There is surprisingly little between Cairns and Brisbane.
There are frequent possum crossings along the road.
They are basically giant rope ladders across the road.
Other than that there is lots of nothing.
And birds.
Lots and lots of birds.
And a giant mango.
And more birds.
Did I mention the birds?
One night we ate at the hostel as they had a BBQ for cheap. After dinner there was fire dancing.
It was okay.
They played weird music to it.
There were some good pictures as we had a tripod this time.
Some of the patterns were cool.
The overall style was much slower spinning as compared to what we saw in the cook islands.
We did get a couple really cool pictures though.
We went for a canoe ride at night to see the nocturnal animals.
We brought the camera, but someone put it on the inside of his jacket underneath his life jacket, so we couldn’t use it.
(That person also didn’t lose the camera or get it wet while doing most of the paddling).
Of course that person also wouldn’t have lost the camera if we had left it safe in the hotel, and it would have done us just as much good.
(Alright then, agreed)
We saw lots of kinds of wallabies and kangaroo rats and possums.
We also saw four tree kangaroos. These pictures are from a zoo, because we had no camera.
(I think they figured that out from above already)
They are really super duper cute.
And easy to identify with their really long tails.
They hop along the branches with their big feet. They went hop hop hop hop hop. But we had no camera.
(Well at the zoo we did and at night with no light it wouldn’t have worked anyway)
The picture from the zoo is blurry because someone dragged me away too quickly.
(We had a time limit and had to get back to the van)
They also cling to the branches.
With their sharp claws.
And climb up and down the trunks.
They apparently like corn on the cob.
They eat leaves in the wild. But we didn’t have a camera for that.
(—-)
We did have a camera after we removed the lifejackets, so here is a frog. It is not nearly as cute as the things we saw with no camera.
(————–)
At dusk we went to the river to watch for platypus.
There was a big blind for us to sit behind, and two people sitting in front of it, leaning on it, with two leashed dogs. Fortunately the platypus didn’t seem to care and showed up right on schedule.
He darted around really fast and only came up quickly for breaths between dives, making it hard to get a good picture.
![image_thumb[3]](https://kerrimatt.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/image_thumb312.png "image_thumb[3]")
North of Cairns is the Daintree rainforest. There were many very large spiders in the forest.
Being a large forest there were many trees and this was the bark of a giant palm.
There were several types of vines growing on many of the trees.
There were also several other plants that grow on top of the branches of host trees.
There was also wild nutmeg but the pods weren’t ripe yet.
Here’s another one of the large spiders.
They have pretty big jaws.
