National Parks and Wild Life

Almost! We almost saw a cassowary. Cassowary - prehistoric - big, black, flightless bird, aprox. 5 feet tall, with blue head, red wattle, grey comb (like and axe stuck in it's head), can be ferocious (?? Big Bird??), leaves BIG piles of "sign" on the hiking tracks and leaves footprints as big as my own! Maybe, I'm happy we didn't come face to face! But we know he was there and we heard him crashing in the bushes. We are hiking in the rainforests of the Misty Mountain National Park, south of Ravenshoe. It is gorgeous. Breathing is easy. We did encounter a feral pig on the track and decided that it would be better to let him know that we were there than to let him run into us, so called out to him well in advance. He just scooted off into the bushes. We also saw a wallaby and heard the calls of several different birds. This is one of the things that we really like about our down time from boating, especially here in the "Wet Tropics", hiking in the rainforest.  Absolutely awesome. The leaches are a problem, next time I will wear socks.

 

"Oh look, there is a different bird! Hand me the camera." We are driving now, on our way back from a good day of hiking. Hummmm, no camera in the car. Somebody, thankfully not me, left it on the roof of the car when we left the park. We back tracked the 10 km that we had already made, thinking it would be in the middle of the track where Glen would normally have spun out on the gravel. He must have been tired, he didn't spin out thus the camera was not where we expected it to be.  Slowly driving along checking both sides of the road as we went, we found it had ridden almost 5 km from the start point before letting go and diving into the ditch. After gathering all of the scattered bits, battery, lens cap and camera, we were astounded to find that it had earned only two miniscule scratches and a barely noticeable bruise. Amazing. Not everything turns out bad, every time!

 

In all, we had two fun days of kicking around. Now we're back at the boat, it's Monday, Wednesday is our planned day of departure - the weather is looking great for a week after that. More Diving - here we come. Since we haven't seen Eric, Anne and Bear for a whole two days, we all head out to a local Noodle House to exchange stories (they went out touring too) and plan our next cruising moves.

 
Cindy Kerunsky