Hannah and me, smiling rather manically.

Don't remember quite what this was about...

Finally, a group photo!

Tony, our Fearless Leader.

After a relatively painless flight to Sydney (and a very painful lunch of airline beans and rice), I took the train to my hostel, the Mcleay Lodge. When I booked the hostel in August, I unwittingly managed to land myself about two blocks up from Sydney's infamous Darlinghurst Rd, the red light district. Had I been in the market for heroin or hookers, I'd have been in business. That said, Pott's Point (where I was) is a bit quieter, and sort of how I'd imaging the Village in the early eighties. Lots of young, gay people and a few trendy shops and cafés beginning to pop up.

I didn't do much Friday evening, but I did go out to explore the "Markets by Moonlight" at the Rocks, Sydney's oldest neighborhood. There was live music there, although I wasn't crazy about it, but it was fun to walk around and look at Sydney Harbor, and eat some mysterious street vendor food.

Saturday I went on Alice's Whirlwind Walking Tour of Sydney. I started out walking to Paddington, which is the trendy fashion district. I looked in some of the cool shops on Oxford Street and then checked out the Paddington Market, which was fun. Lots of neat things by local artists and jewelers, and not really very touristy. Then I walked all the way up to College Street, which was an interesting walk, and stopped at the Australian Museum. The Australian Museum is pretty good, and is sort of a cross between culture and natural history (with an emphasis on all things Australian, of course). Spent a few good hours there, before walking up to the Royal Botanical Gardens. At this point, I realized that I was going to pass out on the pavement if I didn't eat something right away. So, I stopped at a little outdoor café right outside the garden gates and had a piece of quiche and a ginger beer. Australia markets several brands of ginger beer, Bundaberg being the most common. I will miss this.

Anyway, the Botanical Gardens were in their full, early-summer glory. The rose garden, which is extensive, was in full bloom with hundreds of different kinds of roses. And there were day-lilies and all manner of other plantings, both native and introduced. The trees were also interesting––bunya pines next to palm trees next to wattles… you get the idea. At this point, around six-thirty, I was so tired that I walked back to the hostel (at least another fifty minutes of walking), got some take-out Indian food, and fell asleep.

On Sunday, I decided to give my poor feet a bit of a break and take the train back to the Rocks. However, the travel gods were not on my side and King's Cross station wasn't running any trains that day. All of the train routes from that station were being covered by buses, though, so after a bit of figuring things out I managed to get to the Rocks. I walked around in the big Rocks Market in the morning, and then wandered around until I found the entrance onto the Sydney Harbor Bridge. I should note that you can see both the Bridge and the Sydney Opera House from the Rocks. I decided to start walking across the bridge to see the view, and ended up crossing the whole thing (which is quite a long way, actually, and there's no shade). Got a lovely view of the city and the Harbor, with all of the sailboats and cargo ships and cruise liners and jetboats. And on the other end of the bridge I found… another market! Apparently Sydney is big on markets. Who knew? So I walked around there for just a few minutes, and then got some falafel for lunch. Eventually I wandered back over the Bridge and to the Opera House.

As much as I have tried to leave her out of this narrative, it seems negligent of me not to mention that Oprah Winfrey was visiting Sydney at the same time I was. This is significant to me only because of the occasional hassles it caused and the constant embarrassment of middle-aged American housewives along for her tour, occasionally sporting white plastic top hats and bright yellow shirts. I was inclined to begin pretending to be Canadian, if only to stop people asking if I was here with bloody Oprah.

But I digress. The Opera House is really cool from the outside, but I wasn't that impressed with the inside (mostly beige composite blocks) until I got to the concert hall. However, I went there in the first place because I wanted to get a ticket to Handel's Messiah. I got the second-to-last one, actually, and the lovely people at the Opera House give nearly a fifty percent discount to students. The concert didn't start until five, though, so I went to the Rocks Museum, which is very small, and poked my rather large nose around there for about an hour. Then I went back to the Opera House, looking like most of a bum, and went to the concert hall. The concert hall is, architecturally, an acoustic masterpiece. I don't think I've ever been in a room with such well-thought-out acoustics. It's also much more attractive than the beige blocks, although someone got the bright idea to put bright pink upholstery on all of the seats. Also, to the architect's credit, all of the seats (even the crappy last-minute college student ones) have an excellent frontal view of the stage. The performance was incredible, and I was particularly impressed by the tenor and alto soloists. And the choir was huge; at least three hundred people. They were accompanied by the Sydney Philharmonic, which was also excellent. Unsurprisingly, I was sitting next to a German woman, and we got talking about music (she was a die-hard opera fan). And, rather more surprisingly, she invited me for a glass of chardonnay at intermission. So I had fun talking to her, and chatting to the woman from Sydney on my other side, whose elderly mother could recite almost every word of the Messiah, including the solos. It was a wonderful evening.

Monday, my last day in Sydney, I decided to take the train up into the Blue Mountains. The Blue Mountains get their name from the blue mist that hangs over them, which is caused by light reflecting off of tiny droplets of eucalyptus oil that hang around the trees. It's about a two hour train ride from Sydney, but the second half of the ride has beautiful scenery. I got to Katoomba, the end of the country line, and got on a red double-decker bus from London, circa 1970s, I would guess. Anyway, the deal with this bus was that you could get on and off whenever you wanted for the day. So I hopped off at Katoomba Falls, not really having any idea what to expect. I was very pleasantly surprised, however, and found a beautiful hiking spot and amazing views of the highest waterfall I've ever seen. The whole area has sandstone (I think) and clay cliffs. The clay erodes easily, so huge chunks of rock break off and slide hundreds of metres down into the valley, creating very sheer drops. It's quite breathtaking, really. I took some photos, but you can't really capture the panorama very well. It ended up being rather a long hike down a few thousand very precipitous stone stairs, which would have scared my mother senseless.

At the bottom I saw a sign for a "scenic railway," that took you back to the top of the cliffs. I needed to get back up to get the bus, and I didn't fancy walking the whole hike again uphill. So, I hopped on. Whoops. This was, allegedly, the world's steepest rain line. The train was an open car with a cage over the top, but there wasn't really anything keeping you in the seats (like, say, seatbelts). Basically I was facing backwards and literally standing up as the train went up vertically. Slightly terrifying. Actually, it was rather enjoyable after the first minute or two (only about a ten-minute ride). But certainly not what I was expecting. Caught the bus to a town called Leura, where I spent just about half an hour before catching the train back to Sydney. I didn't really feel like going back to the hostel, though, so I checked out Darling Harbor, the rich and fancy bit of Sydney where there are nice parks and fancy restaurants. I walked around for awhile (there are amazing water features in the parks, by the way) and ended up eating at a pretty good restaurant called Blue Fish (not to be confused with bluefish, which I don’t believe live in the Pacific). I had Tasmanian salmon. Then I impulsively got a hazelnut ice cream cone and walked around to the train station, which was running again.

And that was it. Tuesday morning (weird to think that it is still Tuesday here in the States) I got up, got a pain au chocolat for the plane, and caught my shuttle to the airport. Nineteen or so hours later, I'm about half an hour from landing in NYC, and it is still Tuesday afternoon. This has been, quite literally, the longest day of my life.

Tomorrow I leave for Sydney at noon. I have no idea what I'm going to do there, but it should be fun.

Beetles and a tiny house gecko at the Treehouse.

Some views of Peterson Creek.

A cool Australian native plant. I forget what it is. But it was growing by the Allumbah Pocket entrance to Peterson Creek.

Jed, the resident canine at On the Wallaby, and master of the sad puppy dog eyes.

It's been awhile since I've written anything. I wrapped up my platypus research, and headed back to Cairns on the 29^th. Spent rather a hectic week writing up the paper ("The effects of creek vegetation and invertebrate composition on the foraging behavior of the platypus, Ornithorhynchus anatinus, in Lower Peterson Creek, Yungaburra QLD"), but finished it by Saturday morning. We spent all day Sunday and Monday morning listening to each others' presentations, which was neat. It was interesting to hear what everyone had been doing for a month. Maria gave an excellent presentation on bee sperm and apiculture, Karen studied wallaby scats, Tim chased after sharks, Hannah looked at collective behavior in fish, Alyse improved cane toad traps… the list goes on and on. There were eighteen of us altogether.

Monday afternoon we headed off to somewhere (we didn't know where), which turned out to be Mission Beach. Stopped at a beautiful little swimming hole on the way, with a pebbly creek bottom and very clear water. And also at a fruit stand, where we bought tons of lychees. We ate them on the bus. In Mission Beach, we stayed at the Treehouse again, the hostel with the nice kitty cat. Monday night we went for a walk in the little town of Mission Beach, and had a barbeque on the deck. We ran into Tasha, Tony's other half, and his daughters Em and Elli at the fish and chips shop. There were heaps of interesting beetles at the hostel, including enormous rhinoceros beetles. Maria and I had fun looking at them. We tried going for a walk that night to look for more, but we didn't have much luck.

We spent Tuesday at the beach, swimming in the stinger nets (full-on stinger season now). The nets keep out box jellyfish, although the tiny irukandji jellyfish can still get though, as they're only about the size of your fingernail. But they monitor the amount of jellyfish in the stinger nets, so it's generally all right to swim. The water was beautiful and warm, and we had sun until the afternoon. Tony's family was there, as were Russ, Ian, and Giovanne. I was in the water most of the time, and Tony's kids were chasing Maria around because I told them that she was actually a crocodile. Then we had our last ever Merrell lunch, which was a bit sad. Back at the hostel almost all of us showered and promptly fell asleep, and then got dressed for our dinner.

We had dinner at a restaurant/resort called the Elandra, which was really very nice. They put Christmas crackers on all of the place settings, so we had a fun time with those (especially Tony's kids). I had six magnificent oysters to start (they call appetizers entrées here, for some unknown reason), and a delightful piece of salmon with a small salad and roasted potatoes. Lychee and green tea crème brûlée for dessert. And Tony ordered us some pretty nice wine to boot. It was quite a feast, and we all had a wonderful time (although Maria didn't really enjoy my oysters, poor thing). We got a bit silly on the way back to the hostel. Tony handed Em the bus's built-in microphone, and she started singing Australian Christmas songs, which are hilarious on so many levels. And the combination of extreme tiredness and a few glasses of wine got us all singing.

Wednesday morning we got up, threw our things in our bags, and headed off in the bus. We stopped at a beautiful stream in the rainforest on the way home, had a swim, and said goodbye to Ian, Russ, and Giovanne. Then we stopped at another fruit stand and bought about seven kilos of mangoes, and several more of lychees. I can't get over my excitement at being able to buy tropical fruits by the side of the road. We spent Wednesday afternoon clearing up odds and ends around Cairns. Most people were packing up, buying last minute gifts, closing bank accounts, etc. Then we met Tony in the evening. He handed back our field notebooks and a few other things, and read a little excerpt from everyone's notebook. Half the group, including Tony, was tearing up a bit by the end.

We decided that it would be nice to go out for Indian food, so we walked to the infamous Spicy Bite, down near the Esplanade. Unfortunately for the poor waitresses, we hadn't called ahead of time (there were nineteen of us), but they obligingly served us just the same. Maria and I split an order of samosas, and also shared palak paneer and dahl mahkni. Another nice meal. And Tony, the stinker, grabbed the bill before we knew what was happening, which was totally uncalled for (but very much appreciated). We went to walk around the Night Markets, and then came back to the hostel.

Everyone in our room except for Sydney and me was frantically packing, and I tried to make a start of it, too. People kept coming by asking if anyone needed this or that, or had extra space, or was on their flight. Tony came by and gave me an adorable little glass echidna, which was very, very sweet of him. And we all ended up in Karl's bar one more time, for our last evening. Carolyn was bawling her eyes out, along with several other people, but we had a good time in spite of it. I didn't end up going to bed until around midnight, and then I woke up at four in the morning because Hannah and Shannon had to catch their flights. By that point, poor Carolyn was positively wailing. But we got them to their cab all right, and saw them off.

This morning, Thursday, I got up around seven-thirty. I went out to have my tea, and found several people having breakfast with Tony, who had showed up to say goodbye. I cut up a bunch of mangoes, so we had mangoes and tea and wonderful Aussie yogurt. Around ten, Maria and I got our togs on and headed off to the Lagoon, the outdoor pool/artificial beach on the Esplanade. Remember that the city is built on a mud flat, and there are crocs on the muddy beach. But the Lagoon is filtered seawater, and faces the real ocean, and has fountains and beautiful lights at night, so it's a nice place to have a swim (it's also enormous, and approximately the shape of Queensland). Anyone can go there and have a swim.

We had to say goodbye to a few more people first, though. It's very strange to say goodbye to people who you may not see again. I'll certainly try to keep in touch with this wonderful group, but a few people are bound to slip through the cracks. It's sort of weird and sad. And we said goodbye to Tony, the Koala––our Fearless Leader. He has made so much of this trip possible, and he's a sweet and amazing man. I hope I get to see him again some day.

Despite this rather depressing start to things, we had a really nice swim. And then we came back, and said goodbye to a few more people. Maria was leaving around eleven-thirty, so I hung out with her until then. I was so sorry to see her go. She's off to New Zealand for a couple of weeks (flying home on Christmas Eve!). I'll miss having her around, though. She's a sweetie. People trickled out until about two-thirty, and now it's just Lauren, Sydney and me left. Sydney and I are going to Sydney (hee hee) on the same flight tomorrow at noon, although she'll be traveling on to New Zealand and Tahiti from there.

I spent a rather depressing afternoon packing things up and writing a few last postcards, and now we're about to go get dinner, although I don't yet know where.

And now, I'm back in Cairns. I got here on Monday, and I've pretty much been working on my paper since then. I get up around seven, and start writing at nine, when our classroom opens. And then I sit there and write until five, when we get kicked out. I'm only about halfway through, though. Still doing data analysis. But I'll try to have it done tonight, so that Nungi can edit it. It's a bit stressful, really, but it could be worse. I also have to give a presentation on Sunday, so I'll have to make a Powerpoint for that.

Last night we took a walk through the night markets, mostly for a break, although we also needed to get some small, assorted gifts. It's sort of a covered, non-food-related market with lots of stalls, and everything from touristy crap and kangaroo jerky to some food things and fun hats and jewelry and things.

This morning I went to the Yungaburra Market, which they have in the park every 4th Saturday of the month. It was a good time, and I've certainly never seen Yungaburra so crowded before. I actually had to wait to cross the street! Anyway, I got some mangoes and avocados (am I predictable, or what?), and passed up lots of other nice produce, as I'm going back to Cairns on Monday.

I'm pretty much done with data collection now, although I still go down to see the platypuses. I wouldn't want them to think that I've abandoned them.

Thanksgiving Pizza

Well, as much as I'm enjoying Australia, their Thanksgivings leave something to be desired. But perhaps they may be excused, because they don't actually celebrate Thanksgiving here. Since there's no oven in the hostel (excepting a toaster oven in which I recently, foolishly decided to make scones), I obviously couldn't roast a bird. And the butcher was out of fish. Which pretty much exhausted my feasting options. Feeling that it was a bit too pathetic to eat a baked potato on Thanksgiving, I ordered a pizza.

The pizza man, some poor landless Italian, was delighted with my pizza, saying it was by far the most edible pizza he had made since coming to Australia (he was rather horrified with the idea of putting chicken and pineapple on pizzas). So I talked with him for awhile. He had a girlfriend in Guam, but he couldn't immigrate there. He didn't seem like a very happy fellow.

I got back to the hostel, and ate my pizza with a glass of marginally nicer than usual Australian wine. My dinner companions consisted of a bunch of drunk Danes, a plumber from Cairns with "I Heart Beer" tattooed on his arm, and an existential German chimney sweep. I kid you not. I don't think I could make that up if I tried. Feeling rather like a character from a Sartre play myself, I went to bed around eight.

I have a new favorite German word. And it is...

Schnabeltier!

Which means platypus, if you couldn't have guessed. Ray, one of the blokes who works at On the Wallaby, has started to call me Schnabeltier. Which is very clever, you see, because it could be spelled Schnabelteer, as in one who Schnabelts, or goes platypussing! I am very excited about it.

Here I am with Nico, one of my German buddies, on the giant platypus pillow at On the Wallaby.

Beware of Attack Platypus!

Mr. Kitty! Looks a bit like Mr. Stray, doesn't he?

This is Itchy the Platypus. I always see her (I'm pretty sure it's a her) scratching her head with her hind foot. They steer with their back feet, and scratching messes up her steering, so she swims in circles. Very cute. I also caught her sliding down a little waterfall.

Here's a skink. He's kind of friendly, no?

Cute Tablelands cattle.

Odds and Ends

Today I thought I'd give a little lecture on the anemone fish (a.k.a. clownfish, or Nemo). As I'm sure you know, Finding Nemo is an extremely popular Pixar film about fish on the Great Barrier Reef. As a result, tourists on the Reef have an obsession with finding anemone fish (I have seen many of them, and they're pretty cute). Finding Nemo is one of the greatest advertising ploys for ecotourism out there. But I digress. In the movie, Marlin's wife, Coral, dies or gets eaten or something, so Marlin is left to raise Nemo alone. How sad. Well, Pixar really didn't do their research on this one. Here's what would actually have happened, biologically speaking… Coral, the large, female fish, would die. Sad, but it happens. What Pixar didn't account for is that anemone fish are protandrous. In laymen's terms, this means that they are hermaphrodites whose male sex organs mature before their female organs. In clownfish, this maturation occurs only after the large, dominant female fish dies and needs to be replaced by the smaller male. Basically, when Coral died Marlin would have become a girl, and Nemo would have become the new breeding male. Sort of a raunchy tale of incestuous fish, if you ask me. Is this really appropriate for children?

I must also address the issue of Foster's Lager, as people continue to mention it to me. I have seen neither hide nor hair of Foster's during my time in Australia. I'm sure it's around somewhere, but it's certainly not ubiquitous. There is a Queensland beer called XXXX (Four X), however, that's quite common around here. The big joke is that Queenslanders are too dumb to spell beer, so they just put XXXX on the can instead. XXXX Bitter has an ad campaign claiming that it's a "Man in a Can." Oy.

I was in Cairns for over a week this time. We got there around noon on Sunday, and spent the day being relatively unproductive and generally decompressing. On Monday evening our fish papers were due, so we spent Sunday night and Monday working on those. Tuesday we started writing our big papers for Thursday evening, so those three days were pretty hectic as well. My paper was on the evolutionary advantages of the mating practices of echidnas.

Friday was a marginally less stressful day. I got up at five in the morning to go to Rusty's Market, which is amazing and has unbelievable produce, and Mara came with me. We got tons of fruit, and I had a glass of fresh-squeezed sugarcane juice (with lime, which gave it a very nice flavor). Mara had coconut milk. They lopped the top off of the coconut (a whole coconut, still in the green hull) with a meat cleaver, and put a straw in it for her. It was a bit violent, really. When we got back to the Greenhouse, we made crêpes with fresh fruit. It was a nice time. Then we had class for about an hour, just to go over some business about our research projects and our exam. Hannah and I went to a lovely little bakery/café for lunch, and I had a mini quiche and some pumpkin soup with a salad, which was very nice. I also got a beautiful gingerbread cookie to take with me. I spent the rest of the day studying for the exam, which we took on Saturday morning. And so ended stage one of our semester.

I still hadn't heard anything promising from the echidna people, so I decided to stay in Cairns until Wednesday morning, in hopes that I'd hear from them (I had a few loose ends dangling). But alas, I had no luck. Most people left for their ISPs on Sunday, with a few stragglers on Monday and Tuesday. Mara and Natasha are doing their ISPs in Cairns, so they stuck around the Greenhouse for a little while, too. But on Wednesday morning I took a bus to Atherton. It was pouring rain and I had all of my luggage, which was a bit of a pain. But the bus stop in Atherton was covered, so it was all right. Tony lives in Yungaburra, so he offered to come and pick me up at the bus station (there is no bus to Yungaburra, and Atherton is about as close as you can get with public transportation). We stopped on the way back to give extra tent stakes and a spotlight to some poor, wet bloke from the SIT program in Byron Bay, who was camping near Mareeba looking for possums or something. And then we got to On the Wallaby again.

I've been here a week now, and I've started doing my research. To quote from my project proposal, "I will be attempting to determine how creek vegetation and invertebrate composition affect platypus foraging behavior in Peterson Creek (Yungaburra, QLD)." Which basically means that I get up very early and look for platypuses (this is the correct plural of platypus, by the way, although you sometimes see people use platypus as the plural as well as the singular). And then I look for platypuses again at dusk, because they are mostly nocturnal. I'm timing how long they spend diving as opposed to cruising around on the surface, for one thing. Platypuses can't chew underwater (they don't have teeth, but they have plates of keratin in their bills that they sort of squish their prey against), so the idea is that if there are lots of invertebrates, the platypus makes a short dive and comes up to the surface to chew. If there aren't so many invertebrates, the platypus is forced to look harder for prey, and remains under the surface for longer periods. I'll also be measuring the invertebrate populations in other ways, but I won't bore you. You can read my study if you're interested.

Yungaburra is a sleepy little town, considerably smaller than Emmaus, but it's a pretty nice place. The creek and its high numbers of platypuses attract tourists, and there are a number of little places to stay. On the Wallaby runs "eco adventure tours" out of Cairns, so every day or two there's a group that comes to stay over. People come in and out here quickly, for the most part, but there's usually someone interesting to eat dinner with. There have been tons of French people and Brits here this week, for some reason. I have been sorry to discover that I have very little French left, after three years of not speaking it. The grammar is still in my brain but my vocabulary is tiny now. There was one young French woman who stayed here for a couple of nights who liked to come down and watch the platypuses with me in the early morning. And there was a cute French couple who gave me some of their mangoes.

Tony has been extraordinarily helpful to me, especially setting up some of my blocks to measure invertebrate populations. He's a very nice man. I met his kids briefly the other day, Ellie and Em (Eliana and Emmigen, but I'm not sure of the correct spelling), and they are bright and funny.

There's not a lot to do here during the day, since I don't have a car or even a bicycle, but I usually work on the non platypus-dependent parts of my study, and read, and walk around. Yesterday I got the insane notion to walk to the local cheese factory and dairy, which is about 8.5k (about 5.5 miles) from On the Wallaby. I wasn't really sure where it was, so I took the, er, scenic route there and back. But there wasn't too much traffic most of the way, and the Tablelands are very pretty. It will always be strange to me, though, to see the cattle and pastures surrounded by patches of rainforest. The Gallo Dairy has a little window where you can watch them making the cheese, and a nice cheese and chocolate shop where you can taste anything you like. I got two little pieces of cheese, a gorgonzola and one called Seven Sisters (named after seven bumpy hills on the Tablelands), which is sort of like a softer version of Gruyére. And a handful of chocolate with mango and berries. On my way out, I stopped to see the cows and found that they had a few other animals as well, including some grouchy geese, a sheep, a goat, various chickens and doves, and a pig. Trust me to travel halfway across the world to find a pig. He was a cute little barrow, black and white, and they had given him a pumpkin earlier in the day, so his snout was orange. On the walk back, I saw a confused platypus swimming in a culvert at three o'clock in the afternoon. Apparently someone forgot to tell it that it's a nocturnal animal. On the other hand, platypuses don't seem to know that they shouldn't be laying eggs, either, so maybe they're just arbitrary by nature.

Last night a couple of crazy German guys, Alex and Nico, came in with the tour group, and they were extremely amused by my fascination with platypuses. So I ate dinner with them and their tour group, and had a pleasant evening. This morning, instead of walking on my usual transect, I went on a dawn canoeing trip with the tour (they couldn't do night canoeing for the tour last night, so they offered to do an early morning one, and invited me along). We saw six platypuses (an excellent run, as I've never seen more than four in a two-hour data collection period), some wallabies and water dragons, a sleepy possum, and two tree kangaroos. The first tree kangaroo we saw was still very much awake, and we had a great view of her, so we watched her do her tree kangaroo thing until she disappeared. The German blokes were very excited. Everything they liked, they called a "great success," over and over again. They kept asking me if I had seen this animal or that animal (I'd seen everything but a wombat), and they were very jealous that I had seen echidnas. We didn't see any wombats, unfortunately, but we had a lovely time canoeing (except for Jed, the resident dog here at OTW, who insisted on coming in the boats and perching uncomfortably on the bow, howling the entire time).

And now I'm sitting on the couch upstairs, writing this and thinking about what to do today.

Saturday we went to Watson's Bay again in the morning, and looked for more fish. Becca, my snorkel buddy, and I decided on the chocolate-dip damselfish and the sergeant-major scissortail for our fish study. In the afternoon, after our lecture, we went to another reef on the exposed side of the island, called (charmingly) Washing Machine. It felt rather like being in a washing machine, actually, because it was quite a windy day. We almost went to a calmer reef, but decided that it was all right. Washing Machine was a really cool reef. It wasn't very deep until it dropped off of a coral shelf to around 15 metres. You could swim down and peer at all of the little critters hanging on the edge, which was pretty neat. I really like the yellow boxfish, which looks sort of like a bright yellow origami paper ball with fins, a snout, and brown spots. They tend to hang out in little crevices and swim around being friendly. But the current was strong, and there were some biggish waves coming back on the boats, so we got a bit cold and wet on the ride home.

Saturday night is barbeque night on Lizard Island. I was on cooking duty, so we made some potato salad with yams and a bunch of other stuff.

Sunday morning was Watson's Bay again. Beginning to notice a pattern? We went to Watson's Bay every morning until Saturday. But I get ahead of myself. Sunday afternoon we went to a beautiful reef called Horseshoe. Horseshoe is a special reef, because circumstances conspired to make it one of the most pristine reefs in the world. It's quite sheltered by the island, and so it hasn't had much damage from wave energy or big storms or anything. And, during the crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks in the past, Lyle and his wife Ann swam around and pulled all of the starfish off of the reef. Crown-of-thorns starfish are extremely spiny (it's really bad to get stuck by one, as they tend to cause infections and lost limbs), large echinoderms that eat coral. There are lots of things on the reef that eat coral, like butterfly fish, but crown-of-thorns are particularly efficient at killing coral. One starfish can easily take out several large colonies in a relatively short time. While crown-of-thorns are naturally occurring, something (probably that dastardly global warming) has been causing outbreaks of them along the reef, which is seriously damaging coral structure.

I could continue to give a day-by-day account of the rest of the Lizard Island trip, but it might grow a bit tedious. I don't mean to imply that the trip was in any way tedious. On the contrary, it was extremely enjoyable and fascinating. But it is impossible for me to describe with words how different each of the reefs was, and how incredibly vast the diversity and beauty of the reef was in each location. Suffice to say that we visited a new reef each afternoon, except Thursday, when we returned to Horseshoe.

I saw all sorts of incredible critters over the course of the week. On the second Thursday, I swam with a hawk-billed sea turtle, and touched its shell. They are amazing animals. They look like they're flying through the water. I also saw a quickly vanishing octopus, a few cuttlefish, and many squids. Squids are adorable. There was a little submarine (probably not the term for a group of squids, but it seems appropriate) of squids that I often saw in Watson's Bay, composed of three small, pink ones. But one day I saw eleven squids!

There are quite a lot of giant clams in Watson's Bay. They come in all sizes, but the giant ones (which are not at all uncommon) are about a metre long, if not a little larger. Clams are also very colorful critters. Although their shells are clam-colored, the clam part of the clam comes in all sorts of colors and patterns. Sometimes they have Maori-looking line patterns on them, or polka dots, or stripes. Sometimes they are fluorescent, and almost look like that dichroic glass that my mom likes. They can be pink, purple, green, blue, yellow, and all sorts of colors in between, although they aren't usually red or orange (red disappears after 3 metres in depth, by the way, because there's not enough light). They're really not very clammy at all.

The reason that I am going to great pains to describe giant clams has to do with my research on Wednesday morning. Becca and I were minding our own business, swimming along and laying out a measuring tape across a 25 metre transect of the coral and rubble zone. We were collecting data on the benthic composition of the reef, to use for our fish project, so every 50 centimetres we recorded what was under the measuring tape. Relatively straightforward. So we finished with our transect, and started to reel up the tape, when we realized that it was stuck on something. Something that seemed to have a bit more of a hold on it than the piece of coral we had attached the end to. Hmmm. We swam along the tape until we came to… a giant clam. Not just any giant clam, but a giant clam who had decided to close around our measuring tape. A giant clam which didn't particularly wish to relinquish its hold on our measuring tape, either. We were afraid to pull the loose end through the clam, because there was a pointy metal clip at the end of the tape, which would have torn up the poor clam. We waited half an hour. And it didn't open. Finally, we had to call Darren and have him come and scoot the metal end out, but it took some doing. The insolent clam seemed fine, although it refused to apologize, and we had rather an amusing excuse for failing to finish our data collection.

Other reefs that we visited included the reefs off of Pelfry and South islands, Mermaid Cove, and Vicky's (a.k.a. "Big Bikkies," which means lots of money in Australian). I always looked forward to the afternoon snorkel as a break from data collection and a nice swim, as well as a slightly longer boat ride. I loved being in boats all the time. Would have been fun to have a sailboat, though (although totally impractical for the research station, of course).

Both Tony and Shannon had birthdays during the trip, so I got on cake duty twice, which was nice. Tony's was chocolate with crushed Tim Tams, and Shannon's was carrot cake with ginger and raisins (she's one of those strange people who doesn't like chocolate). Had to use boxed cakes, unfortunately, but they came out all right. Shannon turned twenty-one, and was rather eager to celebrate, so someone got the bright idea to walk to the only bar on the island (that is, the only bar we're allowed to go to––I'm sure the resort has several). As it turns out, the only bar on the island is the Marlin Bar, which is for the workers at the resort. So we all set out on the sand roads, and walked about three kilometres until we got to the Marlin Bar. There was one other woman in the place. But, the intrepid SIT students were not cowed, and in we went. Karen and I were both pretty tired at this point, so we just had a gin and tonic and chatted for a bit, before making our excuses and heading off home, in the dark and pouring rain. Never before (and never again) have I walked six kilometres for a gin and tonic. They didn't even have any limes.

Saturday morning we got up and, atypically, didn't go to Watson's Bay. Well, that's not entirely a true statement. We got in the boats, drove to Watson's Bay, and then got off at the beach instead of snorkeling. We got on the path up to Cook's Look, the highest point on the island and a bit of a climb. The story goes that, after Captain Cook landed (he crashed on the reef coming in and had to get the ship fixed), he had rather a tough time finding a way back into open ocean again, because of the uncharted reef. So, he landed on Lizard Island and climbed the peak. It was too foggy for him to see anything, so he stayed up there for a few days until it was clear enough to see a gap in the reef. It's actually quite believable. The view from the top is absolutely incredible (I didn't take my camera because it was pouring rain on and off, but I'll try to get a photo from someone), and you can see all of Lizard, Pelfry, and South Islands (Pelfry and South are tiny islands right next to Lizard), as well as a few miles of reef.

When we got down from the climb we went snorkeling in the Clam Gardens, which is basically right in the middle of all the fancy boats from the resort. We had another Saturday evening barbeque (I was on dinner duty again), and went to bed. And Sunday morning we caught our planes and flew out, back to Cairns, our lab reports, papers, and exam.

Here is my measuring tape. It got stuck in a giant clam. Really. What are the odds? I'll write more about it later.

This is Maud, a small blue sea star in the display tank in the main building.

The seawater aquariums at LIRS. There were always people coming in and out here, looking at fish.

The LIRS fleet. We had two dinghies and one larger boat, although I preferred to ride in the smaller ones.

The view from the beach closest to the station. These are two tiny little islands next to Lizard, which isn't that big either.

Lizard Island.

One of the reefs from the air.

Here we are, running through the pouring rain to our plane (directly in front of us). It was wet.

Here's Lauren in a room at the Lodge.

Yesterday, Thursday, I got up at six, had my tea, finished stowing away almost all of my gear and clothing, and headed out to the Cairns Airport. Barrier Aviation, the wing we flew out of, had a microwave and one of those machines that you get a handful of candy out of. And some metal chairs. And not much else. Kind of looked like an out-of-commission rec room. They called us out in small groups, weighed our luggage, and then weighed us! It took three planes to get twenty of us to Lizard Island, because the planes only held nine people, including the pilot. It was absolutely pouring rain in Cairns, so we sprinted out to our plane with our bedraggled pilot. He showed me how to work the door of the plane (I had the "exit row" seat, which basically meant I was sitting next to the door), got in, and off we went, up into the extremely wild, not-so-very-blue yonder. But we got up, and once we got over the cloud cover it was quite lovely. The clouds burned off as we got away from Cairns, and you could see the reefs from the air. I tried to take some photos, but we'll see how they came out. The internet is a bit spotty here, so I'm not sure when I'll get them up. Anyway, the flight was about an hour, and we landed in the Lizard Island Airport. Which is a pavilion with some wicker chairs. And that's it.
Lyle, one of the two administrators here at the Lizard Island Research Station, came out to pick us up in his 4X4 and drove us along the sandy track to the station. We're staying in two dorm-style houses, about a two-minute walk from the beach, and a one-minute walk from the main LIRS building. We unloaded the food and bags, made a quick lunch, and went to the beach.
This place is incredible. We didn't have to get on a boat to snorkel. We put on our stinger suits, fins, and masks, hopped in the water, and swam about fifty metres to the reef. And snorkeled for about two hours. I saw another sea turtle, which was pretty cool, and thousands of fish. I like the little Christmas tree worms, which sort of look like rainbow bottle-brushes sticking out of the coral. And the coral itself is amazing. One perk of being a scientist is that you're allowed to touch things. Which, I'm pretty sure, the people paying $2000+ a night at the Lizard Island Resort aren't allowed to do. Hahaha. Incidentally, the resort and LIRS are the only places that people are permitted to stay on the island, aside from a small, limited-access campground. Not sure how Tony got our program in here, as LIRS is a really serious, high-demand research station that only takes around 12 student groups a year, but I'm awfully glad he did.

Friday I got up at six, ate breakfast, and went to the little classroom for a five-minute talk about Watson's Bay, one of the sheltered reefs where we'll be collecting the data for our fish project. Then we had a short boat ride in the cheerful yellow LIRS boats and started snorkeling on the reef, which happens to be right in front of the resort. There are tons of huge, fancy boats in the water. There's one particular sailboat, a three-master called the Juniper, which is especially nice. Daddy would like it. But anyway, Watson's Bay is a very shallow reef, only about six metres at the water column. We were supposed to scope out potential study fish for our fish project.
We had a few minutes of down time after coming in, followed by lunch, followed by a lecture. Then we got back in the water and headed to part of the outer reef, on the exposed side of the island. This reef was quite deep, probably about ten metres, so you couldn't do much diving down and poking around in things. But there was a lot of coral cover there. I looked out to the ocean side of the reef while I was swimming, and was surprised by a school of enormous (<4m) bumphead parrotfish! There were around thirty of them, and they were really cool. I swam with them for awhile. They are sort of like aquatic cattle in their demeanor.

...and Cairns Again

Had just three full days in Cairns. Not a terribly thrilling week, although we met a very interesting woman in one of the certified Aboriginal art shops. Becca and I were walking down the street and happened to stop and look in the shop, and the lady came out and started talking to us. Her name was Adina, and she was Bosnian. Came here quite a few years ago, and ended up working in this art shop. She was really interested in the art and artists, and she told us all about everything, and showed us some interesting plants that she had kicking around. We ended up talking with her for almost an hour. Didn't buy any art, though, although I'm sorely tempted by one painting she has in there. It's of an echidna and termite mounds, and it's printed on that pressed cotton that our friend Solomon did his paintings on. Sort of reminds me of those, in a way.

Forgot to add this one. Don't mess with me!

John looking, I think, pleasantly surprised by his Drambuie. He teased us about bribing him to give us As on our presentations.

John, cutting his cake.

Here's the second echidna, at The Lodge. What a nice little fellow he is! See his cute little eyes and beak on the left? He's a bit muddy from burrowing.

Why did the amethystine python cross the road? To slither off into the leaves, of course.

A sunny field at Don and Jill's tree farm.

A beautiful place. These are all native rainforest trees.

I could never get tired of waterfalls. This one is at Hypipamee.

This enormous tree, a Eucalyptus grandis, is a habitat for yellow-bellied gliders. You can see how far up it has burned.

This is Nandroya Falls, a bloody enormous waterfall. It was sort of like being on the set of an Indiana Jones movie (my adventure hat added to that a bit).

On the way to Nandroya, we had a little stream-fording. Thank you, whoever told me to bring water shoes.

A cassowary! This was the first of two that we saw on Sunday, and he was just next to the veranda of the Treehouse.

Nunu cat, at the Treehouse. What a nice boy!

Please do not feed the cassowaries! This is in a licuala, or fan palm, swamp.

The view from the top of Bicton Hill.

Some lianas at Bicton Hill.

Josephine falls.

Eubanangee Swamp, from the top of a grassy knoll. Note that the trees are paperbarks.

Tony and John walking down the hill.

Here's part of our group, with Black Mountain in the background. Left to right: Amanda, Lauren (below), Megan, myself, Shannon, Drew, Sydney (with her arms up), Becca S, Becca B (with her back turned), and Karen.

Here's a goanna. We found him on a rock in the stream by our Lakefield campsite.