Zelma’s Trip

I woke up too early and checked out ready for the bus pick up from my hostel in Cairns.  When I was collected I was pleased that the woman who drove the bus, did the tours and talked about things seemed really nice.  It transpired that she was rare as tour guides go in that she not only didn’t have a really annoying booming voice but that she was actually really knowledgeable.  The following information is from her descriptions of the area and wildlife.  Any mistakes are probably down to me hearing things wrongly rather than her misinformation.

The Common Brown Snake – Bites most people and kills the most in Australia.  The notorious Taipan which locals say is aggressive actually accounts for very few bites and fatalities.  It is, however extremely posionous with the Eastern Taipan being less venomous than the Western Taipan.

The cane beetle was destroying sugar cane at an alarming rate so in the 1930s the Australian government introduced the cane toad, in their wisdom.  The cane toad, which has no native predators in Australia, has since been responsible for the extinction of over thirty species of native frogs.  It is currently in direct competition with the green tree frog.  Somewhat ironically the cane toad never ate the cane beetle as they lived too high up the sugar cane for the cane toad to reach.  Nothing in the country eats the cane toad, it is very poisonous so animals which do eat it die.  This includes household pets.  Apparently one extremely posionous South African snake does eat the cane toad and the government thought about introducing it.  There was a lot of Public unease about this and, thankfully, they decided against the idea.  Sugar cane used to be farmed by hand with the workers having a very short lifespan due to bites from the taipan which lived in the cane.  The advice if you do get bitten by a snake is not to move as the venom travels round the lymphatic system.  So, don’t panic, apply a pressure bandage (not a tournique) and get someone else to get help.

Cape Tribulation is so called as Captain Cook got stranded on his boat just South of here.  He said that the place had given him the most trouble, hence the name.

Daintree Rainforest is the oldest rainforest in the World, categorised as such as it has the oldest trees living in it, oddly enough!  It also has World Heritage status.  There is one kind of lizard which only lives here and also a tree kangaroo which is endemic.  The latter is apparently very rare and timid so the chances of seeing it are low.

The Aborigines don’t have plurals.  Instead of putting an ‘s’ on the end of a word they say it twice to mean more tham one, hence a lot of Aboriginal place names having the same word twice.

The Hercules moth lives in Cape Tribulation as does the Cairns Birdwing Butterfly whose wingspan can be as large as twenty centimetres.  The Ulyses butterfly is a bright blue and is common in the area.  Apparently they are attracted to pink and red so these are good colours to wear.

There are three types of spiders in the area – web building, ground dwelling and hunting.  The most dangerous being the ground dwelling.  Ground dwelling spiders include the funnel web, which is highly venomous and the trapdoor.  The mouse spider, which is known as the bulldog of the spider World, is unusual as its fangs are at a forty five degree angle and it can lock onto its prey.  The biggest kind of spider in Australia, the bird-eating spider, is also native to the area.  This spider can get as large as a dinner plate and is also known as the Australian tarantula

The web-building spiders such as the golden orb are completely harmless.  The golden orb builds an amazingly strong web which is stronger by weight than steel.  There are also web-casting spiders which throw their webs out like nets. 

The hunting spiders are the hairy spiders, the ones which look like what you think of when you think of a spider.  They can spin but tend not to spin classical webs.  However, they do abseil out of the trees and, at around ten centimetres across, it can be slightly worrying if one suddenly appears infront of you.  They are generally found on vertical surfaces such as walls where they sit and wait for insects and then pounce.  Although they may look very scary they are not venomous.

There are three native snakes in the area the tree snake, python and venomous front fang.  The tree snake’s fangs are at the back of its mouth so it can only bite small things.  So you’re only at risk if you poke it in the mouth, which I guess would be pretty stupid.  The most common type of tree snake in the area is the night tiger.  Tree snakes are distinguishable from other types of snake as they have a very thin neck.  They come in a variety of colours including grey, black, blue, yellow, green and the night tiger a blue colour variant.  The pythons include the amethystine shimmer which is like an oily black.  They grown up to eight and a half metres long however they are constrictors and thus not venomous.  They can bite though.  The venomous front fang snakes include the notorious taipan, the red bellied black snake, the rough scaled snake, death adder and small-eyed snake.  This is the most worrying group of snakes to humans.

There are three types of rats in Australia, the introduced, new native and old natives.  The white-tailed rat in the area is the size of a cat.  Mosaic-tailed rats are much smaller but can chew through anything when looking for food including copper piping!

The yellow-footed rock wallaby’s males don’t live beyone eight months.  This is as this is when they reach sexual maturity at which point they mate for twenty four hours non-stop.  At the end of this, perhaps somewhat understandably, they die.  They are small marsupials about the size of a mouse.  Other marsupials include the quoll, a marsupial cat.  The largest natural predator used to be the Tasmanian tiger (dog-like and sized) which lived in inland Australia and Tasmania.  The last one died in captivity in Tasmania in the 1960s and, although officially extinct, each year people report sighting them.

After learning about the area and the wildlife, as you have now too hopefully, we stopped at the Daintree river for a river cruise.  Well to be honest it was more a croc cruise as the entire point was to see crocodiles.  They didn’t disappoint either.  We saw baby crocs, well really small ones which were apparently three years and under up to -really- big crocs.  The latter were quite worrying as the guide took the boat very close to them.  None of them were in the water, well actually they probably were, but none of the ones we saw were, they were trying to sun themselves on the riverbanks.

After seeing the crocs we were dropped at the other side of the river where our bus was courtesy of the ferry and continued our journey.  We stopped again for a boardwalk through the rainforest which was pretty amazing to be fair.  The highlight for me was the strangler fig.  Basically it is as it sounds, a fig which strangles another tree, using it to climb and suffocating it.  The centre was completely hollow with the vine-like fig wrapped around the outside.  I also got a couple of amazing photos up the inside of the tree.

After the boardwalk we were taken to our accommodation.  I stayed at the Ferntree lodge which turned out to be a lovely spot.  I was in a shared room with three French friends who invited me to go to the lookout with them -after offering me a beer that is.  The lookout was a shortish walk and was also next to one of the beautiful beaches in the area.  On the way back one of the French guys and myself decided to take the beach route back which turned out not to be the best plan in the World.  We wondered why several others were standing, wimp-like at the side of a creek until we tried to cross it.  The sand was almost like sink-sand and sucked your legs in.  It also got very deep very quickly.  We decided it wasn’t the best plan in the World and headed back to walk along the road.  Well at least it wasn’t the creek closest to the accommodation which we had been warned had a few very large resident crocs!