Crazy Weekend

This past weekend was surprisingly full. As of Friday, the only thing I had planned was watching a sporting tournament between JCU's Cairns and Townsville campuses and participating in the tug-of-war. Little did I know, my life was to become far busier. I showed up at 12 for the start of the tournament to discover that Townsville had backed down and wasn't coming. A lot of Cairns athletes had committed to playing so it became the Cairns versus "all comers" games. Since I was there, I became an all-comer. I got roped into playing a sport called netball within half an hour of my arrival. First of all, I had no idea what netball was, second of all, we were playing the official JCU Cairns netball team. My team kindly explained the basics to me, and I tried my best to follow them, I'm guessing somewhat unsuccessfully since I'm pretty sure that I got called for obstruction at least five times. For those of you who, like me, haven't heard of netball before, I will try to briefly explain the premise. My roommate describes it succinctly as "really polite basketball." There are two hoops (but without backboards) one at either end of the court. To score points you throw the ball through the hoop just like scoring a basket in basketball. There are several different positions, some of which are pretty much offensive (called attackers or shooters) and positions which guard (called defenders).  Each position is limited in what sections of the court they can enter and when. If you have the ball, you can pivot in place and pass it to someone or shoot, but you can't travel with the ball. If you're guarding, you can't knock the ball out of someones hand or touch them. You stand a meter away and try to intercept the ball.
So anyways, I played netball. I also played a game of rugby touch (they call it touch football, but it's the same thing) and tug-of-war. All in all a very active day. We were promised free pizza (and being a college student I never turn down free food) so we went to the after party to collect it. There we were (for once) the only Americans and actually got to talk to a lot of Australians. My friend and I were very proud of ourselves because we made a genuine Australian friend who offered to drive us to a local mountain called the Pyramid that we had been wanting to hike.

Sunday we woke up bright and early to go hiking. Unfortunately my water bottle had leaked in the bag that I had packed the night before and gotten my camera wet ( I let it dry while we were out and it's fine now, so no worries) so I have no pictures from my adventure. We met our new friend outside and climbed into his classic Jaguar and drove off towards the Pyramid. We stopped at a servo (a gas station in Australian terminology) and then the car wouldn't start. The gas station had one of those battery charging packs so we used that to get the car running. We decided that we would drive about an hour further to Josephine Falls to let the battery charge back up. The falls were beautiful and had a natural water slide which we slid down. The water was pretty cold and it was still early in the morning so I was cold but it was fun. We made some rock towers, including a super cool rock-bridge-sculpture deal. Once we had gotten adequately cold and explored a bit we went back down to the car to find that the battery was again dead. Eventually we found someone with jumper cables (which are apparently called jumper leads here) and got the car started. As we continued driving the car was clearly struggling and eventually we were forced to stop at the side of the road. We called for help and then a brilliant plan was hatched. We had an inflatable boat in the car which had a battery to run a motor. The battery wasn't really intended to run a car but we thought it might get us to somewhere where we could buy a new battery. Our driver plugged it in and off we went again. We bought a new battery and decided that what with all the excitement of the day, we'd rather go hang out at a lake than hike a steep trail up a mountain. We went to Lake Eacham which is in the crater of an old volcano. We blew up the boat and puttered about. We saw a turtle and we climbed one of the strangler fig trees that was growing at the side of the lake. All in all it was a very exciting (and unexpected) day.

Birthday!

This past Tuesday was my twentieth birthday. Despite the fact that I found a cockroach in my bathroom that morning, it was a fantastic day. It was sunny and the sky was blue. My friends took me out to dinner in Cairns. We had a lot of fun eating Thai food (because I missed it) and being generally silly. They even bought me a cake! All in all it was a lot of fun and I'm thankful to have found some awesome friends here.

Other than that I've been doing the school thing and hanging out at various locations. I have now turned in a few assignments, so I suppose that's kind of exciting. I feel like I've pretty much settled into my classes and understand what I'm supposed to be doing in them. I spent a lot of time at the beach last week. I love it. Also, I went into Cairns this past weekend and checked out as many second-hand stores as I could find. Most of them turned out to be more on the antique side of second-hand and were therefore expensive. The last place we went was more what I was looking for and much like a small Goodwill. I bought a  tutu and a tanktop for $11 and was quite pleased with myself. I also bought some dark chocolate tim tams while I was in town. Just for the record, mint dark chocolate tim tams are wonderful, especially with milk. For those of you who don't know what a tim tam is, it's basically two chocolate cookies with a layer of chocolate cream in the middle (kind of like with an oreo) dipped in chocolate.

Mossman Gorge

This weekend we planned to go to Mossman Gorge. We were going to go on Saturday but that fell through so we ended up going on Sunday instead. Since my plans for Saturday fell through I decided to join some friends who were going to a gym to go rockclimbing. On the way back to the bus from the rockclimbing place there is a boardwalk through the mangroves. We decided to go check it out and I'm glad we did. The mangroves were beautiful and at the end of the boardwalk is the Cairns Botanical Garden. It's free and we still had plenty of daylight left so we went in. I saw some amazing plants. I have loved the plants in Australia so much, they're so very different from the plants at home, but the plants at the garden were an entirely different thing. Most of the plants their are tropical but many are from other parts of the world to allow people to see something different from what they see outside of the botanical garden. It was lovely and I am happy to say that I will go back for a field trip for one of my classes.


On Sunday we actually did get out to Mossman Gorge. Mossman Gorge is near Port Douglass in the Daintree Rainforest. The Daintree is a world heritage rainforest and is the oldest rainforest in the world. And yes, it does actually rain in rainforests, I got rained on while there. On the way there we also saw a crocodile on a river bank, the first that I've seen that wasn't captive.

Anyways, we saw some fantastic strangler fig trees. They are very interesting to look at because they are so twisted. They grow by winding themselves around an existing tree. Sometimes you can see the old dead tree in the middle. It was really hard to get a good picture of any though because the light was dim in the forest and it was raining for a while so I was trying to protect my camera. There were lots of bush turkeys hoping someone would leave some food behind for them. I also saw another giant spider, a turtle, and a snake. 

Hills

This weekend was a lot of fun. On Saturday we went into Cairns and went to Rusty's Market. It's basically a giant fruit and veggie stand with some other booths selling all sorts of things. I bought some basic veggies and more kiwi. Some of my friends decided to buy some tropical fruit to try. We tried paw paws, dragonfruit, and custard apples. I think I liked the paw paw the best, it tastes a lot like mango. Dragonfruit looks super cool but at least the one we got didn't have much flavor. Custard apples are kind of bizarre looking but actually taste pretty good, sort of like a mix of pineapple and apple. On Sunday we went for a hike.

We started our hike at about 11:30 without a clearly defined destination, I should have prepared more for being unprepared. Anyways, we hiked to the top of a hill and still had a good deal of afternoon ahead of us so we decided to continue up the saddleback trail. This turned out to be a longer hike than we had really anticipated. It was quite steep for a while. Also it went through a bunch of sugar cane which kept hitting everyone in the face. Then the track went back into the rainforest, which is beautiful. I loved hiking through the rainforest, but several plants didn't seem to want us there, we kept getting caught in things. Several of us have cuts and scratches from the spines on some of the plants. There were some excellent lookout points on the path. We were above the sky rail that goes up the hill which was pretty cool to see from there. Sometimes the trail was basically invisible and we had to hunt around looking for the next pink marker tied to a branch telling us which way the path supposedly took. Eventually we wandered out onto a highway. I'm not sure if that's actually where the path was supposed to end but we couldn't see where else it would go. Unfortunately, we had no idea where we were. Eventually we flagged a car down and asked. Apparently we were 5 km from Kuranda. This was a bit shocking because if we'd followed the road from where we started this would be an 18 km walk. The path that we took was more direct but a lot more steep. We didn't really want to rehike the trail that had taken us about 5 hours to take to this point so we started walking by the road to Kuranda. After about half an hour we came to Rainforestation, the place where I got to hold a koala in my first week here. It was closed but some employees were still there and we asked them for the number to call a taxi. We had to get a maxi taxi (which is basically a van) because there were 6 of us. It was fairly expensive but seemed better than walking the whole way back with no food. When we got back I was ravenous and ate a whole pizza.

I rested the next day and then had class again on Tuesday. In the afternoon someone talked me into running, luckily I seem to be getting back in shape pretty quickly but still, running up hills is kind of icky.