Queensland and the rainforest

So we had a short plane ride (everything is relative to the 17 hour ride from Dallas to Sydney now) from Ayers Rock airport to Cairnes. We flew right over the mountains and landed near the ocean. The mountains end right at the ocean which makes for amazing views! We picked up the rental van and crammed all our luggage and 8 people into it and then David bravely drove us to our rental house. The rental house is amazing and even though I had spend days perusing and scanning and viewing pictures of all the potential places to stay while here, after we booked it I had totally forgotten what it looked like. It's huge with 4 bedrooms (2 master bedrooms) large kitchen, large living room, second living room, outdoor eating and a pool! It also is a 2 minute walk to the beach and a bunch of cool places to eat and watch the beach goers. I highly recommend staying here if you are in the area. After we got here there was a grocery run and then we all went to bed.

Woke up the next morning and enjoyed a yummy breakfast and a little exploring. I walked around the neighborhood and began writing down birds that I saw but it was hard because these birds aren't even in the same group as most of the ones I'm use to so I would spend a lot of my time flipping through all the pages just to find the group that looked most similar. And while I was doing this inevitably another bird would catch my eye and I would look at it through binoculars and then have to remember 2 birds to look up.

We left around noon to visit Granite Rock State Park on our way to meet up with our wildlife tour guide. The park was amazing and had the Meereba rock wallaby which were pretty much like pets. The kids got to feed them and we all took a short hike on the rocks, we even saw a lizard on the hike. We left there and met up with our guide Alan from Alan's Wildlife Tour who use to teach primary school and he was the perfect guide for us! He was great at explaining things to younger kids and answering all of their questions and also knew a lot of the natural history of the area we were in. He explained how the Atherton Tablelands were formed by a volcano and described the rocks and plants and we saw birds and a pandimelon on our first walk about. He took us to a lot of places where we saw mammals, marsupials, birds and turtles. Then we broke for lunch in Yungaburra which i think is the sister village to Cape Vincent. Small town with charm and yummy local places to eat. Then we went back into the rainforest and used his spotlight and thermal imaging sensor to find nocturnal marsupials. This was so much fun! We even found some sleeping birds! After the tour was over, Dave bravely drove us back to town through the winding mountain path where he was driving on the opposite side of the road than in the states. This road was so curvy that it was impossible to sleep on the way homes because we were constantly turning the opposite way!

Tomorrow's post will be about our adventure in the Rainforeststation and tomorrow's adventure is snorkeling/diving in the Agincourt reef of the Great Barrier Reef!!
Pictures below of our adventures and movies of adventures are round on my Facebook post.

This is the view from our front door of the rental house

The only bird that would stay still long enough for me to take a picture of it; the bird is called a Willie Wagtail and reminds me of the mockingbirds in Florida.

the kids bravely jumped into the pool even though it wasn't that warm yet

Granite Rock State Park - this was really fun to walk around on the boulders; the trail was marked with spray paint of different colors. Definitely wouldn't see this in the US, too much room for liability.

Harper and her babydoll feeding the Meereba rock wallabies

Zachary feeding the wallabies

Me feeding the wallaby; they were so adorable and soft

Very photogenic

We found a mom and joey (it's head is poking out if you look closely and zoom in

Look no handrails!

The first lizard of the trip!

Alan is in the front followed closely by his shadow Harper Harper and our guide got along so well, they were both cheeky

Crossing the road to look for the native python that had been spotted 2 days ago along with Lewin's tree kangaroo

We found the tree kangaroo but the python escaped our eyes

This is a native birds nest fern and we have one on our back porch in Tampa - fun fact is that it's edible if you're in a pinch and starving but tastes horrible

We also saw some cute turtles that are all side necked and can store oxygen in their cloaca if they need to stay underwater for long periods of time

This is the riflebird that Alan called in with a lure of mealworms at his friends house - affectionately named Oliver

We all took turns having Olly land on our hands for a treat (except Tracey and Jason), I posted a really cool slow motion video (on FB) of the bird landing on Emery's hand...it was really cool

We got some great looks at the platypus (plural of platypus is platypus); 2 different one, also see my facebook entry for the video of it swimming

Sunset before spotlighting

Here's one of the animals we saw spotlighting - can't remember the exact name but I think it's a green ringtail possum

This was a huge strangler fig that got one 1 tree and killed it just to have it fall on a second tree and killed it and then fell on a 3rd tree that it's in the process of killing. It was quite the sight!

We even managed to spot some sleeping birds thanks to the thermal imaging. All the kids wanted one after Alan let them use it to find the animals in the trees. But first they will need to get their own jobs to pay for one!!