They call today meatless Mondays

This past week has been filled with... alot! I'm not sure where I left off, but I know that we've been spending alot of time together, and not much time to ourselves... once again. We have been getting to swim at lake Eacham, which is a crater lake that isn't too far from the site. The water is nice, and apparently there's a small crocodile that lives there... eek!

Meatless Mondays includes fried everything... and a salad. Except today was actually fried everything, a salad and spinach ravioli! score!
Last week we got to take a canopy tour at Mamu, where we had a guided tour through the rainforest, and then got to walk up a 50m tower to see the lookout, which was absolutely breathtaking. We could see even more than we've seen already... about 7 layers of forests, a meandering creek at the bottom, and two cockatoos swooping through the whole scene. To add to the awesomeness of our day, we got to swim underneath a huge waterfall in the middle of the jungle in Millaa Millaa. The water was freezing and I almost didn't go, but after I made it across to the other side of the lake and under the showering water, I was sooo happy! I looked up and saw the mist from the water sparkling above me. It became difficult to keep my eyes open, but even when closed the smell and the sound was so overpowering that it was just as amazing. We were SO COLD. I couldn't stay long under the fall, but on the way out my professor Tim showed us a "bum-breathing" turtle! They actually have the ability to breathe out of their butts if they need to! How cooooool is that?
Last week we went to Jungle Farms and got to eat kangaroo and crocodile! When we first got to the farm we went down to the lake / river (not sure what it was) to watch for platypuses, but we were unsuccessful.  Dinner was great. I really liked the kangaroo. It tasted sort of like teriyaki beef. The crocodile was alright... it was in sausage form. It definitely wasn't my favorite. We also had beef, crab salad, regular salad, nice bread, cookies and tea and coffee. It felt really good to have some real meat in my body... we've been sort of eating really processed foods that are easy to purchase in bulk. After dinner we took a tour of the farm via spotlighting and saw 3 tree kangaroos!!! They have such long tails that hang down like a branch, and they are very fluffy with black faces. aww.

Thursday we had our first quiz! It was a bird quiz... memorizing 25 birds by sight and sound. I got 19 out of 20! Pretty exciting! Friday we had TREAT (community service time) and Warrawork. Last week my group did Lantana (an invasive vine from the Amazon) removal, and this week we went around the site finding tree species with fruits, sling-shotting their fruits down and bringing them back to the nursery to plant. It was alright... nice not to be inside a classroom, that's for sure! My group's warrawork (warrawok is a time when everyone on site has a designated section to clean, and they clean it) last week was cleaning out the cabin bathrooms and the study shack (bleh!). This week, though, it was easy-- we only had to clean out the car park (what they call parking lots here) and sweep the veranda. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy!

On Saturday we got to go to the Yungaburra market. It was a really cute little town event, where all the local farmers and vendors brought their stuff and set up a table. Marcus and I went around finding all of the free samples (because we're awesome like that), and I ended up buying a canvas bag for $3.60 that has a tree kangaroo on it! I also bought more (5) avocados (nom nom nom), limes (5) and a tomato for only $2.50! I made out like a bandit!

That night we went to Cairns and stayed overnight!!! We all got rooms in various hostels-- I was with Marcus in a hostel called Cairns City Backpackers, which was actually really nice for FIFTEEN DOLLARS. yeah, that's right... cheeaaap! They gave us a free dinner and 10% off of his snorkeling trip, too! Other people stayed at the Global hostel, and most in Gilligan's. The city itself is a really nice area. The streets are really wide, and all of the stores are very nicely kept. The main street that goes down the middle of the city has old strangler figs remaining that were saved from being removed. The esplanade was super beautiful... there's a giant public pool that is flush with the land so it looks like a beach, and then the ocean is in the background. There are large sculptures all around (one of a group of angelfish) and street performers almost all of the time! It's a nice little place to buy some cheap wine, eat some good food and just enjoy walking around. On Saturday night a few of us sat on the esplanade wall looking out into the ocean just hanging out. It was alot of fun! 

Sunday morning we woke up bright and early to go diving!!! The group I went with was all of the certified divers, so Camilla, Evan, Kelsey and I. On the way to the first reef I was absolutely seasick. I filled up three bags with vom. ew. The first 2 dives tasted like that, too. We went to Saxon reef, where there was a giant magical wall, and Hastings reef where there was a giant fishbowl shaped reef. We saw absolutely giant corals, and GIANT clams! We saw huge purple giant clams that probably could have eaten Harmony if they really wanted to! They were mesmerizing! At the fishbowl we saw absolutely gigantic corals. One was about 20m tall! We saw tons of clown fish in their respective anemone habitats and I saw a unicornfish. No sharks, rays or turtles though :-/. We did three dives, the first one being the deepest. I couldn't go very deep (not more than 15m/40ft) because my ear wouldn't clear properly. By the third dive I couldn't clear my ear past 7ft, so I decided just to linger close to the surface and just enjoy what I could see from there. Oh well. The water temperature was 27 degrees C! We also had a nice lunch on the boat with potato salad, macaroni salad, roast beef, ham, bread, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, noodles and more. After my third dive I treated myself to a coke (sweetened with sugar cane, of course)! and I was not sick on the way home, so I slept on the bow of the boat in the sun for an hour :). Overall a pleasant weekend!

Today we spent the day setting up skink traps along the access road with Siggy. My group was at the 900m mark (aka almost the furthest away from the center). That was actually really hard work! We set up one open trap and one closed trap per group (groups of 3... I was with Charlie and Marcus, aka we were the best team ever :)). The closed trap requires  four walls of plastic that we had to dig trenches in order to stake them into the ground in a 5m squared box. In the center of the square we dug a hole for a bucket that we made flush with the ground so that unsuspecting scinks would just walk right into the bucket. We are doing this for practice for our DRs (directed researches). We've spent 3 days with Rohan to get an idea of what a DR with him is like, and now we're spending 3 days with Siggy to see what hers is like, and then will do 3 days with Tim to see what his is like. In November we start our DRs (ahh!) so we have to be prepared to come up with a research question and be able to set up the experiments ourselves. Today we were pretty leechy-- I had some leeches on my neck, hands, arms, legs, ankles, etc. and I had wait-a-whiles attaching to my face and hair! I even wore my hiking socks over my pants, with hiking boots and a long-sleeved shirt. I was doing alot of sitting and kneeling in the leaf litter and laying across vines and logs to lay out the plastic drift fence. but, it's all in the name of science!!!


Overall it was a successful week! Now, on to destinkify myself...
oh, and if you're wondering what a budgie smuggler is... picture a man wearing a banana hammock! (budgie is a type of bird I think, so it was a term used to tell a man that it looked like he was smuggling 2 small birds around in his bathing suit :)). Also, heaps= tons!

cheers!