Iter Facere

Wandering through Tribulation

Sunday, July 16
Cape Tribulation 10:00 PM

Since our walk wasn’t scheduled until 2:00, we got to sleep in late. Breakfast at 9:00, and on the way back we noticed some clumps in a tree outside of our room. The clumps move and have wings. At first I assumed they were bats, but really big bats, the body is one or two feet long and the wings are three to four feet spread. A gentleman in another room, from Tasmania, said he thought they were fruit bats (pineapples? watermelons?). Either way they are large. Later on I hear that they are fruit eating flying foxes.
I coerced Jenny into a walk down the road to Cape Tribulation. It is about 1 kilometer down the road. It’s a nice walk. Along the way we were passed by a women from our resort. We said hello. The Cape is where Captain Cook repaired his sinking ship on his voyage to Australia. The beach is beautiful, clean, long, no rocks, gently sloping down to the water. Perhaps there are a total of twenty people along the mile long beach. No one is swimming, however. There is a salt water crocodile living off the Cape. The clerk at reception said to us, without a trace of irony, that we shouldn’t swim near the cape if we liked living. Our guide yesterday also was deadly serious about staying away from crocodile water.

After looking at the Cape, we tried to walk down the beach back to our resort. We first had to walk through some rain forest. A sign had talked about an aggressive cassowary in the area, (cassowaries can disembowel you), so I was jumpy as we walked down the path, much to Jenny’s amusement. We arrived at the sanctuary of the beach and walked back toward the village. We came to Mason Creek, but couldn’t cross it because it was too deep. So we retraced our steps. Saw the woman from our resort again and said hi (again). It started to rain. We had left our rain gear in our room because it was not raining. Bad decision.

When we arrived back at the village we tried to get a Coke and coffee at PK’s, the local pub/hangout/backpacker resort. They had internet, but no accommodation for laptops. Drat. Also, no change, so no Coke or coffee. We bought Sean a t-shirt at the pharmacy, and a newspaper. We then went to Dragonfly (the restaurant we ate at last night) for the Coke and the coffee. Saw the same woman again. Then back to our room to wait for our rain forest walk.
Around 12:00 reception called to say our walk was canceled because not enough people were signed up. Double Drat. To make up for that, we decided to walk the national park path through the rain forest near the resort. It was a pretty interesting walk. This area is very sandy, so the plant life is different, more palm trees than the forest we saw yesterday, There also was some freshwater swamp so we saw some new plants, particularly a giant sedge with razor sharp (we checked) leaves. We walked onto the beach and then went back to our room.
We played a game of snooker and one of foosball. We read for awhile, and then I pleaded with Jenny to go back out to the beach, since the sky was clearing. Jenny relented, and we walked back to the beach. Again, miles of gently sloping, clean sand with twenty people in sight. We walked up the beach a ways and saw our friend yet again. We walked some more, I was unsuccessful in taking a picture of Jenny and headed back.

We had dinner reservations at 7:30, so we wrote postcards and read until dinner time. Around dusk, the flying foxes began to stir. They groomed themselves a bit, stretched, stretched again, just like a dog or cat. They ten spread their huge wings and fly off. The flew noiselessly, and without a lot of wing beating. Unlike bats, which beat their wings vigorously and constantly change direction, these flew more like a crow or other large bird.
Dinner time, and Jenny had the same pasta dish, I had buttermilk chicken with a spicy aioli and a Viognier and a rose. While we were eating, our friend from the resort walked in.
After we finished eating, our friend stopped by and told us about the fish pond the restaurant had. We went to look at it. It had some turtles and barramundi in it. Pretty neat. She was American, from Saratoga Springs, in Australia to learn scuba dive. She and Jenny had a lot to discuss. We spoke for awhile, and then headed back to bed. We have an early shuttle tomorrow. Hopefully we can post to the internet tomorrow morning before our flight.

Monday , July 17
Cape Tribulation, 6:25 AM

It is pouring. Are we going to be stranded? Several creeks cross the road between hear and river. They flow over the road, and if they get too high we can’t cross. Hmm.
Cairns, 11:00 AM

We made it.

posted by Jim @ 2:31 AM