b r a v e c r e a t u r e s

The second day in Cairns started early, and let me tell you that the Frenchman doesn’t rise very gracefully. Not a morning person, but he warms up pretty quickly, and I still have a few tricks up me sleeve to encourage boys in the morning.The trip up the Daintree was with a smallish touring company, called Totally Wild, which uses extra large 4 wheel drives, the kind with three rows of seats.

Our fellow travelers were two Canadian couples in their late sixties and early seventies, from Ottawa, named Bob & Carol, Ted & Alice or something similar. They were the quintessential North American travelers, desiring to see everything through glass and from air conditioning, wanting to avoid contact with actual experience, and having little in the way of informed opinion substituting instead rhetoric.

We got a glimpse of the Canucks somewhat tenuous grasp on Australian wildlife and geography when Carol loudly and repeatedly demanded to know if we would be seeing penguins. Apparently she had been promised penguins. And she did so love the little penguins.

Embarrassed cough. Silence. Change topic.

Suffice to say that they were to provide us with enormous entertainment for the day. They also let me see exactly how subtle and gentle a tease the Frenchman is. I am a filthy tease, but that boy leaves me in his dust*.

The Canucks aside, the rainforest was amazing, and it was literally a rain forest. Pretty much every 30 minutes the sky opened and it bucketed down for about 10 minutes then let up to leave us steaming. The area is incredibly lush and verdant, things grow almost while we were watching, although it is pretty much as dangerous as it is beautiful. It seems that a large number of the more exotic looking plants are spectacularly poisonous, and the natives had a range of complex and methodical ways of turning the inedible, relatively safe. Or in a number of cases mildly narcotic and/or hallucinogenic.

We tried some of the “bush tucker”, well at least Jerome and I did. The Canadians just looked on in horror as we tried fruits, berries, grubs and bugs. I can highly recommend green ant larva, although don’t eat too many, cause they will make your tongue numb. And some of the grubs seemed to remain more active than I would have liked, even after I had bitten their heads off.

The plant life is not the only thing of interest in the Daintree. The fauna is also pretty much out to get you. Although there is a lot in attractive category, the kings of the forest are the cassowary, and the waterways are dominated by crocs.

Everyone knows a bit about crocs, prehistoric remnant and fearful killers, but the cassowary might be new.

This is a prehistoric remnant form Australians prehistoric period of marsupial mega fauna. At a time if 20 foot high kangaroos, these large flightless birds would have been runts, but now, standing at around 6′, they rule the forest with their bad assed, bad tempers. A bird that big, that can run at 30km/h and can jump up to disembowel a man with is RAZOR SHARP, DAGGER LIKE CLAWS.

Fun.

It’s not like Australia has any lack of deadly creatures that it needed to add a super killer bird. I mean for a country that has no major predators, crocs aside, the place is swarming with things that can bite and kill you in seconds.

And you have to wonder about the lack of predators, I have long suspected that they were wiped out by the things they were supposed to prey on. I have this mental picture of the last of the marsupial lions, cowering under a bush as something tiny, poisonous and pissed off scuttled towards it.

From an evolutionary point of view why did these creatures evolve such potent venom? I mean what’s the point if carrying enough toxins to kill 100 men? Seems like over kill to me, pardon the pun.

Let’s take my latest favorite, the Irukandji (Carukia barnesi). This pretty little jelly fish is a crystalline blue, which makes it nearly invisible in the open water. Given they are about the size of your thumb nail, you are unlikely to see them before you run into them.

But oh what joy and delight when you do. Apparently it’s like having your body set on fire, and if not treated within 15-20 minutes, can kill a full grown man. Now what’s the point of that I ask you? An irriganji is not going to eat you, and it’s not like you can learn a lesson from it because a/ you didn’t see what hit you and b/ well your dead.

All in all, the venomous natives of Australia are a bit of a mystery and could challenge the sense of evolution. Although if they are proof of an intelligent designer, they are proof of one with a pretty twisted sense of humor.

So where was I? Oh yes the cassowary. Larger, belligerent, flightless bird with a killing razor claw. They are kind of cute. The canucks stayed in the truck.

There was one encounter with nature they couldn’t avoid, the toilet. The Daintree is well set up for tourists; for all that there is no cabled power. There are a surprising number people living there and a lot of amenities including a host of bathroom, most of which are built to have as little impact on the surrounding rainforest as possible.

The Canadians pretty much insisted that out guide, Paul, Jerome or I went into the bathrooms first to check for snakes or spiders. On one occasion, after we had done our recce, one of the woman retired for a relaxing, and presumably maple scented poop leaving us standing around outside with Paul enthusiastically pointing out the various flora and fauna in the area that was a/ of interest and b/ deadly or otherwise dangerous.

After a while, a horrifying scream came from the toilet block. Paul ran in to find Carol locked in a cubicle, screaming her lungs out. It would seem that a tree frog had been sitting quietly under the rim of the toilet bowl, and with the coming of darkness (i.e. her backside descending) the frog had decided to come out to explore. Unfortunately in the process it had placed a flipper on Carol who predictably (and understandably) had flinched back. Unfortunately since tree frogs have quite powerful suckers on their feet, and an instinctive response to hang on, once things got excited Carol and the tree frog were pretty much bonded.

I am not sure who was more freaked out, Carol, the frog or Paul who had to separate them.

Fortunately, this all happened at our last stop of the day, because that pretty much finished things right there. Carol calmed down as we headed back to Cairns and I am sure she will have insisted on only going near “the little penguins” from there on in.

*it seems that my life if flooding with teasing French speakers. What is this telling me?