Crocs:
Jellyfish: This beach is four miles long, and the only part you can swim is within the white barriers, which is about knee deep. In the wintertime, there are no jellyfish, so you can swim all you want!!
Poisonous Rainforest Trees & Fruit: The plum colored one will drive you insane (neuro-toxins) the one to the right has the highest concentration of cyanide found in nature, and the third can actually be eaten, but only after bathing in the river (to wash out the toxins) for a couple weeks, which is how the Aboriginals used to eat them.
This is the tree the Cyanide one came from... or it's a nutmeg tree, which is also poisonous.
This "Stinging Tree" won't kill you, but it will embed small nettles in your skin, which will cause severe pain and irritation for 3 to 4 months:
Rusty logging saws:
The Cassowary Bird: Check out its inner toe - four to six inches of disemboweling talon. This also happens to be the most ridiculous looking animal ever.
And finally, Paul:
Additionally, Australia houses many of the world's most deadly snakes and spiders, a large number of sharks, and several other dangerous sea creatures and scavengers. Yikes! This is all a stark contrast to New Zealand, which has no poisonous snakes or spiders and no large predators. About the only thing in NZ which can hurt you are wild mushrooms.
Despite all the deadly creatures, Australia is a blast!! Ann Marie and I spent a week in Tropical North Queensland (in the far northeast) at the end of November. We were primarily in Port Douglas - a sleepy resort town near to the Daintree Rainforest and Great Barrier Reef.
Our adventures included snorkeling on the Barrier Reef (if you are not a scuba person, I would highly recommend the Wavelength tour based in Port D - they are snorkel only and do a fantastic job), a day long rainforest tour (where we learned all the perils of Aussieland and licked green ants, which have a super intense vitamin C citrus taste), relaxing on 4-mile beach (where we couldn't swim), and visiting the Croc Farm where we met Paul, as well as saw Koalas, Wallabies, and the Cassowary up close. Shockingly, we did not see a single Kangaroo on our trip to Aus. We did eat Kangaroo, however, on a couple different occasions (it was great, but croc is better). Here are some pics of the fine Australian cuisine we enjoyed:
Roo, Croc, & Emu Bruchetta
Deep-fried Mud Crab (a specialty of Tropical North Queensland)
Whitebait (actually an NZ staple - whitebait are juvenile smelts, which are caught early in the spring in NZ rivers)
Morton's Bay Bugs: these are like little lobster tails, without the rest of the lobster! They were fantastic and didn't have that characteristic seafood taste that some people don't like - I would recommend to all!
We're working on getting the rest of our pictures up online using Picasa, so we'll post that link soon!
