Month: October 2012

Ballooning

Disappointing that Fearless Felix could not jump from his balloon today. I was surprised to see that the balloon and launch crane appear to be the same as what we used to launch our scientific payloads from north Manitoba back in the day. I guess he’s going just as high and that is pretty crazy.

In other news we did a cool night dive off the west coast of our island on Saturday night. It was called Dive the Abyss and we got to see all these crazy little bio-luminescent creatures rise from the 2000-foot depths of the ocean.

 

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Tablelands

Pictures

From Mt. Garnet we drove over to Mount Hypipamee Crater and Dinner Falls. We decided to spend our last day and a half in the Atherton Tablelands because we liked it so much when we drove through the week before.
We stopped by Herberton, the oldest town in the Tablelands and home of an old tin mill.
The mining museum had some great old dilapidated mining equipment.
We were so happy with the camping over the last week, we decided to stay at this place near Lake Barrine with this perfect little duck pond where we had bread and cheese for lunch. We also went for another swim in Lake Barrine, a beautiful little volcanic lake and an excellent place to swim.
I wanted to go see the World’s Largest Amethyst Geode, but Talia wanted to go to the Bat Hospital. So here we are at the bat hospital, hanging out with the flying foxes who were eating watermelons and bananas. We also saw some small cute microbats.

As the sun was setting on our last day, we still hadn’t see two high priority animals: venomous snake and venomous platypus. We went to the platypus viewing station (where we struck out a week ago) and walked down the river a ways. That’s when we saw this glorious snake, which I think is either a red-bellied black snake or a mulga snake (probably the former). Either way, highly venomous:

Dusk was falling but we walked down to the other end of the stream, beyond the main platypus viewing area to a bend in the river. And look what we found! He was bee-boppin’ around for a few minutes, diving, swimming, looking for bugs. It was a pretty good show for one of the world’s most enigmatic and elusive critters.

The next day we went for a run around Lake Barrine (twice), where we saw what a Bettong bumbling around in the brush. Then we went to Mareeba for breakfast (unsuccessful, but it was nice to see Malanda Falls (pictured)) then to Yungaburra (successful) at the Whistle Stop Cafe with lots of fairies. It was just a couple hours back to Cairns, where we retrieved my bag of work stuff (traditional for me on these trips), repacked our bags (carefully protecting the massive shell we brought back from the island), and headed to the airport.
Just outside the airport we stopped at this boardwalk through a mangrove forest, a nice end to our trip. Til’ next time Oz! Now THAT’S a knife!
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