By the entrance to the botanical gardens, a dozen cane toads lay dead on the sidewalk. The cane toad's mandate for unpleasantness extends to expiring in the ugliest and most public way possible. With their last bit of strength, they crawl up onto the sidewalk and splay themselves out horribly, like the ending of some hammy, all-toad production of Hamlet.
Inside, there are duckboard walks through jungle and swamp, some of them washed out by the rain. Gardens showing the evolution of plant life try to inject some drama with movie-sequel titles: The age of ferns! Rise of the angiosperms! A set of enormous fuel tanks from WWII has been remade into arts venues; the open one contains, for some reason, photographs from someone's visit to North America. It's a bit quiet, and a guide greets me enthusiastically. Canada? We have a sister city in Canada!
Mosquitoes don't bother me, because the first thing I did in Kuranda was to buy a tube of insect repellent that's 80% DEET. This concentration is banned in Canada, which is how you know it's good. It's a combination insect repellent/sunscreen, which is also illegal in Canada, but, as a fearless maverick, I don't let this worry me. Whatever the health risks might be, they're worth it. I do come out of the jungle walk with a leech, which I don't find until I see a mirror. It's interesting that no one I ran into mentioned it. Conservationists who didn't want to disturb it while it was feeding? People who thought it was a pet, or an affectation?
The long walk back towards town goes through the cemetery. Nesting birds attack -- this is happening a lot on this trip, for some reason. There are signs about allowable flower vases: anything with standing water will be removed to keep mosquitoes down. In the older section, graves include little stone enclosures that must trap pools of standing water. Some of these people perhaps died of malaria, and were memorialized with mosquito breeding ponds.
There are about a hundred thousand eagle-sized bats that roost downtown, and at dusk they absolutely fill the sky. The bats -- spectacled flying foxes -- are a political issue, pitting hoteliers and disease hysterics against conservationists and goths, with people who take random positions on things split 50/50. Feeling that swarms of giant bats were bad for tourism, the local council decided last year to trim the roosts. A bat was controversially claimed to have been injured. Activists chained themselves to the cherry-pickers, requiring someone to go and get some bolt-cutters. But the trees were trimmed, the bats went away, and the council issued a statement claiming victory. But it was only a tactical success; the bats came back. The council's only move now is to pretend that bat tourism really exists ("Oh, honey! It's so beautiful, like a black leathery river in the sky. This is the best honeymoon ever.")
At low tide, shore birds prospect in the exposed mud flat. At high tide in the morning, half a dozen net fishermen are scattered along the beach, alternately throwing out their nets and picking seaweed out of them. They're not worried about crocodiles, and probably rightly so. It would be interesting to know the risk here, and how it compares to a short car trip or eating a sandwich. In a rational world, crocodile signs might be replaced by chew-your-food signs and get-some-exercise-you-doughy-bastard signs. In the actual world, though, it is easy to see how crocodiles feasting on tourists, if it became a regular thing, would be bad for business. "I really want to see the clouds of monster bats and buy a cheap didgeridoo, but isn't Cairns where crocodiles keep eating people?"
Apart from the bats, I've seen no exciting Australian wildlife. A few operations here exhibit koalas, but that's it. I do want to look at koalas at some point, because koalas are interesting.
What's neat about koalas is that they are stupid. They're slow even as marsupials go, and marsupials aren't the sharpest tools in the Shed of Life. Connoisseurs of animal stupidity have suggested koalas may be the stupidest of all mammals. Stupidologists and zoostupidologists point to their tiny, unfolded, fluid-cushioned brains and their inability to make simple behavioral adaptations. Exostupidologists speculate that they may be among the dumbest complex life in the universe. If you spread eucalyptus leaves in front of a koala, it won't eat them, because it's only wired to pull them off a tree. As with sloths, their stupidity is adaptive, because of their low-energy diet and uncomplicated lives. They've evolved to be idiots.
Yesterday, I walked down to the industrial port to scout out the cargo ship. Turns out industrial ports are not good places for pedestrians. There are no sidewalks, and there are a lot of things that might crush you without noticing. But I found the ship. I have to go and get on board in a couple of hours.
Inside, there are duckboard walks through jungle and swamp, some of them washed out by the rain. Gardens showing the evolution of plant life try to inject some drama with movie-sequel titles: The age of ferns! Rise of the angiosperms! A set of enormous fuel tanks from WWII has been remade into arts venues; the open one contains, for some reason, photographs from someone's visit to North America. It's a bit quiet, and a guide greets me enthusiastically. Canada? We have a sister city in Canada!
Mosquitoes don't bother me, because the first thing I did in Kuranda was to buy a tube of insect repellent that's 80% DEET. This concentration is banned in Canada, which is how you know it's good. It's a combination insect repellent/sunscreen, which is also illegal in Canada, but, as a fearless maverick, I don't let this worry me. Whatever the health risks might be, they're worth it. I do come out of the jungle walk with a leech, which I don't find until I see a mirror. It's interesting that no one I ran into mentioned it. Conservationists who didn't want to disturb it while it was feeding? People who thought it was a pet, or an affectation?
The long walk back towards town goes through the cemetery. Nesting birds attack -- this is happening a lot on this trip, for some reason. There are signs about allowable flower vases: anything with standing water will be removed to keep mosquitoes down. In the older section, graves include little stone enclosures that must trap pools of standing water. Some of these people perhaps died of malaria, and were memorialized with mosquito breeding ponds.
There are about a hundred thousand eagle-sized bats that roost downtown, and at dusk they absolutely fill the sky. The bats -- spectacled flying foxes -- are a political issue, pitting hoteliers and disease hysterics against conservationists and goths, with people who take random positions on things split 50/50. Feeling that swarms of giant bats were bad for tourism, the local council decided last year to trim the roosts. A bat was controversially claimed to have been injured. Activists chained themselves to the cherry-pickers, requiring someone to go and get some bolt-cutters. But the trees were trimmed, the bats went away, and the council issued a statement claiming victory. But it was only a tactical success; the bats came back. The council's only move now is to pretend that bat tourism really exists ("Oh, honey! It's so beautiful, like a black leathery river in the sky. This is the best honeymoon ever.")
At low tide, shore birds prospect in the exposed mud flat. At high tide in the morning, half a dozen net fishermen are scattered along the beach, alternately throwing out their nets and picking seaweed out of them. They're not worried about crocodiles, and probably rightly so. It would be interesting to know the risk here, and how it compares to a short car trip or eating a sandwich. In a rational world, crocodile signs might be replaced by chew-your-food signs and get-some-exercise-you-doughy-bastard signs. In the actual world, though, it is easy to see how crocodiles feasting on tourists, if it became a regular thing, would be bad for business. "I really want to see the clouds of monster bats and buy a cheap didgeridoo, but isn't Cairns where crocodiles keep eating people?"
Apart from the bats, I've seen no exciting Australian wildlife. A few operations here exhibit koalas, but that's it. I do want to look at koalas at some point, because koalas are interesting.
What's neat about koalas is that they are stupid. They're slow even as marsupials go, and marsupials aren't the sharpest tools in the Shed of Life. Connoisseurs of animal stupidity have suggested koalas may be the stupidest of all mammals. Stupidologists and zoostupidologists point to their tiny, unfolded, fluid-cushioned brains and their inability to make simple behavioral adaptations. Exostupidologists speculate that they may be among the dumbest complex life in the universe. If you spread eucalyptus leaves in front of a koala, it won't eat them, because it's only wired to pull them off a tree. As with sloths, their stupidity is adaptive, because of their low-energy diet and uncomplicated lives. They've evolved to be idiots.
Yesterday, I walked down to the industrial port to scout out the cargo ship. Turns out industrial ports are not good places for pedestrians. There are no sidewalks, and there are a lot of things that might crush you without noticing. But I found the ship. I have to go and get on board in a couple of hours.
