Cape Tribulation - Where Rainforest meets Reef
On a bus yesterday morning at 8.15am for a VERY bumpy ride up to Cape Tribulation - never again will I complain about the state of the surface on Newton Road!!!!! The journey involved crossing the Daintree River - a favourite hang out for local crocs and along a windy road through the rainforest to the most exotic hostel I have stayed since leaving Fiji. I am staying in what is basically a tent ontop of a raised wooden platform with a family of six in the tent next door..... On arrival I was told at reception that uncer no circumstances should food be kept in the room as rainforest rodents called melomys (tiwce the size of mice) would chew through bags and clothes to get at food. I didn't much fancy that thank you so all food stayed well and truly away from the tent!!!!! I am in the tropical north of Queensland so it was out into the sun again, a 3.5km walk to the beach that wouldn't take too long right? WRONG! I was probably only walking for about 30mintues but in the heat it felt like FOREVER! It was a slightly traumatic walk as well as being longer than I expected I was petrified the entire way of being attacked by a cassorwary! - a HUGE ostrichesque bird with a big rock attatched to it's head! Well Cape Trib is cassowary territory, there are road signs and "don't feed the cassowaries" notifes everywhere! So when I constantly heard rustling to my left as i walked along the path through the Rainforest I was addmittidly a little jumpy. It took me about 15 mintues to work out that the rustling was coming from tiny harmless lizards running across the path and through the leaves at regular intercals and not infact huge headbanging birds!

Last night I went on a guided bush walk with the guide being the definition of a fruit loop! He spent about 1/2 an hour in front of a display board descibing to us the types of animals we were hoping to see along with multiple animal impressions - noises and actions - and on several occasions he spoke to and stoked the pictures "Good on ya mate" he also said this to numerous trees throughout the evening..... After this intro we got kitted out with flashlights and we were off. First stop was to see a rather large spider who had built her web by the side of the path in the resort. We were walking through the rainforest along cassowary tracks, luckily at night they go up into the moutains to sleep, a habbit they started in the pre-historic times to stay away from the dinosaurs. Throughout the 2 1/2 hours of walking we saw numerous spiders including one HUGE female huntsman - the huntsman spiders have 8 eyes and are so well adept at hunting for food that they don't even need to build a web to catch their prey! We saw a pretty awesome lizard on a tree that was about 2foot long, a white tailed rat and a melomy along with 2 birds and numerous snails and crickets. A pretty cool experience tramping through the rainforest in the dark and some animals that I have never seen before especially not in the wild.

Today I hired a bike with what must be the worst brakes in the world! I cycled to the Jindalba Trail and walked around the boardwalk through the rainforest here and then headed to the Daintree Discovery centre where I walked along an aerial walkway, and up a cannopy tower to see the rainforest at different levels. Down on the ground there was a cassowary circuit which was where there was the greates chance of seeing one of the birds. Unfortunately...some would say...I didn't see one but I have seen one in Austrlia Zoo where there was a fence between us and I was still a tad intimidated so I am quite glad I didn't have to "use a piece of tree or your backpack to protect you, the cassowary can jump and kick with both legs using 80mm claws as a weapon" After that it was back on my death trap - sorry bike - for the mainly downhill journey back. To a lazy afternoon spent sorting out my backpack and writing ridiculous amounts of babble in my journal!