Wow where to begin! So much happened this weekend!!! I couldn't blog until now because I was without my computer or cell reception. Very refreshing honestly.
It all started at about 2:30 am Saturday morning. After getting about 4 hours of sleep I woke up so Liz could pick me up at 3 to go out to the Glen Boughton site for more fieldwork. We worked with two others, another Australian student and a friend of Liz's. Thank god we had the extra hands because it was hard work! It takes about an hour to get to this site so I had more time to wake up. Saw a few bats sweeping overhead! Saturday mornings start out the same as other mornings, we go to the guinea grass site first and go through all the traps, open them up, and see what we caught. We caught a good number of melomys and a few cane rats, both very cute. The different, and harder, part about Saturdays is that since its the last day at that site we need to break down all the traps, and carry them out to the car. Hard work!!! The wire traps are fairly big and cumbersome. The smaller Elliot traps are not so bad, they fold pretty easily. But it was difficult work dragging them through the tall grass, and there are 12 Elliots and 5 wire cages on each line, and there are three lines in the grid. Definitely worked up a sweat. By the time we finished in the grass it was 6:15 and the sun had fully come up. We took a quick break and then headed off to the forest. We started by opening the traps and found that we had caught three large white tailed rats! They are so feisty and make the funniest growling noises. Most of the animals we caught were recaptures, so we didn't have to go through the whole process of measuring and tagging them. Then the most difficult part began. We had to get all of the bloody traps out of the forest!!! Mind you we're 100 meters in before the grid even starts and we have to trudge through two creeks. It is quite the process. The cages are so heavy, they reek, are covered in electric ants (ow!) and they get caught on every single vine you walk by. All this while walking either uphill or downhill on slippery rocks or roots and swatting at the blasted mozzys. But I had to work quickly because I was beginning to worry that I would not make it back in time to catch my 9:30 bus! Finally, by 8:15 we were back on the road. We fortunately made it back quick enough for me to grab a quick shower (you can't even imagine what I looked/smelled like at this point) before I walked over to the uni to catch my bus to the outback, and thats when my real adventure began!
I signed up with a bunch of my friends through the international office to go on a trip to Chillagoe, a town that is just at the start of the outback. It's not really the outback, there are still trees and grass, but its right at the edge. Our bus, well van really, driver's name was Tony and he won us over right away. He was very funny. He began by giving us instructions on four things we must remember before we started our windy 2.5 hour drive to Chillagoe:
1. If you feel car sick and are going to vomit, find a window that opens, because for whatever reason, not all of them do.
2. Make sure the window is actually open. (People have made this mistake before)
3. Make sure all the vomit goes out the window. (Again, has been a problem in the past)
4. If you are sitting behind the person who is vomiting, make sure your window is closed.
After those and a few other fun announcements we were off! An hour in we made a quick stop in a town called Mareeba to get snacks, use the toilet, whatever, before arriving in Chillagoe a while later. Thankfully I was able to get some sleep, because for me it had been quite a long day already. We arrived at our accommodations, a very rustic place. We stayed in cabins, thankfully with air con. It kind of reminded me of summer camp, only a little better. But you still had to walk up the slope to find the toilets! After a quick minute to drop our stuff we headed over to the only pub in town, the Post Office Hotel, the local restaurant and bar. I have no idea why it is called that. Chillagoe is quite literally a ghost town. Almost no one lives there, its in the middle of nowhere, and it has like 3 buildings on its main street. But it certainly has a nice, locals oriented, charm. It is clearly a tight nit community. They raised money for the local hospital by doing a black and white nude couples calendar where they are posing behind tractors, or watering the garden, you can just imagine. They have yearly wheelbarrow races. It is that kind of place. Hopefully my pictures can give you an idea. After a delicious lunch of spaghetti and watermelon we hopped back on the van to go to balancing rock where we walked around these beautiful limestone rocks that are slowly being eroded away into various formations by the rain. Apparently the area used to be underwater as a shallow sea. And there is one amazing balancing rock that you will see below in my pictures. Tony educated us all on the history of everywhere we visited during the weekend. And over the course of the weekend he blew the minds of many of the boys with all these conspiracy theories. I found them interesting but I never listened in too much. Anyway, by the balancing rock there was the Wallamumba aboriginal art. Now for the rest of Saturday from the balancing rock on, I don't have pictures because my camera died and I didn't get to charge it that night. But I will hopefully steal some pictures from my friends. We go to see actually aboriginal paintings on the rock from about 100 years ago of evil spirits. Very cool. Next we drove over to the abandoned copper smelting area where they used to melt down all these rocks and stuff to get out the gold and copper. We toured the area and learned about its history and then stood on a ginormous pile of slag (what was left over once you melt out the precious metals) and looked out over the land. We saw so many wallabies and kangaroos. Every time we got in the van you could look out the window to see them hopping about. We actually saw some 'sleeping kangaroos' on the road also :( but it was kind of cool because we go to see a giant eagle eating one. After the copper place we headed over to this lovely river/lagoon type area to swim. It was beautiful and nice and cold with a dam to climb and jump off of. Towards the end we got caught in a downpour and ran back onto the bus. Then we headed back to the cabins to get ready for dinner. We headed to the restaurant and had steak with onions and garlic bread. SOOO good. After watching some competitive American vs. Australian pool (Aussies won, but it was very close!) and eating Tim Tams, we headed back to the cabins to do some stargazing before going to bed. It is so easy to see the stars out there. I saw the southern cross and Orion's belt. (The guy with the arrow right?)
Today, Sunday, we had breakfast at around 8:30, fruit, bread, cereal, pineapple and orange juice etc., packed up our belongings, go onto the van and headed for the caves!!! Bob the park ranger gave us a 1 and half hour limestone cave tour. It was so cool!!! We went into all these different caverns, and had to squeeze and duck through all these tight places. There was one area they called weight watchers because it was so narrow. There were lots of bats, stalactites, stalagmites, and amazingly enough, roots, coming from the fig trees some many feet above and outside the rock. There would just be bunches of roots hanging from the ceiling. The caves are like 400 million years old and the water is constantly eroding and changing the limestone as it drips and evaporates. At one point we put out our torches (flashlights) and were in pitch black. It is amazing how dark it is down there. Towards the end we went through this narrow cave crawl called the laundry shoot. You had to get down on your belly and army crawl/wriggle your way through it and then turn around and slide out the end! So fun. We all got covered in the orange claylike dirt. After our tour ended we went to property of this 83 year old man who has collected limited edition Ford cars since the 1970's. They were pretty cool. It looked like a car graveyard. Unfortunately you can't really understand anything he says, but he seemed nice! We then went back to the restaurant and had huge burgers with watermelon and pineapple for lunch. After that we started our way back home and along the way stopped at this old abandoned, bar/house thing with all these cool old furniture and equipment. Almost seemed like a museum, but I guess they still have parties there or something? You'll see in the pictures, I don't know how quite to describe it. We made one more stop after that at this huge coffee plantation where they also have a cute restaurant where they brew their own coffee. Since I don't like coffee I didn't have any, but I did buy some chocolate covered raspberrys. YUM. For $11, UGH. We finally made our way back to Cairns, and were dropped off at the lodge. Nothing else happened tonight besides taking a loooooooong shower and watching Sleeping Beauty. What an amazing weekend! Good thing I don't have class Mondays or Tuesdays either ;)
Enjoy the pictures!!!
Sunrise at the field site.
Drive to Chillagoe.
Chillagoe, aka ghost town.
View from Balancing Rock.
Our group in front of balancing rock. Can you spot me? Haha
Our cabin!
The rocks where the cave is! Yupp, we went in those.
Stalactites!
Ew.
The old entrance to the cave.
Weird abandoned bar.
View of Cairns :)
