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.