In Cairns

My first few days in Cairns have been spent wandering around the city, checking things out. Cairns is a city that is dedicated to tourism, kind of like Key West or Myrtle Beach, just not as obnoxious. Most of the tourism is diving tourism, but there is also some other tours that I have checked out.

The first tour was a trip through a part of the Daintree National Forest which is part of the rain forest preserve here in Australia. .1% of Australia is rain forest, most of it north of Cairns. In a geeky sort of way, it was interesting. I have always been a big Discovery Channel fan, and the rain forest tour was like an episode of Planet Earth. The tour guide pointed out how all of the plants compete for sunlight - - food and water being plentiful - - some of the trees grow up quickly, other plants cheat and use the trees to climb up to the sunlight. Other plants use crooks and crannies to start off. This picture shows most of that in action. Fast growing trees, cheating vines and plants starting off on top of other plants. Pretty cool.

There wasn't much wildlife about, but there was a very cool looking spider: The Golden Orb spider. Family note: This pic was taken with my Olympus Camera, pretty powerful camera, I used it much more than my normal land camera, makes me almost want to go buy a new camera to carry around in Iraq. Can't wait to get it under water. Back to the spider: The picture is a female, she is about 6 inches across, the male is less than an inch, and he doesn't live very long. The two pics are two different spiders, just to show the size of the spiders and give a good view.

There were a couple of good flowers in the rain forest, the best looking one was this white flower, no idea what it is, but it will probably look pretty good framed up:

After the rain forest, we were heading to lunch, when the driver just plain went nuts, turns out we saw some cassowary birds crossing the road, there are apparently only 1200 of these birds around, all of them in the Australian rain forest. There was a dad and two chicks crossing the road, he slammed on the brakes and started yelping, I got a few shots of them, the folks in the back of the van didn't have a chance. Pretty ugly birds, almost prehistoric looking.

After the van tour of the rain forest, we hit a river to check out some crocs. We took a boat tour on the Daintree River, pretty cool, we did see some crocs, a small female named Elizabeth and Fat Albert, a huge (18 foot) male that was just lounging around on the bank. Pictures are posted in the photo log link.

The crocs were cool, but I think the best thing that I saw that day was a Sea Eagle just sitting there waiting on some fish to swim too close to the surface.

The dive trip starts off tomorrow, should be interesting, I won't be able to update anything on the blog, but will be taking a lot of pictures if I can find a patient dive partner.