S’Long, Australia!
In the next few days, we’ll check out and be on our way to Vanuatu. The weather looks agreeable, so hopefully we’ll have a pleasant trip. It’s about 1500 miles from here to Fiji, so a stop in Vanuatu will be a nice break.
It seems really odd that we’re going to have to leave Dad and the boat in Fiji and try to go back to our other lives in just about a month. Jessie and I will also be turning fourteen on June twelfth. It seems like just a few months ago that we were sitting in a big tree outside McDonalds with our friends and slurping McFlurries (or whatever they’re called) for our thirteenth birthday in Tahiti! I’ll be glad to see all my friends and family when we go home, but I’ll be sad to leave the boat and snorkeling and tropical animals and plants. And of course, I’ll miss Dad, and seeing Palmyra and Hawaii with him.
When we were at Lady Musgrave Island (which is a lagoon enclosed in a reef, like Minerva Reef, except that it has an island built up on part of the reef), we saw loads of turtles! When we were snorkeling, we saw five huge turtles, and I got really close to one! I think that we mostly saw Green Turtles, but we also saw one or two Loggerheads. Then, when we went walking on the beach, we found four baby turtles! They were tiny, only about three inches around. I thought there was something wrong with them at first, because they looked sort of odd, but then I noticed that they were turned upside down. We think that they must have hatched the night before we found them, got turned on their backs before they could reach the water, and were stranded until we came. We turned them right side up, of course, but we let them scramble down the beach and into the water themselves, because they imprint that particular stretch of beach in their brains, and come back to it when they are ready to lay eggs of their own. It was sort of hard for the turtles once they got down near the water, because, even though the waves weren’t very large, they pushed the turtles back up the beach, rolling them over and over and sometimes stranding them on their backs again so that we had to flip them over. We watched them until they had gotten safely through the small surf on the beach, and then they swam away over the reef.
We have finally spotted the elusive platypus on the Broken River near Mackay, Queensland! After many months of careful observation, all we had seen were the mud-coated freshwater turtles native to the area, until one day when a small, odd looking creature surfaced in the shallows near our powerful platypus-locating binoculars and quickly dove again, stirring up the muddy stream bed as it searched for food…
Not really. It was on the Broken River near Mackay, Queensland, but it was actually only the first time we had searched for a platypus, and I’m not sure that all those muddy turtles were native to the area, although I think they might be. Plus, we didn’t even have binoculars with us, let alone powerful platypus-locating ones. The platypuses are extremely odd looking; in fact, when a specimen of platypus was first sent to England, it was believed the Australians had played a joke on them by sewing the bill of a duck onto a rat! Also, they are a lot smaller than most people expect: just a little over a foot long! When we first saw the platypus, we thought we were looking at a baby, because we had the preconceived notion that they were nearly as big as beavers!
After our platypus episode, we decided to try and find the much-advertised spot where there were supposedly wallabies on the beach. When we found the spot, there weren’t any wallabies (it was afternoon, and they usually come out in the morning and evening), but there was a gray kangaroo. Although, he wasn’t on the beach, he was in the shade on the grass of a picnic area. We saw a sign that told us, among other things, that “Eastern gray kangaroos sometimes frequent public picnic areas.” We thought it was very appropriate. We walked very quietly over to the kangaroo, who didn’t seem to notice us. We slowly went closer. There was no sign of acknowledgement from the kangaroo. Dad reached out his hand and scratched the roo between the ears. It didn’t even flinch. Well, we felt pretty silly after that, and we spent about an hour petting it and trying to find out what it ate. We finally succeeded in getting it to take the most tender, green shoots of grass from our hands. I think it was a gourmet.
As for feeling silly about not knowing that the roo was tame, we just met some people who had an even funnier story. They saw a kangaroo on the beach, and they started inching towards it, thinking that it must be wild, and not wanting to scare it away. All of a sudden, a couple of kids came over, walked right up to the roo, and started scratching and petting it! They said they felt pretty foolish.
There are new pictures in the media gallery – help yourselves! ~ Molly