Jon and I went separate places.  His tour was more demanding than I wanted. 

Jon thought I was going to see a billabong, maybe even get to hold one or feed one or at least take a picture of one. You, unlike Jon, know that a billabong is “a branch of a river forming a backwater or stagnant pool, made by water flowing from the main stream during a flood.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary. 

Jon also didn’t know that Billabong is a line of clothing. You know, the kind of stuff you see at the beach, worn by someone whose mother wouldn’t approve.

We started at the top of Castle Hill where we were able to have a 360-degree view of Townsville.  I am putting together videos so look for them when I post the link to the video.  The video will cover several days at a time.

We then went to Billabong Sanctuary.  It is a little zoo where we were able to have up close encounters with several animals.  The first was a small crocodile and yes, I was able to hold it.  At the end of the tour, we saw the full-grown crocodile having a meal of a bird and no, I did not come close to him.  We also saw an Australian python and had the opportunity to hold it, but I ran out of time and only touched it. 

Next, we saw a Wombat that weighed 28 – 29 KG and yes, he is a little overweight.  They like them to be 25 kg.  They like to eat gingkoes. 

Now on to the Koala where we watched him move around the pen area.  Yes, they are very cute.  You just want to hug them. 

After this we were able to get into the pen with a Koala and have our picture taken with him. He was holding tight to the tree and his nose was nestled in the crook of the tree. 

The final event was the crocodile feeding I mentioned before. Along the way I took pictures of various birds and ducks I came upon.  As I walked back, I went into the Kangaroo Corral and saw several.  The cutest one standing did not stay still long enough for me to get my camera open, read the screen in the sun and turn back around.  Oh, where did he go?  He was on the other side back to me. Oh well!

I was very pleased with this tour. They appear to take care of the animals.  They are not using the same animals for the demonstrations.  They rotate them so they are only exposed once or twice a week I think they said. 

 

Today was a divide and conquer day. I went to the rain forest and Judy went to the zoo to see billabongs, whatever they may be. We’ll get her to tell us in a minute. 

My trip started with a drive through Townsville (named after the European guy named Towns who “discovered” the place). It’s not right to judge a town by a tour bus drive through, but the vibe I got was positive. Lots of modern buildings, great roads, a feel of prosperity. We saw a number of parks, especially along the waterfront. There is an ordinance to preserve historically significant buildings although most of the protected buildings are not much more than 100 years old.

What really struck me was none of this was done for the tourist trade. The parks and so on were done for the people who live here. And you should see the rugby stadium! Go Cowboys! Townsville seems to me to be a very livable place.

Economically, it does pretty well. There is an active cane sugar industry. Much of the raw sugar is shipped to South Africa, we’re told. Mining for tin, copper and even gold is strong here. And there’s a good harbor to support it all.

From Townsville we headed up the coastal plain on the motorway for about an hour. This is a fast-growing part of the region with lots of new housing going in. Everyone wants to live on the water, crocodile infested though it may be, I guess. At least Florida alligators confine themselves to golf courses and leave the ocean beaches free for tourists. Again, a prosperous looking neighborhood.

Next, we left the low-lying coastal region and started climbing up into the coastal mountains. Don’t quote me on this, but generally speaking, Queensland can be thought of as a strip of flat land along the ocean, running northwesterly, no more than 50 miles wide. Parallel to the coastal plain is a range of mountains, reaching, I’m guessing, 2,000 to maybe 4,000 feet. Beyond the mountains? Desert for as far as the eye can see. When we go to Alice Springs next week we’ll be on the same desert. If it weren’t for the shoreline, Australia wouldn’t be worth habituating.

What happens is that on-shore breezes rise up the eastern side of the mountains. The uplift wrings the moisture from the clouds in the form of fog and rain. That’s what produces the rain forest in the mountains we visited today. After that, there’s no more moisture, hence desert to the west.

The winding road we traveled up into the forest was built for the harvest of tall trees back 100 years or more ago. Later, it served as a path for telegraph and then telephone and power lines. All along the road one sees palm trees, mangos and other fruit trees that normally wouldn’t grow here. The story is that the workers, Asian, mainly, threw their seeded lunch leftovers into the brush, creating the anomaly we see today.

The rain forest, or is it really a cloud forest? is heavily wooded, of course. We saw no wildlife, only trees on our walk and I’ll let the pictures show you what I saw. Believe it or not, it actually started to sprinkle while we walked, so maybe it was a rain forest after all.

One interesting tree, or maybe it’s a vine, is the strangling fig. It winds itself around the host tree, limiting growth of other plants around it and eventually killing the host. We actually saw the same vine in Sarasota, Florida while dining at a stone crab food truck joint.

Lunch was at a resort run by a family who lives there and puts on tours like ours. This is the beginning of their season and cruise boats are a big part of their business. Last season they hosted 1,000 students from the U.S. They loved the wilds after, that is, they recovered from lack of connectivity.

We’re back on board, doing our blogging.But the Internet service is slooooow and unreliable. Here posting will have to wait until later. Patience, please!

 

I hate it when people ask me, “What was the highlight of our trip?” For me, it’s the totality of the trip, not one incident or even day that makes a trip memorable. But there’s no denying that snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef would be pretty high on my bucket list if I had one. And unlike Bali, which for me didn’t live up to its billing, the GBR came through with flying colors. 

We mustered to go ashore at 9:15, bussed to the GBR charter dock and all 250 of us were on board before 10 for the hour-and-a-half ride to a floating pontoon anchored over the tour company’s assigned section of the reef. As our bus driver predicted, winds were light and the seas calm with only a slight swell. 

The pontoon is a huge platform supporting both scuba diving and snorkeling. It can hold in excess of 300 guests. They also operate a “semisubmersible” a tin-can looking craft that seats 26 in its oversized keel beneath the water. We took the 30-minute cruise and saw similar fish and coral as we did snorkeling. Lunch was served. It’s quite an operation, especially considering the 250 passengers today average at least 70 years of age. 

The big deal, of course, was the hour we spent snorkeling. We’d done snorkeling with Jeff and Carter in the BVIs last Spring and in Hawaii with Esme in Hawaii last Summer. So, we knew what to expect and, as I said, the GBR was the equal of the other two. See the pictures – mostly coral scenes – to get a sense of what it was like. 

Rather than take a bus back to our ship, we walked along Cairns’ very nice waterfront. It was a long walk since we had to pass the length of a P&O cruise ship, a real boat, complete with a water slide and an uncountable number of decks. Different market segment, for sure. Not many Orion passengers would make it down a waterslide, although a surprising number of, shall we say, questionable oldsters did just fine snorkeling. I shouldn’t be so quick to judge the old people with whom we are traveling.

Tomorrow: Townsville and a look at the other Queensland tourist attraction, the rain forest. No more snorkeling until day after tomorrow.

By the way, for those keeping score at home, we’ve now been on the road for 15 days, with 15 more to go. Half way!

Judy has been shooting video on her iPhone and has a movie covering our time in Indonesia. Here’s the link: https://judyrick.zenfolio.com/p618424729/ec30e6d5c

Check it out. It’s sure to relieve the boredom you’re suffering from all my still shots. She’s putting together a movie of the video I shot underwater today. We’ll put that up soon.

“Can we swim at the Thursday Island beach?” asked one of the guests. “No. If the crocodiles don’t get you the sharks will,” responded the Guest Services rep.

You guessed it.

I went swimming, well, wading, at Thursday Island. There were lots of locals, including little kids, so I figured the kids were slower than me and tastier than my old carcass, so I’d be safe. And indeed, I was.

Thursday Island is one of the Torres Straits islands, located between the northernmost tip of Queensland State and Papau New Guinea. The Torres Straits islands, 274 of them, depending on how you count ‘em, is home to an ethnically distinct group of Melanesian peoples. They figure the islands have been populated for 2,600 years or so, which is recent in comparison to mainland Australia, which has evidence of habitation 50,000 years ago. Today it’s a Shire of Queensland.

And yes, there is a Wednesday Island and a Friday Island, so named by the Brits who explored here in the second half of the 19^th century. They apparently ran out of dukes and lords and whatever, the names of whom they usually affixed to newly discovered lands. Sucking up to the boss is an old tradition.

Thursday Island has a history of being a center for pearl and shell harvesting, although those industries have declined significantly since WWII due to competition from Japan and cultured pearl farms. As the shire hub, public service is a significant source of income as is a developing tourist trade.

Speaking as a tourist, I’m glad we came here but Thursday’s got a ways to go to rival even Bali and Lombok. Not a single temple to be seen, just a Catholic Church (there are other churches, I believe). White tablecloth dining isn’t prevalent but the local hotel does sport the northerly most bar in all of Australia. They served beer and crisps and played rugby matches on the widescreen TV. We partook of all three after our walk around town.

Our walk covered the aforementioned crocodile beach and the Catholic church. The town cannot be termed picturesque by any stretch of the imagination, but it does sport some very friendly people. Most greeted us as we passed by. We had a nice conversation with a young couple with an eight-month-old son. They’re from Canberra, where they will be returning in a couple of weeks after his one-year deployment on Tuesday Island with the military.

The “included tour,” which we joined after our independent walk and beer stop, was the highlight. First, a Country elder, Uncle Willie, gave a welcoming speech, and gave us permission to enter tribal lands. Then, two local artists made presentations. The first, a young multi-talented artist/musician/dancer/palm oil salesman, gave a talk. The second was a man and his family – wife, two daughters and two sons – who gave a demonstration of aboriginal music and dance. The mom and dad and two daughters sang and played drums to accompany the sons who danced in traditional costumes.

The performance was quite good and, being the third or fourth of the day, the family was visibly tired. Performing for cruise boats is not their full time jobs. The really interesting thing was the dedication of Dad and Mom to instill the traditional culture into their kids. Song and dance is their chosen method.

We spoke briefly with the dad afterwards. I told him of the similarities to his culture and that of our First Nations friends Darryl and Andrea from New Brunswick, Canada: respect for elders, stewardship of the land, taking from the land only what is needed, not what produces the greatest profit. I could close my eyes and hear Darryl speaking the same words as he used to do on our all-day golf outings. It’s also the same message we heard from Polynesians this past summer in Hawaii with Esme.

After dinner we attended a video performance by the Metropolitan Opera – Mozart’s Magic Flute, translated into modern English. The words were hard for our hearing aids to report with great fidelity to our ancient ears and brains, but we got the drift. The costumes and scenery were worth the price of admission. And, spoiler alert, both guys, and arguably all three guys, got their girls before the final curtain fell. No one died in the third act.

Today, Monday, is another day at sea. We’ve been pretty lazy – it’s 5 PM and I’m just now writing up yesterday’s outing. We did attend a presentation by Viking’s guest astronomy lecturer on the birth and death of stars. Interesting, but pretty deep weeds for the uninitiated. Afterwards, I told her that her discussion of Maxwell’s Equations induced an episode of PTSD, flashing back to Lehigh University and the EE exam covering that subject.

Oh, and one other thing. We booked yet another trip, this time a Viking Expedition to Antarctic. Yes, that’s right, ice, penguins and barfing across the Drake Passage. We’ve talked to four couples on this trip who’ve told us to do it, so we’re doing it. Stay tuned!

Tomorrow we’re in Cains, Queensland where we will be going out to a floating platform for a day of snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. We don’t have another sea day for three days, so I’ll have to get cracking on the blog with greater energy.