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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