Greetings from Adelaide! We came down here yesterday and are now in a hotel without a lovely view, but with a good internet connection, so we'll be catching up on the blog! Get ready for a long one... :)

These first few are from Friday the 15th. We decided to do the Mossman Sugar Mill tour that day and go on a "Croc Tour" further north at the Daintree River.

The northeastern area of Australia turns out to be great for sugarcane and it seems like you're always passing along great fields of it wherever you go.

They are currently harvesting (and will be for most of the spring and summer). It used to be all by hand, of course, but now they have big harvester machinery that chops it all down and cuts the cane into 12 inch pieces and loads it into the "canetainers" to be taken by rail to the mill.

The trains (and a few trucks) come in continuously during the day and night during harvest season. Here the cane is going through the first sorting and going by a large magnet that traps any metal stuff that's come in from the fields.

Here we're watching all the cane be taken for crushing and juice extraction.

Tubes of cane juice going to the purifier.

Mmm... mixed juices. :)

And Matt's favorite rusty bits photo.

After that we headed up north to the Daintree River for a crocodile sighting tour. However, the tours up here aren't like the ones further south that guarantee crocs by doing pole-feedings of chickens off the roof of the boat, so no action croc shots for you! And they did warn us that since the water was getting warmer, the crocs didn't come out of the water to sun themselves as often. However, we did see a nice tree snake.

And a cute, little baby croc (about 6 months old). Guess we could tell you it was a really big croc from far away... :)

********************************************************************************

On Saturday we headed further north to the Daintree Rainforest area and Cape Tribulation. One of our first stops was a place that had a cool tower overlooking the rainforest canopy.

Next we stopped at an Insect Museum which we had heard had a large collection of live butterflies. Not so much. But it did have some cool live insects and a very large collection of mounted insects (who knew beetles came in such cool colors?).

And that's not a dead leaf she's holding in her hand...

They did have a few butterflies and one of them was very patient with Lisa.

The results of the modeling session:

We also drove up to an area that our b&b hosts had told us about and said it was far enough away from the usual tourist track that we would probably have the beach to ourselves. He was right.

********************************************************************************

On Sunday we just relaxed and went up to Mossman Gorge for a nice, cooling dip in the river. No exciting photos to show you. :)

But on Monday we decided to head down to the Atherton Tablelands area for our last day in Far North Australia. It was only about an hour & a half drive south, but amazing how the scenery changed pretty quickly. We did drive through some more Cassowary country without a sighting. :P

Our first stop was at Granite Gorge where they have a rock wallaby colony that you could hand feed.
Even though they must get a lot of feeding from tourists, they were still pretty greedy. Watch out for those little claws!

We were fond of the momma wallaby and her joey.

All done, I swear!

Then we drove through some lovely, hilly country to the Mungala Falls Dairy which is a biodynamic dairy and had a very tasty lunch. Here are some cows along the way.

After lunch we hit the "Waterfall Circuit" which had 3 waterfalls in a 16km loop. At the first one we saw a few people swimming (Aussies love their swimming holes!) and decided we should go swimming at the next one (we'd learned to always bring our "bathers" along with us). So this is us swimming at the beautiful, but very chilly (too cold for crocs!) Millaa Millaa falls.

Then Matt went and swam in a nearby lake too! (That tiny dot in the middle is him.)

The lake also had turtles and lizards (but our photo of the turtles seems to have disappeared from the blog...).

Next we were off to visit the Curtain Fig, but we also stopped along the road where they had a platypus viewing area. Didn't see the platypus, but did make friends with some nearby cows.

This is the Curtain Fig. Kind of hard to capture in a picture. This type of fig tree grows by actually starting to germinate when it's dropping into a nice crook of another tree by a bird. It then sends roots from there down to the ground and start enveloping its support tree. It never directly harms the support tree, but does eventually block it from the sun and suck up all the water with its roots.

As we were leaving, we heard a rustling and some animal chatter and saw some tree kangaroos (a baby and 2 adults). It was at dusk, so the pics aren't that great, but apparently we were quite lucky to see them. When we told our host at breakfast the next day, she didn't believe us until we showed her pics! And then she actually called the Department of National Parks for us because you're supposed to report any sightings. Who knew?! All this time we thought the cassowary was the rarest sighting.

And the day ended with a lovely sunset and a good looking guy trying to get some cool sunset photos. :)