Daintree Zip Lining and Crocodiles

Thursday, 18 June

We wake up to a bright, healthy breakfast in the Cassowary Cafe.

We suit up in zip harnesses.  We tread the hamster wheel to lift other zip liners up to the first treetop station in the Daintree forest canopy. 

We are on a platform, ready for zipping along steel cables strung between tall and sturdy trees. 

The view from the canopy shows a clear beach and ocean on this sunny day. 

Zipping from station to station, we gain more confidence.  The activities become more adventurous.  Eitan films his father zip-lining upside down to the sixth station.  

The last lines zip downhill, accelerating Eitan and Mark to 40 kilometers per hour.  We come to screeching halt as a magnetic "zip stop" suddenly engages. 

The afternoon brings us to a boat cruise on the Daintree River, where we meet all sorts of wildlife.  Here is Scarface, the dominant male crocodile in these parts. 

We watch two beautiful kites take off from the riverbank, and fly off into the trees.

Eitan says goodbye to James, our chatty and knowledgeable tour guide.  The tour bus takes two hours to drive us south along the coast to Cairns, back to civilization.

Nightwalk in the Daintree Rainforest

Wednesday, evening, 17 June

The sun has set, and with ten other intrepid travelers we begin our night trek into the rainforest.  Our quarry is the predator – snake, lizard, spider – the dangerous denizens of the Daintree. 

Our guide Marina waves a glow stick in the absolute darkness.  It is rotting wood, damply decaying with a bioluminescent fungus that fireflies ingest to light their bottom bulbs. 

We walk along with our torches.  Our party sights a 5 foot snake by the side of the path.  The amethystine python is Australia's largest snake, growing to 15 feet.  Their under-jaw organs sense the heat of small birds or mammals; they then cast their coils upon their prey.  Each serpentine squeeze forces the captive animal to exhale further, until finally drained of breath, they suffocate. 

We see a reptile perched quietly on a branch.  This is Boyd’s forest dragon, a colorful lizard that lives only in northeastern Queensland.  The forest dragon lives on ants and other insects. 

There are many Huntsman spiders.  We watch them shed their exoskeleton, lounge on leaves, stalk unwary victims, and devour their prey. 

The strangling fig tree grows atop other rainforest trees.  The Daintree fig was the cinematic inspiration for the Hometree in Avatar.  Aborigines would bury their dead in the tree to speed their ascent to the afterlife.  So when the early European settlers found the buried bones, they thought that the giant fig trees ate people.  Thus they slept by the riverbanks, and were eaten by crocodiles.

Through the forest canopy we see a sky ablaze with the density of ten thousand stars and their unfamiliar constellations.  Throughout the night we hear the chirping of jungle insects and the incessant chattering of rainforest birds.  No human voices, nor telecomm signal; no mobile, text, or Internet.  Good night, Daintree, good night.

The Daintree Rainforest

Wednesday, afternoon, 17 June

We enter the Daintree National Park.  We walk along the Dubuji boardwalk, a raised and well-worn wooden platform that wends its way through the wild. 

From the ground, we see fan palms in the foreground beneath the forest canopy.  These evolutionary innovators are amongst the oldest of angiosperms (flowering plants).  They soak up much of the 15% of sunlight that comes in from above, also blocking light for the competing trees below. 

The ancient cycad plant is older than the dinosaur.  This gymnosperm (tree fern) is well adapted for gathering light beneath the Daintree rainforest canopy. 

We spy small insects on the rainforest leaves, such as a yellow caterpillar

and a well camouflaged stick insect against a green leaf.

Eitan examines a "wait a while" or "lawyer" vine.  Their hooked stems catch on to peoples clothing, and can entangle them for a long time (whence the nicknames).  But the one-way hooks let the vine hitch a ride with a growing tree as it moves upward towards the canopy.

Our guide James tells us that aborigines use the blood tree's sap as a natural antiseptic.  He says the sap covers the outside bark, giving the trunk its red appearance. 

The blue "cassowary plum" lies uneaten on the ground, because it is poisonous to most species.  But the cassowary bird coevolved with this fruit, and so finds it a nice treat.  Without the cassowary, its sole seed disseminator, the blue fruit would go extinct. 

James then bites off the back of a green ant, commenting on how its sour taste comes from highly concentrated ascorbic acid (vitamin C).  The ants wield this acid as a weapon, but locals enjoy drinking boiled green ant colonies for their flavor and nutritional value.  Some of the tourists (not us!) bite on their own green ant. 

After a short nap, and dinner at the Cassowary Cafe (those birds were not on the menu), we prepare for our night walk through the Daintree rainforest. 

Wildlife Habitat

Wednesday morning, 17 June

We left Cairns at 7 am, heading up north along the Coral Sea coast to Cape Tribulation. 

Our first stop was the Wildlife Habitat in Port Douglas, which "Puts YOU in the Zoo!"  We saw some ancient cassowary birds up close.  This cassowary was red necked from one angle

and blue necked from another

Modern birds like the eclectus parrot inhabit the rainforest canopy.  These strong fliers leave their roosting trees in the morning to dine in fruit and blossom trees in the afternoon. 

Eitan and I fed lots of young kangaroos.  

After wandering through different wildlife immersion environments, we settled down for some nature talks by a zookeeper handling a snake 

and a crocodile; we got to pet both reptiles.  

We then had our pictures taken with a very friendly Koala.  Evidently, Koala handling is legal only in Queensland, and then limited to just 15 minutes a day.  Both primate and marsupial look happy with the interaction. 

The bus continued north, up to Cape Tribulation.  After lunch at a forested campsite, we walked along the Myall Beach.

This afternoon, the rainforest!