Hiking Castle Hill

Today was the best kind of day.  My friend Maddie and I decided over lunch to hike up Castle Hill.   The giant pink granite mountain randomly in the middle of Townsville.

 Castle Hill

Castle Hill is 938ft high and is a popular hiking and lookout spot (you can drive to the top if you want to cheat).  We were told that the goat path (the orange line on the map) was the best rout to take.  As you can see from the map, it is also the shortest, which means it is also the steepest. 

 

Nevertheless, we pushed on, finally finding the trail head after climbing probably the steepest road in Australia

and were informed that there were 1315 steps from that point to the top of the Hill.

The smile is because I had yet to realize that those 1315 steps were actually 1315 stairs.  Huffing and puffing, I followed my significantly more fit friend up the seemingly endless staircase in an attempt to gain the best vantage point in the city.  It was rough.  A real battle between us, and the miserable sadist who decided to make the steps ridiculously tall and  uneven and out of the stones and rocks they could find in the area. After a bit more than a kilometer of just miserable stone stairs, we won, and were awarded the most beautiful view of the city we are currently calling home

The landmass in the distance is Magnetic Island.  Fun fact, the area between the island and the mainland is registered as a nursery for tiger sharks, not that any have attacked in any recent years, but this is where the mommas come to lay their egg cases. 

After the significantly less painful, but just as difficult trip back down (we nearly fell several times) we decided we deserved gelato, and walked to the Strand, the beach along the waterfront, were we procured the delicious dessert and sat on the beach for a while. It was gorgeous.  There is nothing like a cold treat on a hot day, on a beautiful beach, after a long and difficult challenge.  It was a good ending to a great adventure :)

Thanks to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Hill,_Queensland

for the picture of Castle Hill and its stats and to

http://www.brynns.org/health/tracks.html

for the lovely map

My first Reef Dive

On Saturday, a couple of friends and I decided to go scuba diving.  Townville is located right across from Magnetic Island. 

 

It's not the best diving location in Australia.  The visibility was only about 8m, it was a little cold, and the reef was a bit sparse, but who cares? we would be diving on an area that is basically the beginning of the Great Barrier Reef!  We took a half hour bus ride to the Ferry, a 45min Ferry ride to the Island, and walked for half an hour along a beach to get to the dive shop called Reef Safari, associated with a backpacking Hostel on the island.  For $60 we got a 40min dive and all our gear.  We did a walk in entry off the beach and set off.  It was my first open ocean dive.  I had gone diving in quarries many times, but this was the real deal.  We got to see fish of all kinds, two kinds of rays, an eel and a green turtle.  It was INCREDIBLE.  I was loving every minute of it.  

 My friend and dive buddy Maddie

 cool coral and little fish

 more cool coral cause coral is awesome

 some cool bluish flower like thing.  I have yet to figure out what this is but it is facinating

 more coral, this time including some branching coral!

cool fish

 cool sunfish! :)

 spotted ray hiding amongst the coral

 big fish. this fish had to be at least a foot long

 some sort of sea slug or cucumber which Maddie found. it was only about 4in long

 Jellyfish polyps!

 

 bull ray. He had to be at least 3ft accross

We had an incredible time and got to see all sorts of cool stuff.  I can't wait to go out again!

Thanks to:

http://www.magnetic-island-townsville.com/magnetic-island-map.html

for the map :) 

Orientation part 2

  On Friday we went to the Billabong Sanctuary. 

a really incredible place where all sorts of native Australian animals are housed.  Our tour began by meeting Tonka, a really cool wombat that seemed to be half asleep.

 and actually, he was! Wombats are nocturnal because they don't sweat.  They burrow underground during the day to avoid the heat and come out to eat at night when it's cooler.  There are three species of wombat.  Tonka is a bare-nosed wombat, simply because he has no hair on his nose.  He was rescued from his mother's pouch after she was hit by a car and raised in the park ranger's homes. 

The rangers used Tonka to show us a really cool adaptation/secret weapon.  Wombats have a very thick cartilaginous plate on their butts which they use to block the entrance to their burrows.  They have almost no nerve endings there and predators trying to eat them can scratch and claw at it all day.  Tonka wouldn't care.  The ranger demonstrated this by punching him a few times in the butt.  Tonka didn't even flinch let alone open his eyes from his nap.   Apparently if predators do get into their burrows, they lay flat on the ground and wait for the predator to step on them.  They then use that plate to slam the predators head into the ceiling of the burrow, and suffocate them.  "Death by butt" as one of the rangers eloquently put it.  After we all got a chance to pet Tonka,  we were led to the Koala enclosure.

This is Houdini, so named because he escaped several times from several different enclosures in several different parks.  Apparently Koalas also have a cartilaginous plate in their butts, but theirs is much thinner and meant to make sitting in trees for literally 20+ hrs a day more comfortable.  They also have a scent gland on their chests which make them smell dank and kind of sour.  They are incredibly soft with very thick hair to compensate for their complete lack of body fat.  They also don't drink water. Ever.  They get all their water and nutrients from the leaves they eat, which are actually poisonous.  They also have a really cool kind of second thumb which helps them hold onto things

Like me!  no amount of smelliness was going to keep me from holding one of the worlds cutest creatures. 

After the Koala, were were shown some of the parks scalier friends.

 Python

 salt water crocodile

much bigger salt water crocodile

We were then released to play with the 17 kangaroos freely hopping around the park.

It was definitely an experience I will never forget and one I immensely enjoyed.

Orientation part 1

    Over orientation week, several trips were scheduled to see the local wonders.  On Wednesday, we took a bus tour of Townsville, the main purpose being to orientate ourselves to the local shops and restaurants.  We were shown where the local "Mackers" (Mcdonalds), bottle shops (liquor stores), and malls were, and then taken to a river center, located on a large brackish water river, where we were allowed to wander, eat, and attempt to win prizes from the coordinators. (I came in second. So close!)  Thursday was significantly more exciting when we went to Reef HQ, 

 

  Needless to say, I was in my element. Thoroughly excited, we were split up into smaller groups and taken back into 

where we saw several young green turtles and one that was about 30, all of which needed medical attention.  One of the most common issues was floating, which is deadly to an animal that needs to swim to eat.  These turtles will mistake trash like plastic bags for their regular diet, jellyfish.  The trash blocks up their digestive system, causing air to get blocked up in their gut, messing with their buoyancy and making them float.  Because these turtles get all their water from their food, they usually die from dehydration before starving to death, but not before their bodies have stolen every bit of nutrients, including from their shells, which can become paper thin.  This turtle was floating, but has been rescued by the wonderful people at Reef HQ and is on his way to recovery.

The longer curly tail shows that he is a sexually mature adult male, and you can see that his right side is floating.  This turtle was around 30 and had to be 3 feet across and 4-5ft long.  He was beautiful.

Plastic bags aren't the only thing these turtles need to look out for.  They often mistakenly eat fishing implements, like hooks, lines, and swivels which lacerate their inner organs and leave them dead or dying with collapsed lungs or lacerated intestines. 

    If they don't eat the stuff, sometimes it gets them anyway.  This turtle lost a back fin, which apparently it won't even miss, but the issue remains.

The turtles were beautiful, and incredibly interesting,

but there was far more to see. 

    We were taken into a tunnel where we could see a predator tank on our rights and the reef tank on our left.  Hundreds of multicolored fish swam in the reef tank, in and out of the coral, some of them eating the coral, And a huge and beautiful coral reef it was. 

 (sorry this one goes sideways at the end)

It was gorgeous!  So many different types of fish!  The black and white one, which they allow to bred in every tank, test the water quality and are one of the only fish that protect their young.  Parrot fish swam around eating the corals, butterfly fish moved in and out of crevasses, cleaner wrasses chased all the fish around, and so much more.  I was in heaven.  I could have sat there and stared at those fish all day.  They could only be topped by the predator tank, containing the, largest, fattest, cutest nurse shark on the planet.  

Meet cuddles, one very overweight nurse shark.  he was accompanied by several black tipped reef sharks, large carnivorous fish,  Leopard sharks, two types of rays, and my personal favorite, a grouper. 

 black tipped reef sharks

 shovel nose ray

 really cool camouflage fish

 leopard shark

 another shovel nosed ray

 

several sharks waiting to be fed, on the bottom is a spiny nosed ray

GROUPER!! :D

The aquarium wasn't just these two tanks.  There were pitch black tanks with flashlight fish, dark tanks with deep sea lobsters,  tanks with lion fish and crown of thorns, which are steadily adding to the destruction of the reef,

public enemies #1 and #2

starfish, sea cucumbers, sea horses, the list goes on and on. It was incredible! I loved every minute of it.  I can't wait to go back.