Mission Beach

Mission Beach was AMAZING!!

This update'll be kinda quick, since I'm leaving for the airport in about a half-hour and I won't have internet until I'm in LA at the earliest.

Took the bus up to Mission Beach, which is the closest the rainforest gets to the reef (I think I may have said that in an earlier post...) The hostel I stayed at was really nice- all the people were super friendly and it was just across the road from the beach. There was only one other guy in my room, and he checked out on Saturday, so I had a room to myself on the last night.

Anyway, first night the hostel had a bbq, so I got steak for cheap, and then some British girls and my roommate (who was also British) and I played Trouble and chilled. Next day I woke up and went to the beach as instructed, where I got picked up by one of those amphibious boats that has tires so it can drive up on shore.

It took me to Dunk Island, where I got on a boat for the reef trip I'd signed up for (there's a picture on the photobucket.) It was a small boat, with only 11 people on the tour.

The reef was about an hour out... and it was AMAZING!! Much better than the one at the Whitsundays (possibly because I wasn't freezing...ironic since it's winter here now). I saw blue and green and purple corals, and sponges, and sea cucumbers as big around as my thigh, and giant clams with purple/blue lips and glowy green dots, and three sharks, and a sea turtle, and schools of giant fish, and schools of tiny little blue fish, and on the boat ride back I saw FLYING FISH, and they really look like they fly! (I guess they glide or something...)

I was the only one signed up for the intro dive (the dive for non-certified divers), so I got to swim around the bottom of this lagoon with the instructor. I got to touch a sea anemone, and a giant clam, and hold a starfish, and a cassiopea (a little floating sea-slug type deal...), and one of those sea cucumbesr with the odd star-like structures... it was INCREDIBLE! I'm so glad I went.

Anyway, got back to the hostel, went to the grocery store, picked up some cheap food, made dinner, hung out, slept, etc.

Saturday I went down to the longest rainforest hike I could find that I could get to. (Apparently if you have a car there's a ton more stuff to do in Mission Beach... ah, well.) The hostel people seemed really unconvinced that I could survive a 10 km hike. Seriously, guys? That's about what, 8 miles? That's NOTHING.

The guy who drove me out there gave me this long lecture about "are you sure you want to do this? Do you have enough water? It's going to be too hot for you." (It wasn't, it was a really nice day). There was a guided 'wildlife tour' he was giving, and he tried to get me to go to that instead, which was annoying. Also 'warnings' he gave me: "your feet will get wet, the bridges are out. watch out for hanging branches, they have thorns. take a mobile phone and our number in case you get in trouble..." It turns out it was a reasonably-well-traveled path, no big obstacles or anything. Honestly, I'm an adult, I can walk down a path DESIGNED FOR PEOPLE TO WALK DOWN.

Once I shook the hostel people, though, the path was really nice. It was a nice day, and I had a good walk.

ALSO! I saw a cassowary! They're endangered, and they're one of the things that my overly-attentive nanny/hostel guy warned me about. "If you see a cassowary, back away slowly... don't come between a baby cassowary and its mother, etc." Apparently they actually are dangerous, though. They have NASTY looking claws, and my housemate says they bash people with their heads/beaks.

So I was a little concerned, but the cassowary stayed well off the path and didn't seem to notice me. There's a rather blurry picture on the photobucket. They're so big! This one was as tall as I am, at least. So that was a pretty awesome once-in-a-lifetime thing... and makes up for the lack of platypus sitings during my entire stay here in Australia.

Got back to the hostel, swam in the ocean. I found a coconut and split it open on the spike provided by the hostel for coconut gatherers, so I had a whole fresh coconut with my canned soup! And getting that husk off was WORK, let me tell you.

Ok, my ride's here, so I'm going to wrap this up.

Hung out on the beach for a few hours looking at the stars. Woke up early the next morning, stood in the ocean one last time, then caught the bus back.

Here's the few pictures I did take. LEAVING AU GOT TO GO BYE!!

Townsville Tour!

This weekend (May 8-10) was my things-in-Townsville adventure.

Saturday I joined a group of Uni students going to Billabong Sanctuary, which is a sort-of zoo/ game park about a 1/2 hour out of town.

You could buy food and feed the kangaroos, birds, and other things wandering around, and then they had various Australian fauna in exhibits. I didn't buy any food, but I got to see some little kids feeding things.

Kangaroo family


There was a show where they brought out a koala, then a wombat, then a bunch of snakes, and then some lizards. You had to pay to hold the koala and the wombat, but you could touch them, and I figured that was close enough. Holding the snakes and lizards was free, though.

She works at a tourist attraction, she should expect to end up on the internet.


The lizard in my hands did NOT APPROVE of me.

Then there was a croc-feeding show, accompanied by a long list of all the things that are more dangerous than crocodiles. The crocs have kind of figured out that they'll only get the food if they don't jump and wait for the guy to hit them with it, then snap, though, so we mostly watched crocs avoid getting exercise.


So that was Billabong. Pretty cool, and it's mandatory to pet a koala before you leave Australia.
Here's the rest of my Billabong pictures.

Sunday I took a stroll down to Palmetium Botanical Garden, which is just down the bike path from my house. It's a really big, nice park, lots of cool things from all over the world... but only tropics, so nothing I recognized from home.
The rainforest section:


Monday I don't have class, so I took a bus into town in the morning and went to the Queen's Garden. It was a good day for it, cool and overcast and drizzling a bit, and Monday, so I pretty much had the whole place to myself.

The Queen's Garden isn't quite as nice as Palmetium, size and diversity-wise, but it's still a nice formal garden. They had a couple of hedge mazes and a rose garden, and some huge fig trees.

They also had an aviary with some exotic birds, like peacocks and... turkeys. OK.


After the garden, I walked along the Strand. Nobody much out there, but the water park was still running. Too cold to go swimming, but maybe before I leave. Also saw a couple of misc. Townsville things.
All the photos of Townsville are up in the General Australian Pics folder.

I stopped at the Aboriginal Culture Center, which is mostly a gallery of local Aboriginal artwork (so no photos allowed, you have to buy them... for way more money than I have).

Next to that is the North Queensland Science Museum (or something to that effect). They had a ship wreak exhibit and some things on coral, dinosaurs, deep sea creatures, and the rainforest. All that jazz. They also had a kids interactive zone with no kids in it because it was Monday afternoon, so I played around in there for longer than I should admit.

Two things from Invertebrate Zoology legend: A giant pyc (sea spider) and a deep-sea sea cucumber.


A magical leopleurodon! (or something in the same spirit.


Botanical Gardens and Museums has more pictures from both gardens and the science museum, including a picture of the butterflies of Queensland, which is a pretty impressive display.

After that I stopped at the local art museum, where the visiting exhibit was made up entirely things sculpted to look like food! I was so happy!
They had one that was "meals for the trades", so it was trade-related objects to look like meals. For example, the upholsterer had a slice of cake made out of upholstery layers.
There were also teacups made out of various things... like, a "frivolitea" made out of party favors.
No pictures. (Well, ok, there are pictures that I took before someone told me that I wasn't supposed to be taking them, but I don't want the museum to get in trouble, so I'm keeping them safely offline.)

And that was my weekend.

I have a lab practical test for Marine Algae on Friday, so my efforts are mostly going towards studying for that. After Friday I only have one more week of classes, and only one month left in AU!
It's getting chilly here. I might have to start wearing a jacket from time to time.

Belated Boulia

For Midsemester Break, one of my classes went to Boulia until Thursday. (I was going to spend the weekend doing exciting things around Townsville, but I had a paper due in the only class I'm worried about passing. It was not a fun return weekend.) Boulia, however, was AMAZING and is thus-far my favorite of the trips I've been on.

Album

Boulia is on the edge of the Simpson Desert, about 15 hours drive from Townsville. It's also home to the rare and wondrous Waddi Tree, which is only found in two other places, both on the edge of the desert. The class I'm in goes on a fieldtrip there once a year to take measurements on the trees, which in theory will eventually become a published paper.

So our class piled into a van and we drove into bush country. We stopped by the AU version of the continental divide,


We stopped in some very small, flat towns for pitstops:
(This town is bigger than Boulia, by the way).
With interesting tourist attractions:

(The area we were in used to be a giant inland sea... so it produces a lot of dinosaur skeletons.)
We passed some beautiful mesas,



But mostly it's just flat and dry. (Well, actually, this year was wetter than normal, so there was still water and green things.)


It rained in various places around us while we were there, and you could see the storms in the distance. Also rainbows.



It's a two-day trip to Boulia, so we stayed in a camper park in Winton on the way there, which was full of Gray Nomads, an AU phenomenon of retirees who buy campers and tour around the country around this time of year. (One of our profs very generously made excuses for why we couldn't go to their "bush poetry" recital and ushered us safely away).
The first day was after I'd spent all night working on a paper, so I was pretty out of it... but once I'd gotten some sleep, everything was much better.

The only thing between Winton and Boulia is "Middleton"
This is Middleton, in its entirety:

A group picture outside the famous Hilton at Middleton ("No A/C, No Cable, No Pool, No Charge")


We were in a camper park in Boulia, too, but it was less populated. For food, someone In Charge of This Sort of Thing had taken our field trip fees and given us several giant tupperware containers of food and supplies, so we got to cook for ourselves. I was put in charge of one of the cooking groups (apparently because I look the most alert during morning classes), and we made Spaghetti + Meat Sauce according to some rather-vague instructions. The motto for cooking on the trip turned into "Chuck it in," because that was our default answer for when we found something odd in the bottom of the bins. (This was probably even more so the case for the group who made Tuesday's dinner, coconut curry, because their recipe read "add all the sauces in the bin". I am not making this up. Curry came out ok, though.)

We spent our three days in Boulia driving to different Waddi Tree sights, counting seedlings, measuring diameter, all that science-y stuff. I enjoyed it immensely... ergo my major. The people measuring Waddi diameters were less enthused. Waddi trees are prickly, nasty, half-cactus, half-devil trees, apparently. (Being a little OCD and a little bossy, I naturally end up the recorder who doesn't get her hands dirty whenever I do group projects. This may be why I am not popular.)

Also there are usually flies everywhere in Boulia... not this year, but we were provided with these very chic nets:


On Wednesday afternoon, most of the class left to join up with another fieldtrip, and suddenly there were 7 of us and I was the only American. So we grilled some steaks and sausages and onions using stainless-steel pan lids... after marinating the steaks in random sauces that we threw together. It was both delicious and fun.
Afterwards we went to the Boulia pub. We also saw the illustrious Red Stump, which is what came up when Mom googled Boulia for me. I got someone to take a picture. (And this was even before I'd been to the pub!) It's up on his facebook with the caption "Cecilia's Mum would be proud":


Next morning us Hard-Core Waddi hunters hit up the tourist spots of Boulia, which consists of a gift-shop with info on "The Min-Min Lights", which are apparently ghostly lights that people occasionally see at night. We also stopped at this old Waddi tree that theoretically had some kind of significance to the Aboriginal population. The sign was a bit vague.
You'll notice that Marissa's scarf is in this picture. The Scarf visists Boulia!


The return trip was good. I sat up front with the prof 'cause I'm that kind of sad nerd. (It was a lot of fun, though. The prof's a cool guy) We listened to my extensive Beatles collection because I was the only who brought CDs. They owe me.

We stopped at Middleton again, and I bought a rock with opal in it and a piece of petrified wood for $2. Spent the night in Winton again, this time with a pub run. Then back home... we divied up the unused food, so I ended up with a bottle of hoisin sauce, some vegetable boullion cubes, all-purpose seasoning, a jar of honey, and a jar of instant coffee, which proved Very Useful Indeed when it came time to write that report.

Some misc. things:
The stars are beautiful out there. I've never been able to see the Milky Way before this. Also saw the Southren Cross, but not the North Star. That's a North Hemisphere thing.

We saw some kangaroo herds and some emu herds, and, once, a couple of feral camels. You heard me. FERAL CAMELS. Australia has the weirdest introduced species... Apparently there was some talk of introducing rhinos there to make up for the extinct megafauna. How awesome and ill-advised but still awesome is that?!

No kangaroon, emu, or camel pictures, but the album contains some cows and a few of the lizards we came across in the middle of the road. Note especially Sammy the Suicidal Snake. To get out there with the equipment, we had a truck, a van, and a 12-person van. The truck and the first van ran over Sammy, but fortunately didn't kill him. So our driver stopped the van and the class piled out for pictures. Sammy sat there, playing dead. We tried to get him out of the road, so we poked him with a stick... he didn't move. Someone picked up his tail... he slithered under the van wheel. They tried to poke him onto the side of the road, away from us, and he kept going straight under the wheel.
My theory is that poor Sammy had lost his will to live and had decided to end it all, but that road isn't well traveled and he'd been waiting days for someone to hit him.

So, enjoy the pictures of various views on the way out, some pretty plants, rainbows, lizards, cows, spiders (they have black widows here! Apparently because AU can't stand that we have a poisonous spider of our own.), parakeets, the van after we drove it through muddy roads, and us doing Things In the Name Of Science.

Reef Head Quarters pics

As promised, pictures from the aquarium.

The Whitsundays were great- I'll have a full post about them, coming up.

Not so great was getting back to the 2,500 word paper I had only kinda started, so I'm not running on too much sleep. Miraculously, we were given an extension on the paper that was due this Friday that I haven't really done much on, so I get to sleep tonight for the first time in a while.

This weekend we go back to Paluma to do individual research projects. My group is looking at mosses.

My housemate got me some Cadbury creme eggs for Easter. I'm very excited about them. Also, I went shopping on Tuesday and picked up an Easter bunny and some more Cadbury creme eggs (I love them), plus some hot cross buns, all on sale, so that was my Easter Basket this year. In case you were worried.

Candy bar of the week:
Cherry Ripe: This is dried cherries with coconut, covered in dark chocolate. Tastes kind of like eating a large, chewy chocolate-covered cherry. I like them, but not quite as much as Bubbles.

The place was, naturally, full of little kids shouting "Look! A Nemo!" or "DORY!" (Fun fact: Finding Nemo has Nemo fished out of the water off the Great Barrier Reef, but he ends up in Sydney. This is a huge geography fail.)



Inside the smaller tanks:


And the giant one that the building sort-of wraps around (as far as I can tell), so you walk by different views of it as you go:

Some fish (most of which I can't identify.)
Mangrove Fish:



Crown-of-thorns starfish:



Giant Clam:

Nautilus (one of the ever-awesome cephelapod family)

Parrot Fish:

This shrimp looks like a muppet.

Really Big Starfish:

From the Big Fish tank:



You can see how big this one is. And friendly, too.

The seasnake. I really wish that the pictures had come out better, because I was quite smitten with it. It's maybe 4 feet long?


And a picture of me in the children's area, because I know you all haven't seen my face for a while:

Paluma Rainforest

Nothing very exciting happened this week. I spent the weekend miserably working on a paper for Plant Survival. I'm still not done with it. I'm still fairly miserable about it. So nothing to report.

Tomorrow is Good Friday, and I'm leaving for Arlie Beach. I'm spending the four-day break on a sailboat going around the Whitsunday islands, snorkeling, and hopefully diving. I'm much more excited about this than my paper.

As promised, the pictures from the rainforest (and small community) up on Mt Paluma from last week.


Basket Ferns:


Some canopy shots (not too many: I know they're not that exciting.

This one contains a strangling fig, strangling a tree:


Tree with buttresses:

A creek:

An abandoned mine from back before the forest was declared a "World Heritage" place:


A cool tree:


A vine that no longer has a tree and therefore is an interesting shape:


This is a Refrigerator Tree. It feels colder than other trees. I know the picture really captures that.


The major occupational hazard in the rainforest (aside from leeches and ticks):


Cool plants:




Pine trees (not native to the area, or usually this shape- they were in a yard at one of the houses nearby. Paluma's a bit of a summer-home place.)


There are birds in this picture somewhere. Trust me.


And the view from the mountain:


I took quite a few more, but you get the idea.