Mossman Gorge, Queensland, 24 August 2008

Saturday after the ISME conference, SMB and I booked ourselves into Port Douglas together with two of my colleagues from New Zealand, Carolyn and Jana. On Sunday we decided to hire a car and give ourselves a tour of the Mossman Gorge, a national park just a few kms from our hotels.

The route by which we came to this plan was rather circumloctius, and deserves a wee paragraph in itself. Port Douglas is a small 95% tourist town of the resort persuasion, i.e. there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a good portion of the tourists have a decent amount of expendable income. That being said, we were completely unable to find any information about tramps "off the beaten path" - every single outdoor adventure company provided lightning tourism days with fancy lunches and very short excursions outside of the actual 4WD tourism vehicle. Not for us. We just wanted a place where we could wander and hopefully get as much away from the mass tourism crowd as possible. The local women working in the tourist information kiosks were snobbish, distracted, self-righteous, unhelpful and/or willfully misunderstanding. We found out quickly that our best option was to hire a rental car and drive to the closest adventure, i.e. Mossman Gorge.

Hooray - we found a rental car!! From left, SMB, Jana, Carolyn. Not-too-early Sunday morning we set out for Mossman Gorge.

The first thing that struck me was the relative quiet of this park compared to the Daintree Rainforest, which, if the truth be told, has become extremely over-commercialized. But the quiet didn't last too long as the car park filled up quickly and all the locals zoomed past us to reach the swimming hole at the river. We kept to the quiet bits and were duly rewarded with beautiful scenery and the peace with which to enjoy it.

This was a small dam? spring? about half way around the 3km track through the gorge. There were small fish swimming in it, although the water wasn't very deep.

Similar to the Daintree, the forest in the Mossman Gorge is 140 million years old, and the old growth is evident everywhere.

Another classic example of a strangler fig extraordinaire! SM is leaning up against one of the roots, called a buttress root, because of their grow only vertically up or down, and thereby produce a kind of buttress to support the weight of the growing tree.

And more buttress roots, smaller than in the previous picture but spatially and structurally just as intriguing.

The tree I'm standing in front of here was not visibly alive, but its fallen trunk and branches lay on the ground close by.  Cool to think that everything decomposes exactly where it falls, and that the nutrients are immediately recycled into new trees and bushes and fungi.

And what adventure of ours would be complete without a few macro pictures?

This was the conspicuously colourful fruit hanging in the middle of an otherwise very green and brown bit of forest. Looks a bit like a durian fruit, but this one was a bit smaller and obviously softer (notice the missing bits - no doubt picked off by a hungry birdy).

At the swimming hole there was two of these beautiful critters lazily flying around, undisturbed by the throng of tourists. This one landed on the sand, and everyone rushed quickly to snap a pic before it flew away. But it turns out that it had no intention of leaving, and sat there for at least a good 5 minutes, enduring lots of photos. So I had time to sneak in quite close and get a nice shot.

After a satisfying day (tourist info people - kiss our booties!), we drove back to Port Douglas and hit the town ha ha to find food and beers. On the way, we walked out to the northern tip of the peninsual, which turned out to be a park full of families enjoying the mild weather. We found a nice little spot to sit and ponder the events of the day while we watched the very lovely sunset.

Next time we go to Queensland, we hope to at least make it out onto the water. This trip the wind was blowing very strongly, which induced SM and I to reluctantly cancel our scheduled snorkeling trip :( But if we had gone snorkeling we would have missed Mossman Gorge and Carolyn and Jana's company. A huge thank you to them for being our travel buddies!