Pieter, Becca, and Catherine picked me up at the airport with our fancy rental car - Ford Falcon station wagon - and made it up to Daintree that day. Our first campsite was near a river where the next day we were going to go on a couple croc watching tours...luckily we made it through the night.
Group shot enjoying a beer by the Daintree River before heading to eat (fresh barramundi for dinner!).
The crazy fools that I hung out with for the weekend:
The next morning we saw a couple crocs on the Daintree River and learned about some of the wildlife there. We then took a barge across the river into Cape Tribulation, where we found an area to take a walk and stretch our legs a bit. On our adventure we found a lambda hanging out in the tropical rainforest, apparently their natural habitat.
The next two photos sum up the sudden obsession with peanut butter Catherine and I developed. We couldn't stay away from the stuff, even in the middle of the night.
The four of us booked a day tour out to the Great Barrier Reef for the following day - my first encounter with it! We had a fun day on this catamaran snorkeling around, then enjoying a glass or two of champagne afterward. Though we chose it partly because of the possibility of going sailing, we sadly didn't actually get to sail - one sail was ripped and aside from that the wind wasn't too great. Good time nonetheless.
We saw all sorts of pretty colorful coral, massive neon-colored clams, huge fish (if you held your breath for a second you can hear the crunch as the clown fish munch away on the coral), and even a turtle having a little scratch on a piece of rock on the bottom. The folks on the boat were pretty good at teaching us about the reef and answering any questions about what the different things we saw were. The reef we went to was Mackay, here it is, a great turquoise/blue color:
On the beaches here you can find all these tiny balls spread out in cool formations. They're small crabs that start digging their holes and tossing out perfect little balls of sand. Here's one of their cool designs on the beach near our campsite in Cape Trib. Bet they don't even know they're such great artists.
We also took a little hike on our last day up at Cape Tribulation - a place called Mount Sorrow (Captain Cook's trials and tribulations are evidenced everywhere around here, in the form of names). It was a pretty good walk (not too far, but fairly steep) and we had a nice lunch at the top. Good views of the ocean and a great way to see how the rainforest stretches right up to the beach. Here we are halfway up our walk, rainforest all around.
The view we got as a reward for making it to the peak:
Group shot.
That evening we drove back to Cairns and booked a hostel for the night. Catherine and I drove Piet and Becca to the airport the following morning, sadly saying goodbye to half our crew. Not to fear though...Catherine and I had more adventures planned; including taking off in our spaceship!Thanks to Catherine for several of these photos; I ended up relying on her camera for most of the trip. :)
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