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.

Hannah didn't catch anything either, but here's her bait.

A view of Lakefield. There are feral cows in the park, so sometimes they'd be crossing the road or hanging out around the termite mounds.

This is a frogmouth owl, roosting during the day. Can you spot him?

Here's Ian.

A Bit More

Tuesday night, on the way back from Atherton, we stopped at a random stream at dusk to go platypussing. We saw three, and I had seen four there the previous day (Merrell stopped on our way home from the doctor's office), which brings the total platypus count up to eleven! Hannah did her fauna presentation on platypuses, and so now we are all well-informed.

Wednesday morning dawned rainy and unpleasant, and I woke up shortly after. We met Tony to go bird watching in some of the forest around the lodge. It was wet, and muddy, and generally miserable. We did, however, see some neat birds, the most impressive of which were probably the pair of King Parrots that flew above us. I am hoping to find a parrot feather to put in my adventure hat, which you will see when I next post pictures. We also saw another cassowary, and got about three feet away from him (he was a young male)!

After bird watching, we discussed our projects for the next few days. My group (Megan, Becca, Shannon and I) decided to look at freshwater invertebrates in the stream. We chose this, of course, before actually walking down to the stream. The stream is only a fifteen minute walk from the house, but my, what a walk. It rains about eighty percent of the time here, so everything is always wet. And the track is always muddy. And hilly. Very, very steep. So, all things considered, one tends to slide downhill for fifteen minutes instead of actually walking. Coming up is quite a challenge. And walking off of the track is not really an option, as there are stinging trees. There is no poison ivy in Australia, but there are stinging trees. When you get stung by a stinging tree (which I've managed to avoid thus far), it sticks its microscopic prickles into your skin where they remain, burning you, for up to six or eight months. Not really dangerous, but extremely painful, I'm told. So, once we made it to the stream, battered and not a little muddy, we set up our transects (we are comparing pool invertebrates to riffle invertebrates) and came up with our experimental design.

Wednesday afternoon we made a large lunch, because we were only having sandwiches for dinner. We made our sandwiches and headed off around four-thirty in the afternoon, for an evening spotting of yellow-bellied gliders, a type of adorable possum related to the sugar glider that people sometimes keep as pets. As it turns out, our resident Ph.D. is a possum expert. Poor Amanda chose possums for her fauna presentation, and realized that John Winter wrote the book. Literally. Two of the books she used, actually. He's Australia's foremost authority on eastern possums, and he also graded all of our presentations. He's a decent fellow, though. I think he's British originally, judging by his accent. And very, very passionate about possums.

On the way to the forest of Monday morning (Tumoulin State Forest, to be precise), the most marvelous thing happened. We were driving along when Tony hit the brakes rather suddenly and said, with a note of surprise in his voice, "I think that's an echidna!" Fortunately, I was in the very front of the bus. I think I probably had my head out the door before he completely stopped the bus, and I jumped out and ran up to the beautiful little echidna at the side of the road. He was very startled by the bus, and scurried down the bank off the side of the road, but I saw his (her?) spiny little face and his long, cute little pointy nose from about five feet away. Echidnas aren't very fast, so instead of running the little fellow began to dig into the ground and curl into a ball, exposing only his sharp spines and spiky tail. So I got to do my fauna presentation with a real echidna, after all (I was afraid that we wouldn't find one or, even worse, find one flattened on the road). I don't think it was the best presentation I've ever done. I was really excited, and had been eating macadamia nuts on the bus and not had time for a drink of water, which made my cough flare up a bit. But I think John and Tony probably understood. Tony said, later, that they had only ever seen two echidnas on SIT trips in the past, so the echidna gods must have been smiling on me.

Tumoulin was amazing, too. The yellow gliders were adorable, and John was very funny. He was so excited to show us the possums, but seemed very conflicted about having his light on, as he didn't want to bother them. He'd flash the light on and then say, "No, too much light!" and then flick it off again. But they were really adorable little creatures. I'll try to find a photo of them for you. It was much to dark to photograph them without a serious flash. One glided right over our heads and landed on the tree above us, and another did a little series of acrobatics on a tree about a hundred feet away. The gliders eat the sugary sap out of holes made by birds during the day. They also make the funniest noises. They almost sound like plastic tarps flapping about rapidly in the wind.

Thursday morning we took a brief outing to Wongabel State Forest, which is one of the only remaining areas with type 5b rainforest (which I will not explain, for fear of boring you all to tears). But it was a lovely spot, and we had a nice short walk and finished up the last of the presentations. Then we stopped in at On the Wallaby on the way back to The Lodge, to say hello to the lovely owner and get a few postcards and t-shirts.

We spent the afternoon doing data collection for our project and fending off leeches, which seemed to like the nefarious mud around our stream. It was relatively uneventful, and we made an early night of it after we grilled about eighty-thousand kebabs (only a slight exaggeration––Merrell provides for us quite well).

Today, Friday, we spent the whole day doing data collection. We went out around nine-thirty. While Shannon and I were standing in the stream (we collected the pool data), I looked down and saw a bloody enormous fish about a foot away from my leg. When I looked again, I realized that it was actually a platypus! I could have reached out and touched him. He was going pretty fast, though, and made it downstream before Becca and Megan got a look at him. As it turns out, Shannon and I saw quite a bit of wildlife (including a boatload of invertebrates). In addition to the platypus, we saw quite a good-sized turtle, maybe two feet long, and something mysteriously reptilian. We're not sure if it was a large aquatic goanna or a small freshwater croc, but it shot out of the stream at about thirty miles an hour and dashed up the bank. It went too fast to get much of a look, though.

In the afternoon we sorted out our data and started putting it together for a little presentation (old-school, with big sheets of paper and markers) that we'll give before we leave The Lodge. After dinner, I was sitting at the kitchen table eating my Tim-Tam and drinking my tea when Drew, whose group is doing a project spotlighting for possums, came to our door and offered to trade me an echidna sighting for the rest of the Tim-Tams. I obliged, and followed him out into the rain. Drew and Keven saw the little guy (quite a young echidna, judging by the fully intact spines and small size) perambulating across the lawn near the gate, a few hundred metres from the Main House. He (she?) was curled into a ball when I got there, but I sat on the ground with my light out until he came out. Echidnas are generally nocturnal in tropical areas (they become more crepuscular and even completely diurnal in more temperate climates, but they don't like being hot), so it was actually very unusual to see an echidna in the light as we did on Wednesday. He uncurled after about fifteen minutes, and I got a good look at his little face. I was only about two feet away from him. He got a little scared by the light, though, and curled up again. Some more people came out to look at him, and eventually he got up and waddled off into the bush. What a lovely little creature. Now I'm sitting at the kitchen table in the Dairy, but I'm about to go to sleep. We're going hiking all day tomorrow.

Today, Saturday, we went off on a hike to a spot called The Bluff which was, well, a bluff. We all got compasses and map coordinates, and we were supposed to determine where we were going, where we were starting, and how we were getting there. So, we pulled up to a field of lantanas, which are a nasty invasive scrub bush, and off we went. No paths. We found it eventually, without too much drama, and then we had lunch looking out over the bluff. The route was mostly open eucalyptus forest, dominated by the lemon-scented eucalyptus, a lovely tree. It actually smells like lemons, and you get little wafts of pleasant citrusy air as you walk through the forest.

This evening we had a little party for John, as it's his last time coming with an SIT group. Apparently he's seventy-five, although I would never have put him above sixty-five. He kept up hiking better than some of the students on the trip. We put together a sponge cake for him, and Merrell bought him a bottle of Drambuie, which he loves. I think he appreciated it.

~a

Eubanangee Swamp, a paperbark swamp on a rainy day.

Eucalypts and Waterfalls and... Leeches?!? Oh, My!

Friday morning we left for the rainforest. We have a bus again (I miss having the troopies and Ian to drive us), and a resident Ph.D. by the name of John Winters. We also have a lot of stressful anticipation, because we each have two presentations to do during the trip, one on a flora and one on a fauna. The catch is, we could have to present at any time. I have echidnas and Arecaceae (the palm family), and if someone saw an echidna I would have to present. I got the palms over with today (which is Saturday), which I was more concerned about, but echidnas will be later. I really liked researching echidnas, though, so I don't mind.

Friday we stopped in a random alluvial plain of the Mulgrave river, before driving to Eubanangee Swamp National Park, where we took a walk through the rainforest only to end up on a surprisingly North American-looking grassy knoll. Looking over the knoll, however, I was reminded that I was in Australia by the paperbark swamp and bogs. We stopped for lunch on a nice little stretch of beach, and ended at Josephine Falls, a little waterfall in a stretch of rainforest.

We checked in to the Treehouse, our hostel for two nights, and found a nice kitty and a friendly puppy dog (something crossed with an Australian shepherd). Frankly, they could have put us up in a cardboard box in the rain and, had there been a cat, we would have thought it was the nicest place we'd stayed so far.

Let me mention the rain. There's a funny thing about rainforests. It rains here. A lot. An unbelievable amount, in fact. Last night it rained so hard, and was so windy, that we were all up half the night. It's warm rain, and not really very unpleasant, but my, is it ever rainy.

Today, Saturday, we went for a hike up Bicton Hill, where we looked at several different levels of disturbance in the forest along the way. And got rained on. Several of us got leeches, including myself. They fall from the trees, here, as well as hanging out in streams. Apparently they sometimes fall on people's eyeballs. I'm not making that up, by the way. You're not supposed to pull them off of your eyes, because you can rip off your corneas in the process. But they fall off eventually. Leeches are particularly attracted to Shannon, and she's had at least four already.

We also stopped at Licuala Swamp, which is a fan palm swamp (the endemic species being Licuala ramsayi). We just took a look around, and Becca told us about musky rat kangaroos, the smallest critter in the kangaroo family. This is cassowary country, but we haven't seen any here yet. It's only a matter of time.

We got poured on during lunch, which was at Mission Beach, and then headed to a short trail that led down to another, lovely beach. It poured on and off all day, but that was all right. John identified some species for us, and we talked about geology and topography. Then we went beach combing for a little while, and ended up walking to the end of a pier that went about 200 metres out. Got back to the Treehouse a few hours ago, now, and we're about to go out to dinner. At a restaurant. No idea what we did to deserve this, on SIT's dollar, but here goes.

Saturday evening was lovely. We went to an actual restaurant, and quite a nice one at that, although it had the rather silly name of The Shrubbery. Reminiscent of Monty Python. They let us order whatever we wanted, so I had sun-dried tomato bruschetta with goat cheese and mozzarella, and the fish of the day, which was called nanna guy. The fish was served on a bed of sweet potatoes and green beans. Both were very nice. I also split a piece of chocolate mud cake with Karen. We were all a bit touched that Tony thought to take us out somewhere nice, and we had a great time.

On Sunday we started off the day with two cassowaries! I saw the first one in the yard at the hostel, and the second ran out in front of our bus. They are really cool birds. I'll post a photo of the one at the hostel, which was not huge, but the one we saw from the bus was quite large. After the cassowaries, we got to the Mamu Canopy Walk, which is basically a series of catwalks through the rainforest canopy. It was really neat to see the rainforest from a different perspective, and to be able to get a look at what was going on above the ground (which was a lot). We got soaked, though, because it poured rain all day. After the canopy walk, we met Merrell the Brave at a picnic spot and had our lunch. Then we took about a three hour hike up to Nandroya Falls, which is an enormous waterfall. I felt like I was on a movie set. It was pretty incredible. A few people went swimming, but I abstained, as it was pouring rain, the water was freezing, and I was not feeling one hundred percent. Those of us who remained on the bank fended off leeches.

I must pause in my narrative to give a brief introduction to leeches. Leeches are of the class Hirudinea, and there are many species. Nandroya Falls is one of the leech capitols of the Wet Tropics, and although the leeches there are relatively small, they are certainly ambitious. You don't have to be walking through water to get them (although that is an effective method). They have electroreceptors that can sense when fresh meat is coming by, and they can actually jump onto you. They also inch by like little inchworms (only a bit less endearing), and sneak into your shoes and onto your ankles. Becca got the leech award on Sunday, with eight leeches on her feet within about five minutes. The people who went in the water at the falls got them, too, mostly between the toes and on the ankles. I only had three, although there was a fourth rolling around in my shoe, which was rather an unpleasant experience. Leeches don't hurt (they actually secrete a numbing agent so that you don't notice them), but they do secrete anti-coagulants so it's sometimes hard to get the bleeding to stop.

Sunday evening we got to The Lodge, which will be home for the rest of the rainforest trip. The Lodge isn't a hostel, but a series of three buildings (the Main House, the Annex, and the Dairy) way out in the country on the Tablelands. Our closest neighbors are some cattle. So are our next-closest neighbors. And so on. It's really pretty country out here, and sort of looks like Switzerland minus the snowy caps on the Alps. Rolling, very steep hills, lots of cattle, very green, pine trees… but the trees are mostly hoop and bunya pines, which have a distinctly Australian flavour. And the cattle are all Brahman crosses, which seem to do well in Australia.

I'm staying in the Dairy, which is the nicer house, with eight other girls. The other nine people are staying in the Main House, and John and Merrell are in the Annex with Tony. All of the students cook together in the evenings. It's really pretty cozy, although the houses are extremely primitive. There's a woodstove in our house, so I've been starting fires every evening.

Monday started out pouring but, mercifully, cleared up around nine-thirty in the morning. We started out in a spot of tall eucalypt forest, which was pretty impressive. The trees are all scarred by fire, sometimes up to their very crowns. We saw mostly Eucalyptus grandis and red stringy-bark trees. Then we headed off to lunch, before going to see the crater at Hypipamee National Park, which was formed by a hot water explosion. Then we took a short waterfall walk, and saw three very nice, albeit smallish, waterfalls. In the late afternoon Merrell took Natasha to the doctor, as she is really quite sick, and I rode along to see what nasty little virus has been bothering me. I'm fine, though. He said it would be gone in a day or two. I actually feel very well, I'm just coughing a bit.

Today, Tuesday, is beautiful. Sunny and in the lower seventies, with a light breeze. We started the day at a park that abuts a marvelous piece of private land. The park includes a rainforest corridor that a local conservation group has been working on for several years now, and it allows critters, notably birds and small mammals, to pass through the agricultural land of the Tablelands. We also checked out the private land. One retired couple owns the land, and they're incredibly inspiring. Fifteen or so years ago, they started to revegetate their land with native rainforest trees. They have now planted over 25,000 trees. They have both forest areas and crop trees. The crop trees are for "bush tucker" or for lumber, and they have about 20 species scattered about that can be sustainably harvested in about 40 years. We met Jill briefly, and she's an old British lady, out in her sun hat with her gardening gloves.

Then we headed to Lake Barrine, where we looked fruitlessly for musky rat kangaroos, and ate lunch at Lake Eacham. Now I'm sitting in an internet café in Atherton, using the very slow internet with four other people. Hope everyone over there on the home front is doing all right.

~a

Sunday was our first free day of the semester, which was a bit weird. I slept in until nine o'clock (!), and did a bit of work for the rest of the morning. I spent all afternoon in the kitchen with Hannah, baking a red velvet cake for Drew's birthday. Drew is the baby of the group, and he just turned twenty last week. We're all juniors and seniors in school, though. The funny thing was, the Greenhouse kitchen doesn't actually have an oven. How, you ask, did you bake a cake without an oven? Well. We grilled it. No joke. There's a flat-topped grill that has a little rack under it, maybe four inches of space beneath the cooking surface. And that's where we put the cake. We actually had to cook one side, turn it over, and cook the other side. And we beat the cream cheese icing by hand. That's love, for you. In the end it came out beautifully, but it was certainly a struggle. I'll post a few pictures, to satisfy your inevitable incredulity. I think we should buy a cake for Shannon's birthday, though. We had a little party for Drew in the evening with Carl, the Greenhouse's Kiwi bartender who teased us about grilling the cake.

Monday through Thursday we stayed at the Greenhouse, having lectures in the morning and wearing ourselves out on schoolwork in the afternoons. We cooked some meals (I discovered that kangaroo is quite nice when marinated in soy sauce á la Dave Sloan and seared on the grill) and ate some out, especially at the falafel joint on the next block. I'm a bit sick, unfortunately, for the first time since parent's weekend my freshman year. Lousy timing. But nothing too bad. I mostly just feel lousy in the mornings and evenings.

Camping... The Final Installment

Tuesday morning I saw a little wallaby outside of my tent when I got up in the morning. He was very cute. We had sort of a relaxing day on Tuesday, staying around camp and just hanging out. We painted boomerangs in the morning, and learned to throw spears, which was a good time. Although I don't think I'll be spearing any wallabies more than about fifteen feet away. The Aboriginals use a spear thrower, called a woomera (sp?), to extend the length of the arm. We were throwing the spears at abandoned anthills, which made nice, large targets. Russell also took us out for a short walk, and we talked about some of the plants we saw and their Aboriginal uses. We also got Aboriginal names, just for a lark, over the course of the week. Mine was Biligi (sp?), which means the first light.

Took my first "shower" on Tuesday, in the shallow part of the stream near our campsite. Since I a. had no soap and b. couldn't have put soap in the stream anyway, I decided to try out soap leaves. Soap trees have an obliging tendency to grow near water, and if one picks the young leaves and rubs them together with water, one gets soap suds. No joke. They actually get you pretty clean. Although I felt a bit primitive, standing in a stream rubbing leaves in my hair.

On Wednesday we headed out of camp in the troopies after breakfast (did I mention that we had to ford a stream to get in and out of camp?), and stopped at a few places in the national park, which is enormous. The first place was quite a large lake, which I'm told is the dumping ground for problem crocodiles. I'm being quite serious. We saw one, fortunately far enough out that we had to use binoculars, and there were some brave (or possibly just stupid) ducks paddling dangerously close to him. We also saw a wide variety of lovely birds, mostly in the crane family I believe, and a snake. A copper-tail, to be precise, which is quite poisonous. He was about five feet away from us, but hell-bent on catching the dragonflies that were flying over his head. So he pretty much left us alone. In Australia, home to the most poisonous snakes on earth, one must only worry about the snakes on the ground. For some reason, none of the tree snakes are poisonous. Go figure.

The second spot we visited was, unfortunately, also the site of the annual International Convention for Mosquitoes and Other Bloodsucking Vermin. But it was very interesting, otherwise. It had sandy ground and lots of tree cover, and several murky, crocodile-infested bogs. Crocs like murky water because there's lots of sediment for them to stir up and hide in. We looked around the bogs and found crocodile slides, which are belly-prints of crocodiles sunning themselves.

The third spot was my favorite. We were all getting a bit cranky after the mosquitoes made mince-meat of us, and we were looking forward to lunch. We were driving along on more bumpy, dusty roads when Merrell's jeep stopped. She was stuck in the sand. So, we all piled out and Russell managed to get the jeep un-stuck. Conveniently, Merrell got stuck about four metres away from our next stop. So we didn't have to go back to driving. We had stopped at an intensely sunny, sandy spot in between a billabong and a small stream, and it was shallow enough to get in the water. Russell had brought some fishing lines, and we went fishing in the deeper water. We used live bait, which was a bit sad for those of us who didn't catch anything, myself included. But Carolyn caught a Mangrove Jack, which is the same as a Red Snapper in the States. And Drew caught something else. Russell cooked them up later, but I missed out on eating them (I was throwing spears away from camp with a few other people, and didn't hear about the fish in time). It was nice just to sit in the sun, though.

That evening we talked about some more current issues in the Aboriginal communities, particularly the issue of stolen wages. Throughout most of the latter half of the twentieth century, Aboriginals who worked had their wages paid into a government account. They needed the approval of a police officer to withdraw their own money, and Aboriginals haven't, historically, been the best of friends with the Australian police. So basically, there are millions and millions of dollars worth of stolen wages still sitting in government accounts, and no one (being the government) can agree on what to do with the money.

We also got a little more historical background on the Aboriginals. For example, it was perfectly legal to hunt Aboriginals, with a permit, until the 1960s, because they were considered part of the fauna of Australia. What is striking to me is what a young country this is, and how much the issues with indigenous rights highlight that fact.

On Thursday we broke camp and said goodbye to our beautiful little spot in the desert. It was amazing how much it had come to feel like home. We drove, and drove, and drove until, sometime in the late afternoon, we came to Cooktown. If it isn't obvious, Cooktown is the coastal town that was established in the spot where Captain James Cook landed. Not very large, but a pleasant spot, overall. We stayed at a public campground that had a lot of tree shelter, but was definitely a bit closer to civilization. I was actually a bit disappointed to be so near people again, but warmed up to the idea when The Incredible Merrell lent me her shampoo and told me where the showers were on Friday morning. But anyway, returning to Thursday, we made spaghetti for dinner, and had a short conversation about who-knows-what. While our comrades made dinner, a couple of us took Russell aside to talk with him about how the concept of Dreamtime fits into modern life, which was the topic of our interview project for class.

Friday was a quiet-ish day. We did some things around camp, notably making beaded things. Russ showed us how to make string out of a fig tree by pulling out the fleshy layer between the bark and the wood. If you roll this up the right way, you get incredibly strong, thin string. Even more notably, I started a fire with a stick. I know you're all impressed. Don't try to hide it. If you take a perfectly straight stick (there's a type of cycad, I believe, that is often used for firesticks, and we collected some along the side of the road) and drill into a soft wood very hard and fast, you can get the dust to ignite. And if you happen to be holding it over a bit of that dry stuff that looks like burlap and hangs off of palms, well… you're in business. There are few things that I've done that were as satisfying as blowing on that spark and watching it flare up. Maybe I won't be a total bit of moronic croc-food if I get lost in the bush.

Friday afternoon we went to an old bridge on quite a large river, not sure which one, and fished for a while. A couple people caught small fish, but only one person got one that was legal size. Interestingly, if Russ had been on his traditional land, which is Hintchenbrook Island, and had caught a smaller-than-legal fish, he could have kept it and eaten it. The government has made attempts to recognize the hunting practices of Aboriginals. Because the Aboriginals' food chain requires them to eat the entire fish (or other animal), they need to hunt fewer fish than a European, who would probably eat only the fillets. So the Aboriginals, on their traditional land, are excused from certain hunting and fishing regulations.

After dinner on Friday, we sat around and Russell played us some songs on his guitar—quite a wide variety of songs, one of which he wrote for the SIT kids a couple of years ago. We had a good time, and I got to do a little playing myself. Uncharacteristically, I was up for a few minutes after everyone had gone to bed, and had to fend off a few slightly inebriated Germans who wanted nothing more than to borrow one of our Jeeps. Apparently they forgot that four wheel drive is a necessary feature in the outback. So I told them that they were welcome to wake my extremely fearsome native guides in the tents behind me, but that, alas, I didn't have the keys. They stumbled confusedly off into the darkness, never to be seen again.

On Saturday, we headed back to Cairns. Stopped at a pretty spot in Cooktown on the way out, and also at a convenience store, where Ian got us some Tim Tams. Lunch on the last day was at another lovely swimming hole. Actually, it was a sizeable river, but there was a section that was calm enough to swim in (and croc-free, and really, really deep). So we had more swimming than lunch, really, but that was all right. It was interesting, but we were all a bit reluctant to get in the potentially croc-infested water until Russell got in. Somehow, that confirmed its safety. As silly as it sounds, if Russell took us out tomorrow and jumped over a cliff, I think that most of us would follow him. There's just something very trustworthy about him.

We also stopped at Black Mountain, which is one of those amazing little geographical blips that happen sometimes. In Black Mountain's case, a mountain got crushed up into lots of teeny bits and pushed further out of the ground. The end result is a full-sized mountain made entirely out of bare, black boulders. There is a network of caves underneath, where lots of people have gotten lost.

We got back to Cairns at four-thirty and had a whirlwind unloading of the trailers (the rental cars were due back at five) before heading back to the Greenhouse. I ended up going out for sushi with a few people later in the evening, after another hot shower. It was one of those places where the rolls come by on a little conveyer belt, and you just grab what you feel like eating. I had a tekka roll, something with salmon and avocado, miso soup, and the worst saké I think I've ever had. I was hoping some eel would come by (they had a marinated one on the menu that looked like the stuff that Kim brought on the bluefishing boat), but I didn't see any and the waitress wasn't especially present. Ah, well. The fish was very fresh, at any rate.

Looking at this week, I realize that I've underrepresented Ian. The reason for this is that Ian almost never talked to us as a group, and although I would characterize him as the more garrulous of our two guides, he got shy around a lot of people. Ian was always around, though, chatting about whatever came to mind, pointing out whatever he saw. I had a good time with him when I was making a set of clapsticks out of ironwood. We compared pen knives and talked about sharp objects in general. And he found me a machete, which was infinitely useful.