The Daintree

The end of the line (as far north as we're going on the east coast) for us was the Daintree Rainforest, which was probably one of my favorite areas we've been to on this trip. I loved the cable-ferry crossing of the Daintree River to reach the upper parts of the forest, and I just in general love the atmosphere of the jungle. The beautiful flowers...

 

...and fruit tree orchards with misty rainforested mountains as their backdrop...

...complete with these ENORMOUS bats (which I assume are fruit bats, since they were hanging out in fruit trees?).

Even more fun animal crossing signs up here, and though we didn't see any turtles traversing the road...

...we did see two southern cassowary crossing! This is so exciting, as this species is very endangered (only about 1000 animals remaining), and they're just plain awesome-looking. SR and I are both baffled how neither of us managed to get a clear, good picture of either of them when they walked leisurely past, directly in front of our vehicle, as if to invite us to photograph them. But this is the best I've got.

We spent a lot of time exploring the rainforest-lined beaches of the coast. I particularly love how the mangrove roots are fully exposed at low tide.

SR particularly loved the ropes we kept finding hung from high trees for people to swing on.

This pic, from the Alexandra viewpoint just north of the Daintree River, is special in that it shows the only place in the world where two World Heritage-listed areas abut each other: the Wet Tropics of the Daintree cascading down into the Great Barrier Reef shore. Pretty much my idea of heaven.

And by the time we crossed back south of the Daintree, the weather was FINALLY starting to lift, with some promising sun poking through the persistent clouds of the past week...

North through Queensland

After Byron Bay, we just went north, north, north up the Queensland coast. We took a couple of lovely walks among the Glass House Mountains, which are 25-million-year-old volcanic plugs (i.e., just my kind of thing).

 

SR got to continue his "big things" photo series with some of the tropical fruits of the area (pineapple and mango, here).

There are a gazillion things to do on the Queensland coast, and a gazillion tour operators eager to sell you trips to do these things. As we tried to get a mental grasp on all the options for Fraser Island, the Whitsundays, the Great Barrier Reef, and so on, things were complicated by some unfortunate weather rolling in. Clouds and wind and unusually cool temperatures had even the eager tour operators telling us we'd be wasting our money going out on the water in these conditions. So we decided to delay all decision-making until the weather forecast improved, and in the meantime, just focus on driving north and collecting what info we could so that by the time we made the same trip back south, we might have a better idea of where and how to spend our money.

So for several days, we were mostly just driving. Luckily, we found some really fantastic (and free!) places to park the campervan for the night along the coast. This is moonrise over the beach one night on the road.

I got into the tropical fruit spirit with mango ice cream made from mangoes grown in the orchard surrounding the ice cream stand.

And eventually we crossed into the "Wet Tropics" of northern Queensland, a World Heritage Area due to its natural beauty and exceptional biodiversity, among other things. This means that we're now in the territory of the highly endangered southern cassowary, a bird roughly similar to an emu (and designated "southern" because its northern cousins inhabit Papua New Guinea).

Check out the birds sitting atop the cows. This is just funny to me, so I thought I'd share.

Something maybe a little more share-worthy: spectacular Wallaman Falls, the highest single-drop, continuous (through the entire year) waterfall in Australia, and TOTALLY worth detouring an hour inland to check it out.

 

One of the many things I've been learning about Australia, and Queensland in particular, is that there is a LOT of sugarcane here. I didn't think of Australia as a place that grows sugarcane, and I didn't recognize this as sugarcane, because it looks so different from the sugarcane that grew in Madagascar. But that's what this is--fields and fields and more sweeping fields of sugarcane so ripe for harvest that it has these lovely flowering tops.

Even in the intermittent rain and under the cloudy skies, there was great beach-walking nearly every step of the way north, and the landscape getting more and more dramatically gorgeous. Coastal Queensland is BEAUTIFUL.

Brisbane to Byron

The final three weeks of the trip are focused on Queensland, the only Australian state we hadn't been to so far. We flew into Brisbane and enjoyed a day exploring the city, including a sight-seeing cruise on the Brisbane River...

 

...and just watching the city's residents do their thing on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

From there, we picked up another campervan and took a slight detour from our Queensland coast plan to dart a couple hours south along the Gold Coast, with its gorgeous beach views...

...to Byron Bay in northern New South Wales, with its equally gorgeous beaches and a town that I loved as much as everyone said I would.

One fun thing about visiting Byron is that I got to meet the woman who created the yoga teacher training program I did in Nicaragua in January. She wasn't teaching that training herself, because she was busy having the adorable baby in this picture. So it was great to be able to put a face to the name and meet her whole family.

I also finally convinced SR to go lawn bowling with me. We've been seeing lawn bowling clubs everywhere we've gone in Australia for the past three months, and since I'd never tried it I really wanted to. We're still not 100% clear on the rules and the scoring, but we got to try our hands at it (or "muck around at it," as the woman who showed us the ropes said) and it was a fun way to spend a couple hours. We were getting better when some clouds rolled in and a rain shower ended the game.

Byron Bay is also a very hippie town where you can find all of the yoga (I indulged in a couple classes) and raw, organic food you could possible want, and where I was thrilled to have a ridiculously good smoothie.

Definitely a place I'd be happy to return to someday, but now it's time to head back north to see all the Queensland coast has to offer as the end of our trip ticks ever-closer.

South Australia

Blog readers with EXTREMELY good memories (and perhaps geographical OCD) may remember that SR and I cruised across South Australia very quickly (too quickly, actually; we got an e-mail from the campervan company that we were picked up by a speed camera and are curious to see if a ticket will have found one of us at our U.S. addresses by the time we get home) a couple of months ago on our way to Western Australia.

We didn't stop to do anything here at that point because we knew we'd be back at the end of our overland trip through the center of the country. And now here we are--our two weeks in the Northern Territory (which I've just now learned is not technically an Australian state, though it is largely self-governed) finished--crossing the border into South Australia for a few days.

We stayed for a night in one of the weirdest places I've ever been--which of course makes it one of my favorite places: Coober Pedy.

The vast majority of the world's opals come from Coober Pedy, and the opal mining business is really the only reason that any of the town's 1,500 residents, hailing from 47 different countries (making it the most international, per capita, town in Oz) find themselves there. What appears above to be a big pile of gravel, pink in the light of sunset, is the gypsum rock excavated to create the underground lodgings we stayed in for our night in Coober Pedy.

Outside, the temperature can be obscenely, blisteringly hot in the summer and painfully cold in the winter. But underground, it is always a comfy 20-24 degrees celcius, which is why 60% of the town's residents (the other 40% being Aboriginals who do not like to live underground because underground is where you go when you die) live underground in homes like this:

I learned so much about opal and opal mining during our mine and town tour that it is taking a great deal of will power not to bore you with a long blog of written details. To me, this kind of stuff is incredibly fascinating. I mean, this is a place where people might see something shiny in the wall while eating breakfast and throw some dynamite (sold at the corner store next to the weekly paper) to see if they can get any opal of value from their house. And often they do!

I could go on and on, so if this interests you, ask me the next time you see me and I'll talk your ear off. Or maybe you'll have to come visit me when I move to Coober Pedy to try opal mining myself, as it's a shockingly affordable thing to get a permit and lease some land from the town council.

As you might expect, the town is dripping in stores selling opal jewelry.

We also got to try playing a didgeridoo for the first time at one shop...

...which also had some of the best Aboriginal art I've seen so far...

...and owners who run, on the side, a kangaroo orphanage and do daily feedings for visiting groups.

On our way further south, we also stopped in the Clare Valley, world-famous for its Rieslings, for a wine-tasting.

Reaching Adelaide after so much time in the outback was a little overwhelming. But another free night in another Hilton, with a very hot shower and a very comfy, fluffy white bed after so many nights sleeping outside, plus this view, was definitely not unwelcome!

Adelaide apparently has a rep for being a bit of a boring city, and we didn't see anything in the guidebook when planning this trip that prompted us to schedule much time here. So our visit was brief, but I actually liked it a lot and wouldn't have minded more time here. The Adelaide food market is FANTASTIC. And it is a very pretty town, and a great place to regroup, wash up from our outback adventure, and launch ourselves (via plane) into our final Australian state and the final three weeks of our adventure Down Under. Anyone keeping track who can tell through powers of deduction where we're now headed?....

Red Centre

After a couple of very restful days in the quirky desert town of Alice Springs (this pic is sunset seen from the top of ANZAC Hill)...

 

...we joined up with a new conglomeration of group tour participants and headed past some of Australia's (tens of thousands of) wild camels...

...out to the country's iconic "Red Centre." Our first stop was King's Canyon, and a beautiful afternoon hike there.

Then, it was on to one of Australia's top tourist draws: the stunning Uluru (the Aboriginal name), or Ayer's Rock (as the white settlers called it). It rises more than 1,000 feet above the surrounding desert and is a mile and a half wide by more than 2 miles long. And bright red. Pretty amazing.

We had a couple of days in the area, and got to walk around most of its base, though since the Aboriginals who are guardians of this land ask that tourists don't climb the rock, we didn't.

There were so many beautiful spots on the ground, there was still plenty to keep us busy.

And then there was the requisite seeing it at sunset...

...and then at sunrise...and then at sunset again.

We also ventured over to Kata Tjuta...

...and did the beautiful hike over there through the Valley of the Winds. This picture looks off into the surrounding rocks, which encompass sacred sites for Aboriginal men and are not open to tourists.

In a place where the natural world is so overwhelmingly, commandingly gorgeous, it seemed only right to sleep each night outside, under the stars, and around a fire in swags. SO COZY.