Whitsundays
Paluma
The rest (most of these you've seen. Look in the other folders)
I only have about a month left here. I can't say that I'm sad about this. I'm ready to go home and be around people that I know again. But I am trying to cram as much traveling as humanly possible into my remaining five weeks.
(That being said, I spent Saturday morning at Billabong Wildlife Sanctuary, so there will soon be pictures of me petting a koala up on the photobucket, as well).
So, my Rainforest Ecology class returned to Paluma rainforest for a weekend of fun, educational activities!
We stayed at this convention-center/summer camp/something deal. They hired a caterer, so we got FANTASTIC Aussie food all weekend.
I can't say that I remember the particulars, but the important bit was the Very Australian Breakfast of thick bacon rashers, fried tomatos, poached eggs, and toast w/ rosella jam.
The next morning we also had a Very Australian Breakfast of porridge. The Aussie students poured milk and honey on theirs, the Americans put in brown sugar.
I've never had porrigde w/ milk, and although I'm not a big milk fan, I could definitely get behind this. If I wasn't too lazy to make oatmeal first thing every morning, I'd have invested in some during my time here.
There was also Morning Tea and Afternoon Tea, which consisted of either fruit, cake, or (my particular favorite) fresh scones w/ cream and homemade jam. I'm such a sucker for jam and cream, it's really not funny.
Food aside, it was a good time. I didn't take too many pictures (most of the ones in the album are from the first trip, and you've seen them), because the forest hasn't changed dramatically since we were there a few weeks before.
Day one we stopped at the Tall Open Forest, which is the forest type that competes with rainforest. Lots of gum trees:
They have leeches out there. I'm a big fan of leeches following a 10-page paper I wrote on them last semester. The paper itself almost killed me, but the all-night leech-paper binge before it kinda drove home the point that Leeches Are Cool.
Apparently in the rainforest they'll jump off branches onto your face and crawl behind your eyeball, and there's nothing you can do about it until they crawl back out. Please believe me when I say that if that EVER happens to me, I demand that you knock me out by any means necessary until it crawls out. I am very serious about this request. It is a standing order to everyone who reads this blog.
Good leech. Nice leech.
(This is one of the ones with three teeth that form relatively large cuts. But they don't attack eyes, so I'm ok with them.)
We did some tree identifying, prepping for our individual research projects, that kind of thing. Saturday night, the profs had Rainforest Trivia Night, where we all gathered around in groups and played for candy. I ended up in the group of graduate students, and we all got way too into the tree identifying... more important, though, was our head prof, who got more and more drunk on red wine as the night went on.
The evening culminated in him singing a Paluma version of Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed. We were supposed to sing it together, but at the end of the chorus the prof would sort-of sing "Do-wah do-wah" (which isn't in the original song as far as we could tell), so we would all pause and wait for him. Every once in a while after lecture I hear someone in the class say "Dowah dowah" and giggle.
Sunday we did our projects. My group scrapped moss off a couple of different moss-environments, so we finished up rather quickly. Of course, we spent the next 3 weeks frantically identifying the mosses and trying to figure out how we could turn that into a report, so I guess the joke was on us, after all...
Me collecting samples:
Back at the center, there was a male Victoria Rifle bird hanging around. Their feathers sound like satin when they move, and the sunlight shows off these beautiful blue lights in them... they're really pretty birds.
Sunday we stopped of at Little Crystal Creek (as compared to Big Crystal Creek), and those of us who brought swimsuits went diving and those of us who hadn't brought swimsuits were scared on behalf of those who had, because the water does not look half as deep as it actually is.
Then we stopped off at The Frosty Mango, a famous tourist attraction/ice cream place. It sells fruit sorbets... fresh mango, coconut, passionfruit, pineapple, dragonfruit... a bunch of exotic fruit I'd never heard of... I splurged a bit and got a three-scoop cone... mango, passionfruit, and pineapple.
Ever since I've been trying to get my friends from the Whitsundays trip to go out to Crystal Creek so I can actually swim, and then to the Mango so I can spend all my disposable income on the fruits I haven't heard of.
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