Reef and Rainforest

When I first started planning this journey, Queensland was not on the agenda, almost every other part of Australia was. But then when my friend Maurene from Jerusalem said she would like to meet up with me for a few days and go to the Great Barrier Reef, things changed. Instead of heading into more arid outback after Darwin, I flew to Cairns on the north east coast and a few hours later picked Maurene up at the same airport after her business day in Sydney. We spent the first 48 hours exploring the Atherton tablelands inland from Cairns and then relaxing in a cabin in the rainforest. Maurene observes Shabat so we were very low key for 24 hours. On Saturday night we dined at the resort restaurant, a great open dining room with part of the swimming pool in it and lots of heavy tropical wooden furniture and of course, palms and other vegetation. I have never been in the wet tropics before so this is all very new and inviting, especially since it is not too hot and humid at this time of the year.

Sunday, the reef trip, was a peak experience. I had heard that the reef is disappointing because it is in decline and especially since a huge bleaching episode 4 years ago. But this little slice of the reef was exquisite, there was hardly any dead coral but a gazillion shapes and types of living coral mostly ranging through the beiges from yellow to grey with a few more colourful types. The fish were brilliant in colour and form, shoals of little ones, and various individuals Then there were the purple starfish and the black sea cucumbers cleaning up the scene on the sandy bottom.
Saw a mantra ray as well but the very best was the sea turtle which the guide saw and beckoned us to follow gently, so graceful with just the front flippers moving we followed (him or her) for many metres. After we got back on the boat she surfaced and hung around as if to say....I did this just for you, go well dear humans.

On Monday, I drove up to Cooktown on the Endeavour River where Captain Cook, a childhood hero of mine, brought the Endeavour after almost foundering on a reef at Cape Tribulation, also named by Cook. They spent 6 weeks there, fixing the boat while Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander collected plants and made various other natural history observations.
I am a bit of a Cook groupie since I grew up not far from Marton where he was born and as a child often walked up to the obelisk known as Captain Cook’s memorial on the north west edge of the North York Moors. I took all the requisite photos, of Cook, the landing site the memorial obelisk and went to the James Cook museum which is small and deals only with Cook’s landing here through quotations from the journals of Cook and Banks and also from the perspective of the local aboriginal people whose oral stories of that time have been captured in text. They referred to the Endeavour as a strange large canoe in which it appeared something was not right.

Then it was south to explore the Daintree Rainforest, a feast for anyone, you don’t need to be a botanist. It is a demonstration of how alive our planet is and how well it does without us, so many species, so many interactions and adaptations, the statistics are staggering, the experience even more so. Huge trees, with buttressed roots, many of them several hundred years old, cycads, idiot fruit, woody vines corkscrewing in the canopy, ferns, mosses, lichen and various flowering plants mostly growing as epiphytes on the trees, then the ubiquitous strangler fig. I saw the phenomenon of cauliflory, flowering and fruiting from the trunk, rather than the tips of branches.
Most of North Queensland’s coast was originally rainforest, giving way to mangrove swamps at the shoreline but the forest was cleared and the flatland of red lateritic soil planted with sugar cane. The Daintree was slated for a similar fate in the 1980s, logging, sugar cane and subdivision. It was saved by a grass roots protest coupled with expanding scientific knowledge that these were the most diverse and ancient tropical rainforests on the planet. Now it is a World Heritage area, and has a reforestation research centre, and a relatively low impact tourism infrastructure. Canopy walks and boardwalks allow human access without damaging the forest. The access road is peppered with signs warning of cassowaries crossing. Alas I did not see one of these curious solitary birds but on a night walk saw bats, roosting birds, spiders and stick insects and awoke next day in my tent cabin to a dawn chorus of birds and insects.