KinirysAussieAdventure: Our Daintree Adventure

Our view on the way to the Daintree Rainforrest.

On our way to the rainforrest, mom and dad saw a sign where we could eat breakfast with the birds sign! They didn't tell us that we were going to...breakfast with the birds! I saw the sign to the bird sanctuary and got really excited and I couldn't believe we were going in. There was a REALLY loud cockatoo at the door. I think it was having a bad day because he kept cawing at us and other people. They had to replace the cockatoo because he kept yelling at everyone! They replaced him with a rainbow parrot and he was pretty. He was also quiet!

These are the birds we ate breakfast with:

During breakfast dad said we had to try Vegemite! I said no, but dad said just to lick it and see what it tastes like. It was very, very, very salty! Mom, dad, Parker and I did not like it one bit! Australians love it and I do not know why! They eat it on toast with butter and on other stuff too.

This is my mom trying it. She tried it and after she tried it she drank coffee.

We ate at this picnic table inside the sanctuary and some food accidentally got on the floor so two of these lorikeets hopped down to nibble on our crumbs. We got our food from a big buffet near the door to the food there were giant pythons! They were very, very, very long. There were two of them.

There was a pink parrot and she was laying down on this branch for a little while, sleeping. Then she stood up when we walked by.

These are owls. They were right next to our bench. There were two of them. They blend in very well. We didn't notice them for a little while! Then my mom saw one of them. I saw one at first then I thought the second owl behind it was a tree trunk, then I figured out it was another owl behind it! You can see the second owl in the photo above.

This is a measuring stick that shows how big the cassowarys are compared to us!

In the bird sanctuary, these were the trails that followed along the tops of the canopy and went down to the ground eventually. The birds flew and walked all around us.

Here's Airlie. She is a female cassowary. Females are bigger than males. The female lays 4 eggs and then the male sits on the eggs and raises the cassowary babies for a year or year and a half. Airlie was born in 1995 so she is almost 22 years old! She is a southern cassowary.

This is a Torresian Imperial Pigeon. It doesn't look like our pigeons! They migrate from New Guinea to Australia.

This is a Rainbow Lorikeet. They live all up and down the east coast of Australia. They are quite noisy and they screech a lot!

There were also kangaroos and wallabies at the sanctuary! We got to feed and pet them.

There was a mother with a tiny baby in its pouch! There were wallabies and kangaroos everywhere. There was a wallaby and it was small. It was under a palm branch on the ground. It was shading the wallaby.

This little baby in the pouch was SO CUTE!!!

This was a spider web we found. It is an tent spider web. The web was over fifteen feet tall! Many spiders live in the same web because it is very big.

This is a male Cassowary and it is one of the three different kinds of cassowarys.

This darker wallaby is called a swamp wallaby. They have darker and thicker hair that is not as soft as the other wallabies. The swamp wallaby is also different from Parma wallabies.

This is a giant pelican that kept following us because it was trying to eat the kangaroo food and it also wanted to sneak out of the gate with us.

We left the sanctuary and went north to see more of the Daintree rainforest. We had to cross the Daintree River on a cable ferry. There are 163 cable ferries in the world. It took 5 minutes to get across and we could not get out of our car.

We drove up into the mountains of the Daintree. The first people who ever lived here were Aboriginal people of the Eastern Yuku Yalangi tribe. They are called the original owners of this land.

We stopped here for organic ice cream. We had to eat it really fast because it was melting!

There are speed bumps and signs everywhere because the the giant cassowaries. They walk everywhere but we did not see any of them in the wild!

We drove north to a little store called Mason's General and we walked along some fields and into a forest and down a little trail to a secret swimming hole. We learned on our crocodile tour we should NEVER swim when we can't see the bottom, but mom and dad said it was ok because we were with locals.

We had to climb down a steep bank and hop in. The locals said the water was really cold to them but it was hot to us! They are not used to cold weather and the people who live here have never seen snow unless they traveled to see it.

This is Mason's Swimming Hole. It was very pretty and there were bright blue butterflies everywhere.

It is traditional to build cairns (stacking rocks) everywhere in Cairns.

On our way home we stopped at the Marrja botanical walk and went on a tour through the mangrove forests. Mangroves are trees that live in harsh environments on a coast. The trees have a lot of salt in them because they live near oceans.

This was a really cool trunk of a tree! It looked like a web and art!

These are fan palms and they grow up to 6 feet wide!!

The things that look like nests in the trees are called Baskets of Life. They are basket ferns that catch leaves and things and deliver food to the trees.

This was a huge Basket of Life that was 5 feet across!

A giant orb spider!! It was bigger than my dad's hand!!

These are the tree roots! They are called snorkels because the grey mangroves need air to their roots so they send up these snorkels to help them breathe.

Back on the cable ferry! We are about to drive on so this is how big the ferry is.

On the way home just when it was getting dark we stopped at Mossman Gorge. The park had just closed so they let us drive ourselves up!

These birds were everywhere. They look kind of like our turkeys back home. They followed us or led us down all the paths.

I found this lizard in the forest! It perched on top of this stick straight up in the ground. Eventually it ran away on two legs like a person!!

We had to cross this suspension bridge to get to the gorge and it was really wobbly. Since we were the only people there we got to run back and forth on it and it moved up and down A LOT!!