Photos from 2002 October 06
Today was my rainforest guided tour. We started out with Nick, shown here telling us about strangler figs, taking us to the Mossman Gorge. Nick was an interesting guy; he grew up in Spain, the UK, and Kenya, before moving to Australia sixteen years ago. He was a knowledgable and cheerful fellow.	This is a typical shot of the forest in the Mossman Gorge. Nick explained to us that we were getting a highly *a*-typical view of the area, because this year has been one of the worst droughts in recorded history, and all the water levels were much lower than normal. As he put it, there was no rain, no bugs, no mud -- we were getting a highly skewed picture of the forest. These rocks should have been submerged in a stream.	This is the gorge itself. He said these rocks have been here for millenia, with the soil around them getting washed away over the years. The water also wore the rocks down to these smooth shapes.	This is a bush turkey, off to the left of the path. It was very hard to photograph in the quiet light of the forest, so it came out kinda blurry. However, you can see its bright red head just to the left of that thin tree, and its black back to the right. All it does all day is pretty much just scrape with its feet in an attempt to move dead leaves and other ground cover over to its nest, which in this case was about three meters over to the right of the path. They just have three toes to do this, so it's incredibly inefficient. They make a terrible mess.
Another shot of the gorge. The water can rise up to thirty meters above this level in a really wet season.	Another dry creekbed leading through the forest.	This is a baby dragon. Unfortunately, my camera failed to focus properly, and it looked fine on the LCD display on the back of the unit, so I moved on. New lesson to be learned about the digital camera: the low resolution of the display can hide serious problems with the image. Drat. This was so cool to have seen this creature, and all I get is a blurry photo. At least you can actually see the dragon, unlike the bigfoot in the background. (Just kidding.)	This is the Daintree ferry. You can see the ferry loading up on the other side. This is one of only two ways to get a vehicle across this river, and the other way will only work for a fairly hefty four-wheel drive truck. The north side of the river takes you out of the twenty-first century. Even electricity is not provided for people who live north of here: you're on your own as far as generators or candles go. Now, just to the left of the frame of this photo is a big warning sign that there are crocs in this river, and as we were getting back in the car, I saw a tourist standing with her toes right up against the waterline, right next to the croc warning sign, taking a picture of the ferry. Now, I'll go to quite some lengths to get just the right photo, but standing with my toes right up against a croc-infested river is not one of them. I don't think that woman had ever actually *seen* a crocodile, or she wouldn't get within six feet of the water.
Electricity or no, you do get some spectacular views north of the ferry. This is looking down at the spot where the Daintree river flows into the ocean.	Another shot of the same view, just standing a few feet to the left of where I took the previous shot.	This is a zoomed-in shot of part of the previous two photos. Port Douglas is on the dark part of the land at the center, right at the boundary with the ocean. If you squint, you can see the white ships of the marina on the right side of the darker area.	Like the picture of the Dragon, this photo didn't focus right and I couldn't tell on the display. I couldn't let this one go, either, because this tree is australia's answer to the stinging nettle. Its called a stinger tree, and its heart-shaped leaves are covered in a fine white >fur<. If you brush up against it, the spines of that fur come off easily and stick in your skin. They then start secreting a toxin that is (Nick said, and produced a book to support his argument, in case we didn't believe him) excruciatingly, screamingly painful. The stuff stays stuck in your skin for around two months, and any time it is jostled, via air currents, water, whatever, you start screaming again. It grows just about anywhere the canopy cover of the rainforest is broken, so watch out for it, if you happen to be wandering in the Queensland rainforest!
A very cool-looking fern I liked.	This species of fern has been around for some 300 million years.	The big version of this picture combines three photographs to try to give you a sense of the vast, vertical grandeur of the forest.	The highest mountain around these parts. You can get a permit to climb it, but it's not encouraged.
This is cape tribulation: >where the rainforest and the great barrier reef meet<, they say. The reef apparently comes right up to shore here, and the forest comes right down to shore as well. They say its one of only two places in the world where rainforest and coral reef come together, but I forgot to ask where the other place was.	A coconut palm by the beach.	I liked the unbroken ripples in the sand on the beach.	These were fascinating examples of a species of mangrove. All the little twigs poking up out of the ground are part of the root system, and the trees themselves are only three feet high or so. It was like walking through a bansai forest.
I had to hold the camera about a foot off the ground to get this shot.	A shot of Cape Tribulation -- so named because Captain Cook had many trials and tribulations when he knocked a hole in his ship on the reef near here.	Another >ripples in the sand< shot; this time with a small red fruit to interrupt the pattern of the sand.	A stream runs out of the forest and across the beach into the ocean.
A different kind of mangrove.	Here's a kookooburra (probably spelled that wrong) that alit on a street sign just as we were driving up to it. Don't they look funny? I think it's cause their heads are much bigger relative to their bodies than our intuition tells us they should be.	This was fascinating. This is a sugar cane harvest, and you can see the two funnels at the top of the chute: the cane, being heavier, falls out of the lower one into the truck, while the chaff flies out the top one past the truck. Now, you will note the enormous quantity of birds flying about. These are kites and hawks and other raptors. Cane fields are so dense that they make great hiding places for rats. Snakes also like to live there for the cover, and to eat the rats. At harvest time, that cover goes away, and the birds are having a vermin smorgasboard.	This was the chef at the place where we had lunch. The meal included a tropical fruit salad, and this guy came out to explain to us all about the different kinds of fruits he used and some of their history. Fascinating >Guns, Germs and Steel<-type stuff. If you don't know what I mean, read the book by that name.
These two very pushy geese were hanging around the restaurant.	After lunch, we drove through a whole bunch of cattle farms to get to this secluded waterfall for a refreshing swim. It was quite bracing, but I swam over to the falls and stuck my head under the cascade. Very fun! Its a little silly, but theres a 10-sec quicktime movie in this directory called Waterfall.MOV that you can look at.	It was very difficult to get a good photograph of the falls, because the bright sunlight was falling diagonally across them. So the right exposure for the shadow part would totally saturate the lit area, and if you underexpose for the lit area, the shadow is invisible. This was the best I could do.	There were no crocodiles in this pool (thank goodness), but there were a whole bunch of turtles, or >tarrapins<, as Nick called them.
Heres our tour group, listening as Nick told us about the times when people got left out on the reef by irresponsible snorkel tour groups that didn't count heads properly before heading back to shore. Now that's a reassuring image! Crikey!	This white-lipped green tree frog was hanging out in the public bathroom -- lots of moisture and flies to eat: the perfect place for the frog. I suspect, though, that the close proximity to people will prove extremely dangerous to this fellow. Since they breathe through their skin, if you touch them with mosquito repellant on your hands, you kill them. I hope people treat him carefully, though. What a gorgeous shade of green!	Here we are on an electric boat out on the Daintree river.	This was the guy who drove the boat. He had a really great, laid-back, crusty kind of demeanor. He told us about the ecology of the river, and although croc-spotting was certainly the primary focus of the trip, there were a lot of other plants and animals with interesting stories that we passed along the way.
Here's a white-faced heron. The camera was still moving when I snapped the shutter, so it came out more blurry than I intended, but the weird colors give it a kind of otherworldly quality that I like.	More mangrove roots, the tips of which would be just like what I saw on the beach.	And here he is, a four-meter male croc who's the king of this chunk of the river. We did see a very small male a bit further downstream, whod managed to survive his two years by avoiding this guy, because this guy will brook no competition. We also saw a female, but couldn't get very close because the water level was so low, the boat was in danger of running aground. Still, being able to see this guy was itself a justification for the trip. What a staggering amount of power, waiting for the right excuse to spring into action.	Another shot of the croc. Look at the size of that tail! Whew!
The riverbank.	A better shot of a white-faced heron.	You can see how low the water level is this year: the roots of this tree are a full meter above the waterline!	This is back in Port Douglas, and I noticed this tree as I was eating dinner. I liked how it looked against the slate grey sky, so I took a picture.
Yes, believe it or not, this is cane toad racing. One of the strangest things I have ever witnessed. This guy was the exuberant and charismatic emcee, as he explained the background of the cane toad (introduced to Australia to kill the cane beetle pest, it enjoyed Australia so much, it proliferated like mad, eating everything *but* the cane beetle! Now its a pest in its own right.) and introduced the racing steeds for the evening.	Participants were chosen by lot (my number was not drawn, thankfully), and after having to kiss their assigned toad (!!!), they were given one of those blow party favor things, and using that alone, they were supposed to >encourage< their toad to hop from the center of the table to the edge, and then into their hand.	As you can see, each toad was given a colored elastic band to identify it. Most of them seemed to just sit there rather impassively despite the mayhem going on all around them. Maybe they were traumatized. I cant say that I know how to recognize PTSD in a cane toad. It was certainly a bizarre and baffling experience to watch.
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