Daintree Rainforest, Australia, 20 August 2008

On Wednesday we had a free day from seminars, and Stein Magne and I decided that we would like to visit the Daintree National Park, a 140 million year old rainforest in Eastern Queensland, that also happens to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The conference had arranged for guided tours, but seeing as how organized speed tourism isn't exactly our thing, we decided to try a more independent venture. My MSc advisor from Berkeley, Steve Lindow, was one of the plenary speakers at the conference. He and his wife Betsy had rented a car specifically for the purpose of driving up to the Daintree on Wednesday, and they kindly agreed to let us join them.

The man himself, Professor Steven E. Lindow, armed and dangerous with his Nikon camera.

Our day started our sunny, which provided a very nice view from the first outlook point we stopped at on the Captain Cook Highway. The hat Stein Magne is wearing was made in Australia, but purchased in Norway. So in bringing his hat with him on this trip, he was bringing it home, we decided.

One of the stars of the Daintree is the cassowary, a large flightless (wingless, really) bad-tempered bird with brilliant blue skin on its head and neck. Traffic through the rainforest was warned to watch their speed

lest the unthinkable happen

Apparently cassowaries are extremely temperamental birds, and will attack humans. Visitors were even warned to "back slowly away, keeping eye contact at all times" should they encounter a cassowary in the park. We didn't see any, which is I suppose no surprise. But we did see one at the Rainforestation Park (blog article coming soon!).

Because Australia is home to 99.999999% of the world's most poisonous snakes, lizards, spiders, Martians, etc etc etc, walking trails "in the bush" are pretty much not to be found. Most of the walks in the park were boarded walkways

But could we keep to the boardwalk? Of course not! We wandered about 2m off the boardwalk near a river bank to take macro pictures of some ant activity, only to be surprised by a very large snake

Fortunately for us he was a bit sluggish and basically ignored us, slithering along his way. Based on my post-trauma reptile research, I narrowed our scaly friend down to either brownsnake, blacksnake or taipan. All of which are potentially fatally venomous woohoo! So if you're thinking "gosh, that's not a very good picture", that's because my heart was racing at about 180 bpm as I tried to steady my hands long enough to snap a pic of our very beautiful friend.

Back on the boardwalk we continued strolling in the true Outback Explorer way of strolling (notice hat and khaki blouse)

We found all kinds of cool greenery, including epiphytes on literally everything that was holding still

a strangler fig that had overgrown a tree standing at a 45deg angle to the ground

a few WELL-defended palms

and bazillions of Fan Palms with their ginormous leaves

We wandered out to the beach, which was fringed by a lovely stand of mangroves.

Stein Magne might have been smiling purty for the camera had he not been, in that moment, attacked by mosquitoes. The day wasn't that warm, which was fortunate since we wouldn't have been able to swim in the water anyway!

On our way out of the beach we encountered two flightless birds, which were affectionately dubbed "swamp chickens", as per the impression that they weren't the smartest critters in the forest

But that's not to say that we didn't make use of my most favoritest favoritest bestest macro lens! This was an interesting sight: ants that bend leaves together and seal the edges, making a kind of compartment in which they build their nests

Of course there were lots of different species of ants in the forest, including this little fella who was wandering about on a leaf. What caught my eye was the remarkably long antennae.

And what photo collection of ours would be complete without a beautiful flower snapshot?

Must admit that I have no idea what plant this flower lives on...

Just north of Daintree Village there is, remarkably enough, a tea plantation just off the road.

Here's Stein Magne, Steve and his wife Betsy scoping out the greens.

In summary, we did go to the rainforest at the height of the dry season, which might possibly explain why we saw so little animal activity (butterflies, beetles, mammals, birds, etc). But that could also be due to the millions of (noisy) tourists that go rampaging through the boardwalk pathways every year! I can't complain, though, we had a spectacular time and learned alot both about the rainforest and about the area. It is no small deal standing in the midst of 140 million years of natural history. Can't wait to go back during the rainy season!