Yesterday evening I had a delicious dinner of pasta Alfredo
and kangaroo kebabs! Kangaroo meat is pretty good and not gamey at all. It is
very red and reminded me a bit of horse meat.
So today I took a tour to the Atherton Tablelands, which
extend south of Cairns. The tablelands are not really flat, but are a volcanic
plateau formed by the coalition of several small basaltic shield volcanoes, 4
to 1 million years ago. They were originally covered by a sub-tropical
rainforest that has been heavily cleared for agriculture. As the name suggests
this is an area where it rains a lot. The town of Bobinda has won the Gum Boot
trophy 14 out of 15 years. This trophy is given to the town where it rains the
most in Australia, and Bobinda boasts an average of 6 m per year (that would be
72 inches per year), and the nearby mountains, which include the two highest peaks
in Australia (only 1,600 m in altitude) have been known to receive 10 to 12 m
of precipitation per year (120 to 144 inches per year)!.
So what type of ag goes with these high precipitation
values? Bananas, sugar cane, and surprisingly also maize. Sugar cane is the
cash crop here, and we drove past thousands of hectares covered by it. It has
already flowered, so it is ready for harvest, but today is raining and to
harvest it they need several dry days on a row. It is thinner than the sugar
cane we are used to in Mexico and the Caribbean (maybe the thickness of a
finger), but that means they can mow it like grass, which makes for much faster
mechanized processing. Outside of that they follow the same procedure of squeezing
the juice, boiling it to concentrate and crystallize the sugar, and then
centrifuge the mix to separate the molasses from the refined sugar crystals.
Our objective in this trip is to look at waterfalls, and the
first ones we stopped at, Josephine Falls, were scary if not that impressive.
The water was moving so fast! There were giant potholes carved in the granite
by swirling pebbles and cobbles, and the roar of the water was deafening. Of
course, it is raining, and it is probably raining a lot harder up in the
mountains.
The second waterfall we saw, Milla Milla, was in stark
contrast the “perfect and tidy” waterfall, precisely 18 m high and 6 m wide. It
is so perfect that it has been seen all over Australia in shampoo commercials
and movies about paradise.
The final waterfall, Malanda, was not only perfect, but the
pool at the bottom had been shaped with concrete to look as a swimming pool.
Big disappointment. However, the forest around it is home to the elusive
tree-dwelling kangaroo, so I got a crink in my neck looking up (without success
I am sorry to report). This peculiar kangaroo occupies the ecologic niche that
monkeys occupy in other rainforests, and has even evolved a mildly prehensile
tail. The wonders of evolution!
At Malanda they have a Visitor’s Center where they did a great
job explaining all about the tree-dwelling kangaroo, but most important is that
it reminds me to tell you that the National Park Service is doing a big effort
to recognize the local aboriginal tribes as the Traditional Custodians of the land.
I was a bit skeptic about the apology that the Australian Parliament extended
to the First Nations, as being too little and too late, but I tip my hat in
salute to the effort being done to bringing in the elders of the different
tribes as advisors to the conservation efforts of Australia.
The last big hurrah of the trip was a quiet walk along this
muddy creek, where 100 m down the way we saw in wonder a female platypus
swimming for a few seconds, diving into the mud to look for crayfish and other
small invertebrates, and then coming up again to elegantly flick the mud out of
her catch, regard us with mistrust, and then dive again for another serving. It
was fabulous. The platypus, which is probably 10 inches long and thus much
smaller than what we had imagined, is very shy and difficult to spot, so I am
counting this as one of the most meaningful wildlife sightings of this trip!
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