Animals, cliffs, and waterfalls

Who can ever climb around too many cliffs? If we were better photographers we would capture the thrilling sensation of standing on the high edge, looking down on the crisp white against vibrant blue of the ocean.

Further visual rewards on this same hike around Noosa Head include trees such as this.

Some might say it's cheating to feature animals we see in a zoo . . . and we would be among them. Hmmm. We go because it's Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin's family's place: The Australia Zoo in Beerwah, near Brisbane. The animals there are either rescued creatures who cannot survive in the wild or there's an effort to rebuild their diminished wild numbers. The thrust of the zoo, which permits touching of certain animals as well as offering shows of their behavior, is also to expose and educate the public. They believe that humanity is more likely to prevent habitat loss if people appreciate and care about the animals. They're doing an excellent job.

Here's the flightless cassowary we watched for so diligently in Queensland's tropical rain forests. He's a relative of the emu. A handsome bloke with a fetching sort of helmet, he's actually quite dangerous. The inside toenail on each foot can rip a person open from stem to stern. Maintain a respectful distance.

We've seen wild echidnas and koalas, but still, who can resist these marsupials? A little-known factoid: the echidna and the platypus are the only mammals who lay eggs! And they're both marsupials. And they each look like something out of a surreal dream.

As for the koala, he is NOT a bear. His diet is eucalyptus tree leaves which are nutritionally not far above paper, so he conserves energy by sleeping on high tree branches for 18 to 20 hours per day.

The endangered giant tortoises are actually from the Galapagos Islands. Back in the 1700s and 1800s ships at sea routinely captured large numbers of these huge creatures, who can go for weeks without eating, to carry them alive on board as a fresh meat source. Even when their numbers were clearly diminishing drastically, the attitude was to grab them while they could, before they were all gone!

Charles Darwin took one as a specimen in 1835 and named him Harry. Later she was more appropriately renamed Harriet. Visitors could meet Harriet here until her death just two years ago at about 200 years of age.

Australia is a mecca for snakes, many of them seriously venomous. Also plenty of pythons. Don't these guys look relaxed?

A few days later near misty New England Nat'l Park, we finally encounter feral camels. They're sharing space with a mob of kangaroos. If you look closely and use your imagination you can see them, too.

Inland from the east coast, precipitous mountains and gigantic rocks jut upwards in eye-catching, gravity-defying shapes. Late spring and early summer rains create lush green landscapes. Waterfalls are gushing enthusiastically. Art always likes me to walk first on a trail so I catch the spider webs in the face.

On a final note, exemplifying how Art imitates Nature, here is The Rock Roadhouse. Who needs to go to Uluru in the Outback when you can come here to shop, eat, and buy fuel in an east coast faux Uluru?

We send each of you the warmest of holiday wishes from balmy Oz. As for us, we'll spend Christmas with our crazy Aussie friends Barry and Jeanette, south of Sydney in New South Wales. Stay tuned for the outcome of their promised Live Wombat Patrol!

Southern Queensland

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Oh the drama! Our laptop has entered permanent sleep mode. The upshot is that we now own a new (used) PC laptop, a scary proposition for this die-hard Mac addict. Salvaging files and learning a new platform are as much fun as a broken nose. Persevere!

The coastal town of Bowen features impressive historic murals on many of its buildings. We decide to go walk-about from block to block to view them. We don't even finish two blocks before we feel woozy from heat and bright sun. Silly though it feels, we wimpishly drive from one to the next.

At Eungella National Park the mountainous views are enshrouded by heavy mists and fog. It's a lovely pocket of lush rainforest, and we're lucky enough to see several platypuses (platypae?) swimming in river pools. This photo is more a view of the surroundings than of the small creature paddling in the foreground. Claudia and PJ, we need you here with your cameras to do him justice!



Just inland from the coast, we drive past miles and miles of sugar cane fields and refineries with their characteristic aroma of steaming sweet greenery. The landscape is criss-crossed by narrow-gauge tracks for the cane trains which haul the crops from field to refinery.

We zig inland to visit Carnarvan Gorge. On the way we pass this emu family. After mum lays about a dozen eggs, dad takes over the rearing of the kids while mum takes off to find another male for her next batch of babies.

Carnarvan Gorge is a spectacular heap of eroded and sculpted rocks. The climate is much drier here. Also cooler! Although we are out of shape from inactivity we walk many kilometres, knowing we'll pay later with stiff muscles.

The crack through the towering rocks here is the gateway to a hidden amphitheatre around a pool of clear water.

Not surprisingly this area is sacred to the Aboriginal people who inhabited it for many generations. Here they left a striking record of pictographs on a rock wall.

There are plenty of wallabies and kangaroos bounding about. One of the most beautiful is the small and delicate whiptail, or pretty face, wallaby.

Along Rifle Creek we wash our vehicle with river water. You know how it is with home maintenance. It's so clean outside, we launch into a deep-clean inside. Well, while we're at it, why not touch up the paint on a few scratches and dings?

Shiny as our Troopy is, we obviously appeal to a couple of cockatoos. They march around squawking orders for a while, then pose on top perfectly!

Fraser Island is the world's biggest sand island, a gigantic dune held in place by trees and scrubby growth. After crossing on a ferry, we drive about 30 kms along the beach (passable only at low tide). That's the easy part since most of it is fairly packed. Abruptly inland it's a mecca for 4-wheel-drivers. All roads consist of narrow winding tracks of soft or softer deep sand with exposed or not so exposed tree roots. Yikes! It's hard to even WALK in this stuff. Despite Art's valuable experience with a 4wd in Vermont's snow and mud we become embarrassingly bogged a few times till he reeeeeeally reduces the tire pressure and drops the 4wd gears into low range. Aha, now we swear this Troopy could actually climb trees. From then on we are able to breathe like normal people and have fun plowing slowly up and down and around to beautiful perched lakes and striking overlooks.

On the beach is the quite complete wreck of this old passenger liner. In the 1930s while it was being towed to Japan for scrap metal, a cyclone blew it off course, and it washed up here. That saved the Japanese the trouble of sending it on to us, in different form, at Pearl Harbor.

We find some amazing beach camping on Fraser Island and the adjacent nat'l park south of it. We also do some trash-picking. The favorite food of sea turtles is jellyfish. Sadly and often fatally, plastic bags can be mistaken for yummy jellies.

Given the sidetrack of The Great Computer Disaster we miss wishing everybody (well, in America anyway) a Happy Thanksgiving. Now the Christmas season is in full bore, and we are in a new state: New South Wales.

Steaming in Queensland

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Lately the name of the game is Stay Close to Water. The tropical rainforest features a minimum of 500% humidity, and we’re sweating like we have little faucets all over our skin. Smartly, we realize there’s usually a breeze on the coast, whereas inland the air is always holding its breath.

Cooling off in waterholes is ever-welcome, but it’s important to be sure crocodiles aren’t doing the same. The worrisome ones are the huge, ill-tempered ‘salties’ (estuarine crocs), but as far as we’re concerned even this smiling ‘freshie’ has awfully pointy teeth.

Since we’re so far north, we might as well push on past Cooktown, up the pointy peninsula of Cape York. The roads are known to be, shall we say, increasingly challenging. We’ll see how far we drive before our teeth loosen. Corrrugation (washboard to us Yanks) is the main pain, but fine ‘bull dust’ thrown up by approaching vehicles blinds us as well. We leave the rainforest for a while as we pass through vast dry plains of termite mounds. There’s very little traffic up here. Hmmmm….

As we take a slow stroll (the maximum pace in this heat) on a wetlands boardwalk, we nearly lean against this fellow curled up against the corner post. Surprise! We can move fast after all. He’s about six feet long, and we don’t know whether he’s venomous or not. He’s watching us, but what is he thinking?

About halfway up Cape York peninsula a tiny bit of sense rattles to the forefront of our minds, and we rotate our compass to point south. Back to the east coast, mates!

At Palm Cove we discover a rough-edged gem named Doug running the shire campground. Through Peter and Rosemary who are also staying here, we are invited to one of Doug’s frequent ‘feeds’ on the fishing jetty. It’s simply what he does most evenings. He has a cooler, a bar, and a kitchen disguised as a funky cart covered in license plates and off-color signs. After a few cold beers he catches a small shark from the dark waters of the Coral Sea. Before we know it, it’s on his barbie grill, and soon it’s in our mouths. There’s also kangaroo meat, so now we can say we’ve tried it. Whew, there’s a job we can cross off our list.

After a few days we leave Doug and his shenanigans. We’re off to Cairns to snorkel for a day on the Great Barrier Reef. Awesome coral and fish and even a stingray! And luckily, given all our vast experience traveling on the freighter Matisse last December, I am able to assist with a little navigating of our sailing vessel. In the background the captain is so confident of my skills that he’s taking a brief nap.

Having returned to the lush, tropical rainforest of this World Heritage area, we are constantly agape at the scenery. Even Dr. Seuss couldn’t make some of these shapes up. But a big disappointment: not only have we not seen Tarzan, we have also missed sighting the elusive cassowary. We would include a photo of this huge flightless bird (related to the emu but more colorful and with a Larsonesque helmet-like structure on its head), but how can we?



At a place called The Boulders (on account of lots of you-know-whats), we find a fantastically refreshing river with waterholes and no crocs. It enables us to survive since there’s not a whisper of a breeze. Did we mention it’s hot and humid here?







Here are some friends who also appreciate a pleasant swim.



Traveling south we pass through Tully, a sugar-mill town and self-proclaimed ‘pretty wet place.’ The height of the boot demonstrates the Australian record for rainfall: 7.9 metres (about 26 feet) of rain fell in Tully in 1950. Climbing up the boot is a white lipped green tree frog. There is a real one in the restroom sink of our camp area this morning. Wanting to borrow my toothbrush probably.

From one extreme to another

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We travel northward into more and more remote country. Each day is a little hotter than the last as we enter the state of Queensland. In Longreach as we’re studying the excellent exhibits of Stockman’s Hall of Fame*, a fellow visitor tells us that the little town of Winton, just a couple hundred kms up the road, is celebrating a long weekend with its bi-annual Bush Poetry Festival and concurrent Outback Festival. Eureka, we’ve struck gold! This is also the town where Banjo Paterson first performed his ditty “Waltzing Matilda” (Australia’s unofficial national anthem). The historic North Gregory Hotel, host to the poetry performances, generously opens its dusty, back parking lot to campers. They even provide showers in the hotel. Just beyond the parking area is Arno’s Wall: an ongoing project of encasing old stuff in adobe and cement.

Our Winton stay turns out to be a major trip highlight, worthy of gushing and blathering ad nauseam. Bush poetry is like the writing of Mark Twain in verse, featuring humanity’s funniest, saddest, and most poignant foibles. Poets come from all over Australia. We are entertained from 7:30 am till noon for three days. For further poetry and memorabilia we visit the Matilda Centre.

As if that’s not plenty for a town of fewer than 2,000, Winton is also the original home of QANTAS Airlines. The meaning of the name? Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service.

We devote our afternoons and evenings to the Outback Festival. When we belly up to the bar for a beer on the first eve, we encounter these Three Musketeers, emissaries of Reliance Corp, distributers of BP Petrol. In addition to buying us plenty of beer and even treating us to dinner at the local Chinese joint, they are wildly funny and full of travel tips, some of them perhaps actually useful. Troy, Steve, and Mike, it was a genuine pleasure, mates!

Throughout the festival there are assorted performances, yabbie (crayfish) races, a truck (promoting tyres) which practically catches fire over and over as it burns melting rubber skidding in circles, various “ironman” and “ironwoman” competitions, etc. Most spectacular is the “Dunny Derby.” Over two dozen homemade dunnies (outhouses) are pulled/pushed by their teams in a grand chariot race/obstacle course. To begin, the jockeys must run with underpants at their ankles to leap onto their toilets. The humor of the dunny graphics and official commentary is, well, straight from the toilet.

In case you’re seeking the strongest man in the world, your search is over. The Guinness Book of World Records will tell of Derek’s feat of pulling this very road train (truck cab and FOUR trailers weighing 80 tons) more centimetres than any other person ever.



Pushing beyond Winton into the very jaws of the inferno, we discover that our air conditioner does nothing more than deliver the outside hot air to the inside. With temperatures climbing to 40 degrees C and beyond (over 100 F), our bones are melting. When we reach the Gulf of Carpenteria we find this actual size sculpture of the largest estuarine croc ever captured in the world: 28 ft 4 in! (1957)






Desperate to cool off we book it east to the tropical rainforests of Queensland’s high, hilly Tablelands. We have our air-con repaired (ahhhhhh), then revel in the green scenery. It’s like a different planet… or at least New Zealand.



There are breathtaking waterfalls, rocky rivers, outrageous strangler fig trees, tangled jungle growth, and all of it alive with the sounds of colorful birds. It’s lush and beautiful on its own, but infinitely more so to us, having been in the dry dry dry outback for so long. What a contrast.

After several days hiking and exclaiming we brave the mythical, 4wd-only Bloomfield Track north to Cooktown on far-out Cape York Peninsula. It’s a spectacular trip, with river crossings and 33% grades on some hills.

And when we feel too hot, why, we just turn on the air!

*Throughout Australia we observe the cultural clash of the Aboriginal people and the Aussies of European descent. The Longreach historical exhibit states it well: “It was a delicate co-existence, underpinned by profound differences in the relationship of each to the land. To the European pastoralists, the land was essentially an economic resource, the key to wealth, social status and political power. Deeply entrenched in their attitudes were the core Christian values that the land should be tamed and made ‘productive.’

“To the Indigenous people, it was almost the reverse: the people belonged to the land rather than the land to the people. The land determined the identity of every person and their network of social and political relations, and was central to the construction and transmission of knowledge.”