 3 weeks!) The place was peaceful (aside from the family-based noise - and the geese!) and green, and at night the thousands of stars balanced the blinding blue skies of daytime.

During my time at the house I did everything from house-based chores - cleaning the bath, washing windows and screens, and shredding stacks and stacks of paper to line the goosepens, to making and bottling cumquat jam, mucking out the goose pens, helping prune the fruit trees, weeding flower-beds and feeding the chooks and geese each morning. This was slightly nerve-wracking as not only did the geese attempt to mug me whenever I came into their pen to let them out, but there was the ever-present worry of snakes in the hanging branches above the chook pen. Oh, and the poisonous and giant golden orb-weaver spider which lived in the food shed! The farm was my first encounter with two scary/amazing/horrible types of Aussie wildlife - giant spiders and green ants.

I saw 3 massive spiders during my time on the farm - with a legspan that could cover your face and freakishly big, black or orange-patterned bodies - the one in the shed, a golden orb-weaver high up in a tree (picture coming soon - camera zoom is a wonderful thing), sitting in it's golden-stranded web, and another creeping across the grass towards my host's bare feet as we pruned fruit trees. Luckily we all spotted it in time and her son picked it up on a rake and chucked it away, but it was unsettling all the same - they're impressive, fascinating animals when you're staring at them in a web, not so when they're inches from your feet! I lived in fear (and still do, in fact) of walking face-first through one of their webs when I'm working in an orchard or garden!
Green ants, while neither poisonous nor giant, are still unpleasant, particularly when they gang up on you (as they always do). They're tree ants, much larger than our British black ants, with a green body and orangey legs and pincers, and build huge, amazing nests in trees by gluing leaves together to make a sort of giant ball. They even 'farm' aphids around the nest to give themselves something to snack on. So, very interesting and clever little creatures from afar - not so nice when you get up close to them, after miniature-chainsawing (my host, not me, i think she could sense my inherent clumsiness) down a branch holding one of their large nests, or dragging a branch covered in them a few hundred metres to the burn-pile. This is when they'll grip onto you with their rear-pincers, pinch your skin open and spray a stinging, acidic (but, oddly, lemon-flavoured) substance onto you. Any close contact with green ants swiftly leads to the 'green ant dance', a series of flapping, jumping, twisting movements (sometimes with accompanying shrieking-in-pain sound effect), as the performer attempts to rid themselves of the five or ten or fifty ants which have attached themselves to their feet, ankles, arms, or wherever. Even wearing gloves and shoes I often got bitten, but Narelle would have bare legs, hands and feet, even when working closely to their massive nests! Mad. Unfortunately you can't avoid green ants if you're working around trees - if there's trees, they'll be there. Great!
Still, according to the locals, fire ants are a lot, lot more painful and unpleasant. And I found out after the fruit tree pruning that the ants' lemon-flavoured venom can be used to flavour tea, and even chocolate.... yummy?

My second Ingham WWOOFing experience definitely got better as time went on, and added to all the encounters with new and interesting wildlife, Narelle's husband was actually an English guy who'd come over on the 3 week boat from England (the "10 Pound Poms" - when the British government was promoting emigration to Aussie and a ticket for the voyage only cost 10pounds) at the age of six. He was still very interested in England and particularly English cooking, so Narelle made lots of yummy English food like yorkshire pudding and bread and butter pudding, which definitely made a nice change from pasta and stirfries.

From Narelle's I caught the bus to Mission Beach, to discover if Nik had survived his 3 weeks hard labour on the banana plantations...

written by  LizIsHere on June 13, 2010 from Ingham, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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I'd got three days to kill before Nik arrived from working in Tully (just 30 mins down the road), and I spent most of them hanging around on the gorgeous beach at Wongaling, which is the middle settlement of Mission Beach (there's 14 km of beach, with South Mission Beach at one end and, um, North Mission Beach at the other). There's not much to tell about that really, insert your own visions of me wandering barefoot up and down the golden sand under blue skies, gazing off to the palmtrees fringing the beach and the green-rainforest of Dunk Island across the water.
(To add the paradise-like feel, the hostel gave you a towel. A fluffy, big towel! It might not seem like much, but after using a tiny travel towel for 5 months a big fluffy towel is amazing. But the beach was the highlight, obviously :).)
Apparently there are crocs near one of the creeks flow into the sea at the beach but luckily/unluckily, we didn't come across any during our wanderings!

Then Nik turned up, and we celebrated his birthday and freedom from the banana fields in ker-a-zee style with pizza from the Italian restaurant down the road, a bottle of wine and of course, cake! Some of the other hostel people even spontateously started singing Happy Birthday when I emerged from the kitchen carrying it, which was nice. He also got a ukulele, because he definitely needed something else to lug around the country as his backpack (literally) splits at the seams...

From Mission Beach we were heading... Back To Tully. Except we weren't really (thank goodness); it just happened to be the nearest Greyhound stop to our WWOOF host's place in Murray Falls. Her WWOOF book entry had been fairly basic, so we didn't really know what to expect (you never do with hosts, really, as much as they have no idea what to expect from us). Still, whatever it was, it would get us away from hostel-world, which we've got pretty sick of over the last few months...

written by  LizIsHere on June 18, 2010 from Mission Beach, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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juicing oranges

outdoor shower

Mouser! Gorgeous cat :)

The property was named Yabullum, which means - approximately - in the local Aboriginal language (each tribe has their own seperate language), 'the place that is never dry'. The actual house was next to an oxbow lagoon, that mentioned place, and a creek also ran through the property. Half of the 80 acres was given over to wildlife refuge bush, while the rest held the house, sheds, three fields of lychee, mangosteen and rambutan trees, and the horse paddock. The setting, particularly outside the house next to the lagoon, was gorgeous, peaceful, green, alive with birdsong, the burps of frogs in the water and the hum of cicadas in the bush on the other side. And the barking of hyperactive Layla, an extremely playful Kelpie dog, who never tired of playing with sticks and balls, and would try out her full range of barks to try to persuade you to play too.

The house itself was old and wooden, decorated with buddhist and eastern imagery, paintings left by past WWOOFers, and always scattered with at least two of her five cats. Mouser, a gigantic grey fluffball of a cat (with a fondness for sleeping on the kitchen island) who had turned up on the property after being dumped as a kitten, easily won the most gorgeous cat award, but the others were very cute too. The main kitchen/dining area even had a hinged wall, meaning that the wall could literally be propped open almost all the way to reveal a massive strangler fig tree, thick foliage and the lagoon itself. It felt like you were almost eating dinner in the bush at times! There was an outdoor shower too, under the shed roof but with a cut-away so you could look out onto the lagoon as you washed your hair.
We stayed in a caravan, under the open-sided shed connected to the house, but spent most of our time in the main house, for meals, reading, drinking tea, or watching Dr Who and the Aussie music-comedy gameshows Spicks and Spicks.

It obviously helped that our host, an ex-teacher, was wonderful - she was friendly and relaxed, she knew stacks about the bush and Aboriginal heritage, and she also had a great cd collection of 60s and 70s greats which we played our way through during our stay. Oh, and she blended her own tea, and believed in brewing up at the very least three pots a day - one at smoko (smoking/snack break, which happened around 10am each day),with lunch, and normally after dinner as well - which was heaven. Teabags taste like brewed sawdust after that!

There were three Jersey 'house cows' (not cows who live in the house, incidentally, as we had tentatively assumed from the WWOOF book entry...), and three horses on the property. Two huge Clydesdale geldings, and one extremely nervous Quarter horse mare who had been rescued after being abandoned on a cattle station. We groomed the older, placid Clydesdale, Lauchlan, each morning, while Suzanne trained Fergus, a stunning but headstrong 5 year old. It was great to be around horses again, even if they were much, much bigger than what I'm used to!

We did a wide variety of tasks on the farm, none of them seeming particularly strenuous due to the frequent breaks - we would start at 7.30amish but going to feed and groom the horses, then work on one project till smoko time, which consisted of piling back to the house for tea and crumpets, cake or toast, then either go back to that project or work on a new one till lunchtime at 12.30/1ish, then continue on in the afternoon to, at the latest 3/4pm, before another visit to the horses in the early evening. We covered boggy patches in the cows' field with sand, weeded the orchid nurseries (and fertilised them with a delightful cow-poo based fertliser, there was a yummy froth on the top when we took the bucket lid off...), fertlised an entire orchard of rambutans (with help of a Suzuki mini pickup, which I got to drive), stacked wood into burnpiles (and then cooked potatoes in them, eating them later on with butter and salt and cold XXXX's, which was up there with culinary highlights of this trip!), collected and juiced oranges, and painted irrigation piping. We also spent much of a day clearing a whole shed of various bits of mysterious - and often very heavy - farming gear, discovering a large family of toads and a large, hairy, tarantula-like wolf spider in the process, and wrestled with miles and miles of vine to reclaim the garden after the wet season speed-growth of invasive plants.

Suzanna even took us on a daytrip one day to visit Murray Falls, which was about twenty minutes drive away. We took an interpretative bushwalk up to a viewpoint at the top of the falls - the climb was rewarded with breathtaking views of the waterfall and the tablelands with misty rainclouds rolling down the mountaintops towards us. The walk itself was made even more interesting by Suzanne's own knowlege of how it was possible to live off the bounty of the wet-tropics bush, learned through her friendships with Murray Aboriginals. We discovered how boomerangs were cut from the buttresses of trees, providing the ideal shape and yet leaving the tree itself in tact, and how bush turkeys built huge mounds of plant scraps into nests, using the heat of the material to incubate the eggs.The Murray Falls site is actually the Dreaming place of the brown pigeon, and appropiately enough we spotted a flock of them flying from a tree as we walked along the ridge above the waterfall. On the return journey back down the track we were lucky enough to encouter two inquisitive kookaburras, who's distinctive laughing calls reverberated around the farm but which we'd never managed to see up close.

Leaving Suzanne's farm was quite difficult, we'd had a great time with her, working, talking, getting hints on old 70s cult authors to check out, and hanging out with the awesome cats. But we had to move on Cairns - and luckily, we'd never have to come back to Tully again, since my mysterious disappearing bankcard had finally turned up at the branch there on the day I left (post in Aussie is slow... even slower when the bank forgets to post things for a month...)

So, back to north to Cairns, and then finally we could begin our proper journey south...

written by  LizIsHere on June 23, 2010 from Tully, 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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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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