It's a Boy!

Stormy Dunedin

When it's as pretty as this, we don't even mind the weather being so cold and miserable. That's a complete lie. We're fed up of it. If another co-worker tells me this winter has been unusually wet, I'll kick them. It snowed today. And then it was sunny. Then it rained. Then it hailed. Then it was sunny again. And then it rained. I took this photo from Mount Cargill Road yesterday afternoon. Mt. Cargill sits to the north of the city, like a big green cone. We took a Sunday drive up it yesterday because we're old and boring. On the way back we even complained that the other drivers were driving too fast. (They were driving too fast.)

Australia Has Very Weird Birds

We were only in northern Queensland for five days, but we saw so many unusual birds while we were there. Fortunately, we're not birdwatchers. We have lives. But it was interesting all the same. Under a hot tropical sun, as we lay in the pool, chattering cockatoos flew overhead in pairs, white against the blue bowl. Brightly-colored rainbow lorikeets fed on the seed heads of the strange plants outside our room. It was almost, almost, enough to make us into birdwatchers. But, like I said, we have lives. Whenever possible though, I took a photo of some of these strange birds, and here are a few of them.

A kookaburra: it's sort of the national bird of Australia. They live in groups and generate a lot of noise, sounding more like hyenas or monkeys than birds. Apparently, they can live for twenty years or more, but if there were a group of them near my house, making all that noise, they 'd live for about twenty minutes. Sorry, kookaburras, but it's true.

A hummingbird? Who knows?

We think this bird is some kind of an ibis, but after only a day or two, we decided to call it the Trashbird instead. These things are like rats. Dirty. Furtive. Smelly. One day, we sat on the beach, looking for crocodiles and sharks and jellyfish and snakes, and a Trashbird sat right next to us, waiting for us to finish our lunch. We could smell it from five-feet away. Hot dirty smelly Trashbird. Everywhere we went, we saw Trashbirds digging through trash, disappearing into dumpsters, carrying ripped plastic bags around in their curved beaks. I think this Trashbird even has trash stuck in its beak. Smelly Trashbird.

Here's a cassowary: a large, rare flightless bird that lives in rain forests and eats purple figs and poops out the seeds, helping the rain forest to regenerate, et cetera ad infinitum. They're a bit like emus. They can be aggressive, which might explain why the photo is a bit shaky and out of focus: we were getting prepared to run, or hit it with a camera. Survival of the best armed.

A rainbow lorikeet. This bird is pretty and brightly-colored and it's quiet and doesn't eat trash and isn't dangerous. So we like it. Good job, rainbow lorikeet!

Actually, you are not really here ...

The Sun Worshippers

In Palm Cove, it was difficult not to worship the sun. Everyone was at it. So, here's a few photos of my favorite two sun worshippers. The first one should be familiar to you all, with the sun shining right down on her tight belly and on our baby. She looks perfect, doesn't she? The second worshipper is a guy who walked down an almost empty beach one day, and then stopped about four feet in front of us and just stood there, sunbathing vertically, eyes closed, blocking our view for about twenty minutes. As suddenly as he'd arrived, he put his glasses back on and walked off again, along an otherwise unpopulated beach.

Australia: Impending Doom

After our fun babymoon in tropical northern Queensland, we're back in Dunedin. We had a great time and I'll be posting some photos here all this week.

The most important question we have after our trip: Why does Australia have so many of the world's most dangerous animals? I have no idea. The signs are posted everywhere though. Doing anything is terrifying. Sharks. Snakes. Jellyfish. Crocodiles. Spiders. Signs. Terror. Danger.

On our first morning in Palm Cove, we swam and floated blissfully in the calm of the sea, enjoying the sun on our faces. Later on, I noticed a lifeguard's hut and flags set up a couple of hundred yards farther up the beach. The first couple of photos below were posted on the lifeguard's hut. In front of the lifeguard's hut, a stinger-resistant net was set up in the sea, and we slowly realized we had risked our lives earlier by swimming in the open sea.

The nets aren't crocodile and shark proof though. I spoke with a guy fishing on the beach and he told me that one of the largest saltwater crocodiles ever caught was captured under the Palm Cove jetty at the end of the beach. I could see the jetty. Maybe he was playing with the pale and friendly tourist. Male salties can exceed 20-feet in length and weigh 2200-pounds, making them a lot like my car but with more teeth. Imagine a Subaru Legacy with teeth.

I like that, according to the poster below, 5-40 minutes after an irukandji sting, a "feeling of impending doom may arise." That's great. I've never read anything before that has made me feel more like sitting on dry land, drinking rum.

This sign below was posted near the beach at Cape Tribulation, a couple of hours north of Palm Cove. We rented a car and drove through the rain forest, and around headlands, and along pristine beaches to the cape, which was named by Captain James Cook in 1770 after his ship ran aground here. Very poetic. He should have named it Cape Jellyfish, or Cape Really Scary, or Cape Impending Doom. Or maybe Cape Vinegar, for the bottle of vinegar provided so that poor swimmers suffering a feeling of impending doom can treat their stings.

Where's that rum?

This sign below was posted by the side of Cooper Creek, near a place called Wonga Beach, on the road to Cape Tribulation. I saw it while we waited to drive onto the deck of a ferry that would take us, locked in our car, across the creek. In a few moments we'd be locked in our car, slowly chugging across a muddy brown slack creek, filled with car-sized toothy dinosaurs. Snapping jaws. Ridiculous. Rum.

Then, we stopped for a self-directed bush walk in the Daintree rain forest and saw the last amazing sign posted below. Somewhere in the thick green screen of trees in front of us, cassowaries were prowling, waiting to attack unsuspecting tourists. I didn't really know too much about cassowaries. From the sign we couldn't really learn too much more, except that cassowaries look like very large turkeys and that they might attack us. They live on plump purple cassowary figs that fall onto the forest floor and lie there like shiny eggs. Cassowaries are very rare, skittish, and we shouldn't disturb them. They're big aggressive fig-eating turkeys.

Killer turkeys.

And so we got our cameras out, sadly said goodbye to each other and walked right in ... with a feeling of impending doom.

Palm Cove ... and news!

It has rained constantly for almost two weeks. I'm not kidding. Rain. For two weeks. The entire city is saturated like a sponge. The gutters are filled with rain all the time. Everything is damp. Nothing will dry. Every night the news is full of fallen trees, roads eroded by the sea, flooded streets. It's like living on another planet. A drowned world. We're thinking of calling the baby Noah now, instead of Pancake.

More importantly: we don't care. Tomorrow we're off to Christchurch, and then on Monday we fly to Brisbane, and then to Cairns, and then to Palm Cove in tropical north Queensland, where the temperature is currently in the high-70s. The sea is one degree Celsius colder than the air.

Ha.

Also, we know the sex of our baby now ... who wants to know? (ck)