There’s a reason they call it a rainforest

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I never thought that mold could ever grow so fast… We spent 5 days in the rainforest. 5 DAYS. That’s only about 120 hours, but apparently, that’s enough for mold to get everywhere. In this short week, I lost, to the little green fuzz, a perfectly good pair of leather sandals and a nice straw hat that was just getting the old worn down look I was going for.

We spent 5 days there, and that was more than enough. Wazza, our host, has been living in the makeshift bush camp for 20 years. During the rainy season, he’s there mostly on his own. Once in a while, a lost camper or misinformed WWOOFer will find his way there during the WET, but otherwise it’s just him and his two beautiful rescued cockatoo and Dog the dog who smells like… Well, smells like wet dog actually. But it never gets lonely in the rainforest. There’s plenty of life to keep you company: birds, lizards, insects of all sorts (my first scorpions!) and of course the fabled duck billed platypus. Considering that most Australians have never seen a real life platypus, we consider ourselves extremely lucky to have been able to observe one frolicking around the crystal clear creek in the early hours of our last morning there. (They’re a lot smaller that you’d expect.)

At night in the rainforest, it gets eerily dark. The canopy is so dense that absolutely no light can get through. Pitch black. Lying in your little tree huts, high above the wet ground, your eyes never adjust, open or closed, there’s absolutely no difference. That makes for a real good night’s sleep. That is, it would if the sound of constant rain falling combined with the flow of the nearby river wouldn’t make you wake up 6 times a night to relieve a sudden urge to go pee.

The main road out of the Platypus Bush Camp is a winding one, crossing many riverbeds. Having left our car a kilometer away from camp, that meant we have to traverse on foot four of these gullies of varying depth and current. It was all good fun on the first couple of days, but on our last trip out, having been constantly soaked to the core for the last 120 hours, I didn’t feel like taking the award-winning picture of our last crossing that I had originally planned. National Geographic will just have to wait another year.

In other news, Mackay, where we are drying off, has decided to finally ADOPT fluoridation of their main drinking water. Knowing that the European Union has banned fluoride, a toxic waste product of aluminum, in all its drinking supplies over 20 years ago didn’t seem to make Mackay rethink its “cavity fighting” strategy. Neither did the fact that the substance has been used for years to tame down circus lions or to alter Russian inmates’ brain chemistries to make them more accepting of their fate. I miss drinking rainwater, but I suddenly just don’t feel like complaining about it anymore…

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Captain Marc

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We are en route towards the North! The GREAT North. The one bringing tropical cyclones, torrential rains, suffocating heat and hosting salt-water crocodiles and the most deadly jellyfishes on Earth in every water hole having the potential to refresh you. Why are we here, would you say? Darn good question…

While working at the hostel front desk, Stephanie sometimes sold boat tours to people also migrating to the Tropics. In exchange for her services, ABC Company, which manages most of the tours, graciously offered her a free stay on one of its ships. That’s why we faced overflowing rivers and giant ox statues to cross the Tropic of Capricorn and reach Airlie Beach, Whitsundays entryway and Australian capital of tourist exploitation.

So we discovered the Great Barrier Reef on board the Atlantic Clipper (which only cruises the Pacific Ocean)! Two days and two nights on board a 34 m sailboat. A really sublime experience. To our great astonishment, the 74 islands forming the Whitsundays don’t even resemble the tropical oasis we dreamed of. Being a continental archipelago rather than a coralline one, the islands produce vegetation similar to the one on the coast. Very few palm trees but a few conifers. Many times, we had to remind ourselves we were in Australia instead of Quebec, on a lake. The presence of wild dolphins and giant fishes helped to bring us back from our brief mind-wandering.

The heart of the Great Barrier Reef, for one, is absolutely magnificent. Much more than its South end point, where we waddled when we were in Agnes. Here, in the protected section of the Reef, colour prevails. Corals take every shape and present a colour palette rarely seen anywhere else in nature. There are also sea cucumbers, sea stars, sea snakes, sea horses... The Ocean is filled with creatures so strange; Man was forced to create a terrestrial parallel in order to not get lost in it. There is also a dramatic quantity of fishes of all sorts and configurations.

Of course, we saw Nemo; everybody is looking for that one down here. He had eyes much smaller than in the movie though, one less line on his back and he was much more protective of his home. One of them even bit me when I wanted to touch his anemone. Good lesson learned: Don’t touch anything in the Ocean. Except, maybe, Elvis. Elvis is a GIGANTIC maori wrasse, who apparently always wanders in the same spot. He got his name because he’s the « KING » of his strand of reef. He’s 20 years-old, measures about 2 metres, loves to be pet and apparently, recognises boats by the colour of their hull. Substantially, Elvis is a huge sea golden retriever.

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In Agnes no more.

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Last time, I mentioned that the Southern Cross had asked me to make their promotional video for the “Tours of 1770” DVD they were putting together. As it turns out, Bruce, the instigator of this project, saw the finished product. The very next day, he was calling me up, asking if I could redo HIS promo video. He also suggested to all the other tour operators to call me and have me redo all of THEIRS too...

It took me almost three weeks, but I managed to complete six of the videos before we finally left Seventeen Seventy. We got to do all sorts of crazy things. Some of the fun things involved:

-Doing some wicked manoeuvres on the acrobatic plane including some that could not be filmed as they were considered “illegal” by the pilot. On the way back, I even got to fly the small aircraft for a good 10 minutes.

-Doing some funky camera work whilst riding on the back of a speeding motorcycle. We didn’t have anything like a steady cam, but I think it turned out all right.

-Using a waterproof camera to actually get IN the waves with would-be surfers. The footage ended up being very good, with TONS of funny wipe-outs.

-Destroying the underwater camera Bruce had lent me for the Lazy Lizard shoot. Apparently, it wasn’t as waterproof as the manual would have you believe...

-Revamping some existing Surf Kayak video and trying to make it look nice enough that I would put my name on it. Since both tours are run by the same company, I used a similar layout to unify both products, which seemed to please Luke a lot.

As the title suggests, after having done all of that, we finally managed to escape Agnes Water. Considering that all the roads out of town were flooded at the time, this should be sufficient to let you know how much we needed to be on the road again. I don’t remember the last time I have seen THAT much rain fall in such a small amount of time. It was all very tropical. The campsite that has been our dry home (despite really heavy storms) for the past two months suddenly became a raging river, not even two hours after moving everything back in the car. Good timing, I would say. Funny enough, Australian car manual include a detailed section on how to cross overflowing creeks and what to do when you hit a kangaroo. Crazy Aussies...

Last week, we got to celebrate Australia Day. It’s cool to see how one culture celebrates its own independence. It’s just a shame that, while the Ozzies celebrate the date Captain Cook made his first landfall on Australian soil, all the Aboriginals have to celebrate is the day they lost the right to call themselves “People”. Makes it a little bittersweet to wave the Australian Red White and Blue around... The dogs didn’t seem to mind too much though... So why should we? Plus, we got to chase around some cane toads in the middle of the night to have them race reach other. Mine didn’t win despite the fact that I had named it “Speed Frog”.

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