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.