more ahhhhhs....

Back in the US, and I’m finally getting around to posting the second blog about the rest of my vacation in Australia. Although it was pretty wet down there, I can see my first blog posting was a little dry. I’ll try to make this one a bit more interesting.
After my rather miserable hiking experience on Sunday, I decided to take it a bit easy on Monday by driving down the Queensland coast. There are a number of parks south of Cairns I’d been told to visit and also a place where I could see some Cassowaries, an endangered bird. Very changeable weather – it would rain like heck for 10 minutes and then I’d need my sunglasses. The first two places I stopped were swimming areas: the Boulders and Josephine Falls. Both were running way too fast for anyone to get in but the scenery was beautiful. At Josephine, there’s a place where you can slide down a waterfall so I was disappointed I couldn’t do that. Something to file away for the next trip. I did see a small rat-kangaroo about the size of a squirrel but couldn’t get him to stay still long enough for a photo.
Further south I visited the Murdering Point Winery (what a name!) and bought a bottle of local fruit-wine to bring home to my wife. I went off the main road to a small beach community called Etty Bay where there were supposed to be Cassowaries. Quite a nice beach and swimming area and yes, there he was out at the far end of the beach. They’re a large flightless bird, smaller than an emu or ostrich but pack quite a kick, I hear. Beautiful blue neck and head area. He wasn’t too concerned with me as I was able to get to within about 15 feet, but the shadows in the mangroves prevented me from getting a good photo. (All in all, my photos from the trip are pretty disappointing. Never quite had the right light. Or maybe the right camera. Or maybe the right operator.)
My destination for the day was Mission Beach. It’s a funky beach town that’s still a little off the tourist track, and after stopping at a Cassowary habitat on the way into town (where I saw another male and his chick – the dads raise the babies) I nearly hit one driving into town! I’m sure the Queensland police would have been just thrilled had I killed one of their rare state birds. Apparently cars are the leading cause of death and that’s why the species is endangered.
At the southern part of town there’s a hiking trail that goes for several miles along the coast and around a point. It was ‘closed’ due to storm damage but typically, I decided to go for it. After a couple of miles I came out onto a long strip of beach where there was literally not another set of footprints. Amazing that you can still visit places where no one’s been all day! I proceeded a little cautiously since there were supposed to be crocodiles, but I didn’t see any. What I DID see, at the end of the beach, were four kangaroos! (I’d kind of forgotten about kangaroos since I think of those as being an outback kind of thing and not tropical.) They were on the other side of a fence and I didn’t get too close before they hopped away. Made my day, though. And as a bonus, I saw another cassowary on the way back down the beach.
On Tuesday I made connections with Adrian (whom I’d met while at the Great Barrier Reef) and we left for the outback at 7:30am. It was a long drive (by the end of the day I’d logged almost 350 miles) through a variety of different landscape. It’s the wet season in the outback too, so it wasn’t at all what I’d pictured – things were pretty green and there was quite a bit of grassy ground cover that I’m sure is gone later in the year. The road was mostly paved with a few flooded areas we had to drive through and a few stretches of graded dirt that was surprisingly in pretty good shape. Our destination was Chillagoe where there are some limestone caves and a ranger-led tour. Of course, we were the only tourists out there (it’s the off-season, as noted in my other blog) so we got a personalized tour. The caves aren’t large but the formations are quite spectacular. Nearby there was a small hike that led to a ‘balancing rock’ and various other rock formations. On our way back we stopped at an abandoned marble quarry and explored. Ginormous blocks of marble – obviously the price on the marble market must be down because this stuff looked to be worth something. I suppose transport must be expensive as it’s pretty far away from anything….
On our way back to Cairns we drove through the ‘Tablelands’ which is the plateau behind the coastal mountain range. There are a lot of creeks and places where we were supposed to see platypus, but we never found the right spot at the right time. (Dusk is supposed to be the optimal viewing time.) We did get a closeup of one of those ‘stinger trees’ that inject painful neurotoxins and I got some good photos. I guess I shoot trees better than animals.
Wednesday I was back on my own, so I drove up to the Daintree Rainforest, which is one of the oldest in the world. I had to take a car-ferry across the Daintree River and ford a few more streams before I arrived at Cape Tribulation, so named because Capt. Cook grounded his ship there in the late 1700s. The drive itself was fantastic – right along the coastline and every bit as beautiful and winding and challenging as California’s hiway 1 along Big Sur. As an added bonus there were waterfalls at every turn, some spilling out over the roadway, so it also reminded me of the Hana hiway in Maui. Every beach seemed to be totally empty. I had intended another ambitious hike up along a ridegetop, but I’d been warned that the trail might not be in good shape. As I arrived at the trailhead about 10:30am there were no cars around and there was a sign warning that the trail shouldn’t be attempted alone. I could see one of those dinner-plate-sized spiders with a web directly across the trail so I knew no one had been up the trail that morning, or even recently, so I reluctantly gave up and decided to walk the beach instead. At Cape Tribulation beach, it was low tide so I walked 2 miles up the beach and pretty soon I was completely alone. Just me and the crocs that I never saw. I slogged a little ways into a mangrove swamp (with mud over my shoe tops), just to see what was there but didn’t encounter any local fauna. On the drive back south to Cairns I stopped at another empty beach just to relax. Just amazing – here in California you’d never see an empty beach in any season, unless it was storming. I could get used to that!
Thursday was going to be my last full day in the area so I was determined to see a platypus. There was a special viewing platform just outside of a town up in the Tablelands, so I built my day around arriving at that spot in the late afternoon. First, though, I wanted to check out an aboriginal town that I’d seen on the map about 30 miles out of Cairns. The road to get there was steep, 20% grade in spots as you climb up and over a small mountain range. When I drove down to the waterline and was checking out the small inlet, an old aboriginal woman came over and started talking to me. And she talked and talked and talked, about the area, how they used to have barge deliveries, the shack down the beach that she grew up in, local croc sightings, and on and on. It was pretty interesting. I guess they don’t get too many random visitors so she was happy to have someone new to talk to. She introduced me to her grandkids who were visiting from someplace up in the Tablelands; they’d never seen the ocean or eaten saltwater fish. I stayed and talked for a while and then drove down towards a beach she’d told me about. But the road got too sandy and I was afraid I’d get stuck so I turned around. Hard to get out of the sand when you’re by yourself….
I went back to the main hiway and headed up towards the platypus area. The road that goes up and over the coastal range is locally famous for its many curves. (When Adrian and I had come down from the Tablelands on Tuesday I’d driven down this road in a driving rainstorm at night. It was pretty weird driving such a windy road on the ‘wrong’ side in some adverse elements – it almost seemed like one of those video driving simulators.) It was supposed to be a beautiful drive so I was happy to drive it during the day. And it WAS quite pretty. Just for the heck of it I decided to try to count the curves that seemed to be at least 90 degrees or more, and I counted 96 of them in stretch that’s less than 15 miles. And later on I was reading something that said there are 612 curves on that road. Not for the faint of heart (or stomach)!
I found a creek hike that I hadn’t known about and walked it, probably about 6 miles all told. That stretch of creek had been restored by students at a local Episcopal College over the previous 10 years. There were supposed to be tree kangaroos but I didn’t see any; they’re shy. As evening was approaching I walked to a little café in the town and was about to order a pizza when the power went out. Apparently it went out over a wide swath of Queensland and was out for a couple of hours. So instead I stopped at a little grocery store and bought some milk and cheese and walked over to the platypus viewing platform. It was dusk and I was in the right place so I was sure to see this odd animal. But no luck – I saw one at a distance but he never came close enough to get a good look. I walked back down the creek trail in the growing darkness thinking I’d have better luck somewhere else, but it just meant I had a long drive home in the dark again. Disappointed, but I guess that’s just one more reason I’ll have to come back to Australia….
My flight was Friday night so I still had almost a full day. I decided to hit some of the local beach towns (and swim at the beaches inside the area protected by stinger-proof netting) and generally chillax. I still got quite a bit of walking in along the beaches, saw a couple of monitor lizards, and just enjoyed the warm waters and looking at some of the more expensive beachfront homes in the area. I got to the airport in plenty of time and it wasn’t busy, so after I returned the car and checked in I walked a mile back to a nature trail I’d seen on the drive in. It took me on a boardwalk through a mangrove swamp that gets filled by a high tide only a few times a month. Reading about the mangrove ecosystem and listening to the various sounds was interesting but I couldn’t spend too much time there. I got on the flight to Melbourne and arrived an hour late at 1am. My friend and coworker Michael picked me up at the airport and I went to his house for a quick day-and-a-half visit with his family. Along with his kids we did a small hike in the Dandenongs and hand-fed the wild parrots and cockatoos. (Those darn things BITE!) That evening we went downtown Melbourne to cruise around, see the sights, mix with the tennis crowd (the Australian Open was being held nearby) and check out the casino. It was a short visit but I had never seen his kids (his wife Elke was pregnant with their first, the last time my wife and I were in Australia) so it was well worth it. On Sunday I flew from Melbourne to Sydney, got lost at the airport (didn’t realize the international terminal was 3 miles away) but found the bus and made my flight to San Francisco. Interestingly enough, the gentleman sitting next to me on the long flight was Linus Torvalds, who invented a widely-used operating system called Linux. Unfortunately I didn’t get to talk to him because the flight was so empty, he found a whole row of seats and laid down and slept most of the flight. I’m not an IT geek any more but it might have been interesting to hear his take on things.
So that was the blow-by-blow description of my vacation in Australia. (I fear this blog is just as dry as the last….but it’s 1am and I’m not in the mood to re-write) Bottom line: it simply whetted my appetite for a real exploration of the country – at least 6 months with a camper-van or 4WD, which I’ll do as soon as I can re-retire.