Mossman Gorge

The first piece of rainforest that I visited was at the Mossman Gorge where the forest clothes the steep slopes:

The path initially runs alongside the swift, broad, boulder strewn river ...

... before heading off away from the main watercourse and across smaller streams:

Some of the commonest - or at least most recognizable - of the forest trees are strangler figs. Unlike other trees they grow down, rather than up: the seeds are deposited high up in trees by birds that have feasted on the figs, and when the seeds germinate they send roots downwards that form a mesh around the tree trunk. These roots fuse to form what looks like a single tree trunk, and this arboreal straitjacket then does what it says on the tin - killing the host tree. The dead tree rots to leave a hollow fig tree, whose origin from fused aerial roots can sometimes still be seen. The buttress root to the right of this one is about 2 meters above the ground.

Strangler figs aren't the only trees with buttress roots:

As well as the buttress roots, there are some fairly spectacular lianas, ...

... and a few trees with fruit growing directly from the trunk:

A bit of colour was supplied by this small fungus:

Animal life is not easy to see in rain forests: much of it is high up in the canopy where the light is, and the creatures living lower down are either nocturnal, or, like many of the birds on the forest floor, rather secretive. So I was excited to see an information board telling me to watch out for Boyd's forest dragon on the trunks of tree saplings. 'Dragons' are some of the more spectacular lizards, Boyd's forest dragon growing to up to half a meter in length. I kept my eyes peeled ...

... but didn't manage to see any lizards other than this small skink enjoying a patch of sunshine on the forest track.

Sugar, sugar

Having stayed in Cairns just long enough to make day trips to the west and east, it's time to get some wheels and head north. The mountains run parallel with the coast, and for about 90 kilometers - as far as the Daintree River - there is a coastal plain. Tarmacked road continues for another 50 kilometers north, squeezed in between the mountain slopes and the ocean, as far as Cape Tribulation. I have a campervan for a week, and the plan is to drive up to Cape Tribulation, visiting some of the World Heritage rainforest along the way, and then come back south of the Daintree River and head inland onto the Atherton Tableland before circling back to Cairns.

The coastal plain was cleared for agriculture in the later 19th century. To a first approximation, there is just one crop: sugar cane. The field in the foreground has been cut, but behind and slightly to the left, the cane is still standing. In the distance, the mountain slopes are covered with rain forest.

Although sugar cane cultivation extends a considerable way north and south, there is one town - Mossman - that is the centre of sugar cane cultivation, by virtue of having the only sugar cane mill. The chimney, and its rather dirty cloud of smoke, dominates the small settlement.

There are one or two characteristic style buildings in the town. This one is confusingly called the Daintree Inn, although the various places with the name Daintree are a bit further north.

The sugar mill was opened in 1897, with a two foot gauge tramway to the wharf on the Mossman River. By 1899, tramway had been completed from the sugar fields to the mill, and the extensive network is still the means by which all cane from the surrounding region is brought to the mill. This section of tramway cuts through the centre of town and across the main road.

The empty trucks are left on sidings next to the crop, and the farmers fill them directly, before they are collected up again into a train and taken back to the mill:

Under the waves

The Great Barrier Reef stretches for over 2,600 kilometers along the seaboard of tropical Queensland, but Cairns is one of the main centres taking tourists out to visit the reef. The reef is about 30 kilometers offshore, so day trips leave port about 9 am, take about an hour to reach the reef, and then anchor closeby to allow people to snorkel, and in the case of some trips, also dive.

The boats leave from the Reef Fleet Terminal on a small promontory at the south end of the Esplanade. There are tens of tourist boats leaving for the reef each day, and the terminal is organised like an airport check-in, where you queue to get a boarding pass before proceeding to the boat.

The boat that I went on took about 30 of us.

The crew were excellent, taking great care that everyone felt confident and safe, whatever their level of experience. The trip out was used to fit us out with masks, snorkels and fins, and instruct us how to use them:

The place that we were headed was Upulo Cay, the pale blob to the south east of the 'C' of Coral Sea:


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A cay is a low sandy island formed on the surface of a reef. Some of them are big enough and high enough to have forest growing on them, but others, like Upulo Cay, barely break the surface. The idea was that we would be put ashore on the cay, and would be able to don our fins there and snorkel back to the boat.

In the event, it was a very high tide, so we were put 'ashore' in a few inches of water.  It wasn't the perfect weather for snorkelling: a strong wind was blowing which created waves, stirring up the sand and reducing visibility in the water. (All of the underwater photos have been edited and give the impression that it was clearer than it actually was.) Photogrpahing the underwater life was also challenging as it was difficult to frame and focus on a subject when bobbing up and down in the waves.

The reef itself is built by corals, small colonial animals that are related to jellyfish, and who create a thin living layer on the surface of the non-living calcium carbonate skeleton which they secrete. The skeletons of different coral species have a range of different forms - from domes to branched 'trees' - which are probably adapted to catching their small floating prey in different strengths of water movement: branched forms are probably more efficient at catching prey, but are also more vulnerable to damage by tidal currents and wave action. The corals have potozoa called zooxanthellae living as guests inside their cells in a you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scartch-yours 'symbiotic' relationship. The zooxanthellae photosynthesize, producing carbon-based chemicals that the coral can use as an energy source. In exchange, the corals provide the zooxanthellae with shelter, nutrients (including nitrogen and phosphorus in their own waste material), and the CO2 that the zooxanthellae need to photosynthesize. The pigments that the zooxanthellae use for photosynthesis are what gives the coral its colour; if the coral is stressed - for example by too high a water temperature - the zooxanthellae die or are expelled, and the coral loses it's colour so the white calcium carbonate shows through: hence 'coral bleaching'. Not surprisingly, coral bleaching is becoming an issue in relation to climate change.

As well as the coral (amd small coral reef fishes), there were other creatures such as this ray ...

... a striking blue starfish ...

... and some of its relatives, sea cucumbers:

The biggest group of fish was the school under the back of the boat: sleek silver fish of the open sea:

Once we were all back on the boat, it moved to a new anchorage, and people had the opportunity to snorkel from the boat. It certainly seemed a long way from any land:

Another option was to dive: those with a PADI certificate could dive unsupervised, but for beginners there was the chance to dive with an instructor. I have dived before - but over 30 years ago, and also then only with an instructor - so I definitely counted as a beginner. There was one other beginner, and we had one instructor - literally - between us:  he held onto each of us by the hand for the whole 30 minute dive.

After the dive, there was a break for a leisurely lunch ...

... and after lunch another chance to dive.

This time I and my fellow diving neophyte were allowed 'off the lead' and got to follow the instructor instead - although he did keep a beady eye on us:

We didn't go very deep on either of the dives, which was fine by me as there was plenty to see: more coral of course ...

... including this fluorescent blue one ...

... coral reef fishes ...

...  a giant clam about a meter across ...

and some sponges:

These colourful little guys - or rather guys'n'gals as they're hermaphrodites - look very similar to sponges and have a similar lifestyle - filter-feeding small organisms from the water. However, they're a totally different group of animals - sea squirts - whose nearest relatives are the vertebrates: fish, amphibia, reptiles, birds and mammals - including you and me.

More marsupials ... and other beasts

The Red Centre had much to recommend it, but mammals were not among its strongpoints. In fact, the only one that I saw was a dead spinifex hopping mouse on the path at the eastern end of Uluru. It looked very similar to the other desert rodents that have evolved independently - including the jerboa of North Africa - in having short forelimbs, powrful hopping hindlimbs, and a long tail with a tuft of hairs at the end. One reason for the dearth of mammal sightings was that most of the smaller mammals in Australia (and elsewhere) are nocturnal, and seeing them requires wandering around at night - preferably with a powerful spotlight.

The antidote to this lack of furry tails and wiffly noses was on hand in Cairns. My flight got in after dark in the evening, so I'd decided when booking various trips in advance from the Netherlands not to try and book a full day trip for my first day. I'd found the perfect alternative in a wildlife trip that left Cairns mid-afternoon, and went up onto the Atherton Tableland (only an hour's drive away) for a bit of wildlife watching in the afternoon followed by spotlighting after dark for nocturnal mammals.

Rickie the guide picked me up from the hotel in a minibus. Looking rather sheepish he said, well you'll either think this is good news or bad news, but you're the ony one on the trip. The Australian dollar is relatively high, which makes a holiday to Australia expensive, and those who do make it are economising on day trips once here. As far as I was concerned it was definitely good news as Rickie was knowledgeable and more than happy to share his expertise. Later, as the only passenger, I didn't have to fight over the second spotlight.

We stopped off in the suburbs of Cairns to watch a group of about 20 agile kangaroos happily munching in a small field enclosed by houses, then on and past Gordonvale where the first cane toads were fatefully released, and wound up through the forest - dry forest at first, but then a sudden transition to rainforest - before emerging out onto the Atherton tableland. The tableland is volcanic in origin, and much has been cleared for agriculture. Small patches of rainforest remain around a couple of volcanic crater lakes. We stopped off at Lake Barrine, headed along the footpath around the lake, and within a couple of hundred meters had spotted a musky rat-kangaroo, about 25 cm in length, plus a tail about half of that. Unusually for a small marsupial thye're diurnal, and they don't hop but bound like a rabbit or walk quadrupedally.

We headed on again to a private property - once, I guess a small farm, but now hostling wildlife tourism. There were grassy areas with high tree hedgerows, and a small stream and pools. We fed the Johnstone River snapping turtles and black bream that were waiting for their regular meal, but the light was too poor for photos. We did find a tree frog to pose for us, though:

Dinner was provided by our hosts, and conversation interrupted for 15-20 minutes by chorusing cicadas. This particular species 'sings' in synchrony, and very loudly, but thankfully for a relatively short period each day. The noise is like a circular saw being used to cut metal and loud enough to drown out speech. A few were attracted by the light onto the terrace where we were eating, and showed off their jewel like colouration:

Before dinner a green-tailed possum put in an appearance for the first time that our hosts had seen her carrying her young. I didn't have my camera ready, but made up for it after dinner when we made another circuit of the hedgerows on foot and found a coppery brush-tailed possum:

Then we headed off in the van to look for more mammals on some dirtroads throught the dry sclerophyll forest, but before we even got off the asphalt we spotted an owl on a fence post. This is either a barn owl, or just possibly a grass owl:

Once we got on the dirt roads, it started raining hard, but it didn't sem to put off the mammals. Rickie and I both had powerful handheld spotlights to search the area alongside the road as we drove along, and in less than an hour we saw Mareeba rock wallaby, eastern grey kangaroo, northern - and possibly also southern - brown bandicoot, norhern bettong ...

... and common brush-tailed possum (below). This last beast was particularly interesting as it and the coppery brush-tailed possum are sub-species of the same species, the former in the sclerophyll forest, and the latter in areas originally containing wet forest. The distributions of many mammal species and sub-species in the mountain range are finely divided, probably as a result of populations being isolated on separate peaks, and particularly between the ranges to the south and north of the Daintree River, about 100 kilometers north of Cairns.

Cairns

My Four corners and the (redgreen) centre route takes me in a big M across Australia, hop-scotching in and out of the tropics: Perth is at 32° S, Darwin at 12° S, Alice Springs at 23° 42' S, Cairns at 17° S, and Melbourne at 37° S. I  had to consult the interweb to check whether Alice is in the tropics. The Tropic of Capricorn is at 23° 26' 16" S, so all of my journey in the Red Centre was outside the tropics. However, in the process of checking, I discovered the curious fact that the Tropic of Capricorn is not always in the same place, and is currently drifting north at the rate of 0.47" a year. A quick check with the calculator shows that, if this rate has remained constant, Alice Springs would have been in the tropics in the year 3 B.C. I wonder if anyone noticed.

*                    *                    *

The Great Dividing Range running up the eastern side of Australia is - at 3500 kilometers - the fourth longest mountain range in the world. In the south the coastal plain is relatively wide, but in the north there is only a narrow coastal strip. Cairns is squeezed in between the ocean and the mountains, whose eastern slope and crest harbour World Heritage rainforests. Behind the crest is a fertile plateau, the Atherton Tableland, with the country becoming drier as you travel further inland.

An Esplanade runs along the ocean front. On the land side, there are the usual range of seafront businesses: cafes, restaurants, and abundant tourist agents. On the ocean side, there is a mud flat - complete with the occasional mangrove sapling (I discovered that the council has a contract for someone to 'weed' the mudflat and stop it turning into a mangrove forest).

The Espanade is therefore the perfect place for a spot of bird-watching, including the odd pelican or four ...

... and groups of waders on their way south for the winter - or summer as it is in Australia.

Between the seafront and the row of businesses, there is a narrow park, with various activity areas for children and adults. The council seems keen on encouraging physical exercise, and there are posters up for various fitness programs. This one could do with a comma or hyphen to clarify whether the prospect is pleasing or alarming:

Although a flourishing modern city, Cairns is not that large, with a population a little over 120,000, so there is space in the city for wildlife, including a small colony of fruitbats ...

... and masked lapwings enjoying the grassy verges and roundabouts.

The city also retains some rather characterful older buildings:

Schedule, Part 2: The Red Centre

8 Oct: Fly Darwin-Alice Springs
8 Oct: Hotel in Alice Springs
8-14: Campervan Rental
14 Oct: Fly Alice Springs - Cairns