Tonight (Thursday night) we have internet for the first time in several days so I will update you on what we have been up to.
After our snorkeling on the reef on Saturday I had to deal with the back of my legs being badly sunburned. the sunblock had washed off.
On Sunday morning we picked up our rental car. As we left Cairns Duke and I were both concentrating on keeping on the left side of the road. An Australian friend said we just needed to remember to keep the passenger (me) in the gutter 🙂
From Cairns we had planned to immediately head south but several people told us it would be a big mistake to miss seeing the Daintree Rain Forest. So from Cairns we headed north up the coast. We drove along the ocean and stopped to take pictures.
At Mossman Gorge which is a part of the Daintree Rainforest World Heritage Site we went for a hike through the rain-forest. The forest we hiked through looked like it was right out of the set of the movie Avatar. It was lush, green, and humid with a raging river right through the middle. We saw an enormous colorful spider ( about 6 inches across!) at one point. I am going to try to not use the word amazing over and over again but it was!
After our hike when we were back on the road heading south we saw a sign for bananas and stopped and bought bananas and a pineapple. The trees with bananas on them were right next to the stand.
A little farther down the road we stopped at a stand selling locally grown nuts and coffee. We bought some warm freshly roasted cajun flavored peanuts and ate them as we drove down the road. My Mom used to roast peanuts and serve them warm as a snack. It brought back memories.
Right before we got to Yungaburra where we spent Sunday night we stopped to see a giant curtain fig tree in a small park. Apparently curtain fig trees start growing up in the air in another tree and drop roots down to the ground. Eventually the curtain fig kills the original host tree and it supports itself. The tree was enormous and the board walk around the tree gave us a really good view of the curtain of roots.
In Yungaburra we got a room at another back packers lodge. It wasn’t as nice as the one in Cairns but it was clean, the people were great and you can’t beat the price. It was called On the Wallabee and this time we even had a mosquito net although we didn’t use it.
Before dinner we went over to the local hotel for a beer. There had been a folk festival in Yungaburra over the weekend. It was done but on the hotel veranda they were having a jam session. All the people watching were joining in the Australian folk songs. I even recognized one about Ned Kelly, a famous Australian outlaw. Sitting there listening to the wonderful music and even joining in a bit was fun.
We had been told that at dusk we could watch a platypus feeding down in the local creek so we walked down to the creek watched the platypus then walked back up to the hotel and had a couple of beers while we listened to the singing.
After dinner we drove back to the big curtain fig which was just a few mile out of town. We used a flashlight to walk the board walk around the tree again. When we turned out the flashlight we could hear animals in the forest but we couldn’t see any. We did see some cool phosphorescent stuff glowing in the dark. I think it was a fungus.
Our first full day on the road was wonderful. If you would like to see all of our pictures in Australia they are available here.
Marion's Blog 