Monday in Cape Trib/Cow Bay
It's Tuesday night, but I'm writing this as if it were Monday night! Drew and I decided to take it easy today, and actually slept in with no alarm! Today's plan was for nothing. We had breakfast at Crocodylus, very nummy and relatively cheap. Our general plan was to drive north until we ran out of road, and that didn't take all that long. Our first stop was to be at the Daintree Ice Cream Company, but I guess 10am was a little early for ice cream, so we went on to the Fan Palm Cafe, got some fresh juices, and walked along their boardwalk into a big grove of the fan palms. I think I mentioned that these are very slow growing, a small one is usually around 60 years old. This grove was full of palms as tall as a Doug fir, and they can live to be 3,000 years old. And I can't keep a palm even one year!

We went back to the ice cream company, where they make the strangest ice creams you're ever likely to see. We sampled 4 flavours. Plum and mango were fairly normal, although the plum melted really fast. But have you ever had black wattle seed ice cream? It was our favorite, it tasted like moca. Mmmm! The other flavour was black sapote. The fruit is also known as the chocolate pudding fruit. I didn't like it... I know, me not liking ice cream is bizzare in itself. But I usually don't like chocolate ice cream, and this tasted like a very strange chocolate ice cream to me. But the overall ice cream experience was pleasing!

Next, we went and found a beach and had a nap. We were pretty much the only people there, although we could hear a generator from the nearby beach cafe. But the overall nap experience was pleasing!

Then we drove north untill we ran out of road... which took about 20 minutes. Actually, there was still a road, but it was a dusty gravel one for about 32km, then it became a 4wd track for 120km. Both of us had already had our lifetime alotment of gravel road travel from the Kakadu experience, so we decided to head back to the Bat House, which was unfortunately closed on Mondays.

So we found another beach and had another successful napping experience! This time we shared the beach with alot of honey ants. They were very amusing to watch and tease!

At 4pm, we went for an exotic fruit tasting experience. The story of this couple (Digby and Alison) was pretty interesting, heck with the fruit! They were school teachers from Victoria (as in Melbourne) and decided to 'drop out'. So they became itinerant teachers in the Northern Territory. They ran a one room school something like 500km from Tennant Creek... which is 500km from nowhere. He said they need two married teachers, because they only had a one bedroom caravan for the teachers to live in. And they had to phone to Darwin every morning to prove that they hadn't skipped out in the middle of the night. In the early 80's, they came to Cape Trip, bought this place, and started planting strange fruit. He was a zoologist, so had no idea about plants, but they struggled along. At that time, there was NO electricity, NO phone, NO road. The closest phone was a 4 hour 4wd track away at the river crossing. It now takes about 45 minutes to get there on the road! Still no electricity out there... everyone has a generator or solar batteries. When they built the road, all the locals blockaded and protested, but it still went through. And as recent as 1995, they had a vote to go onto the power grid... which soundly got defeated.

There are lots of the agri-eco-tourism small businesses here. It's the major form of employment. Alot of these businesses are also for sale. It reminds me of the smaller gulf islands.

So we had 10 different fruits, and I know I don't remember the names. One fruit is so fragile that it cannot be marketed at all. It's a variety of custard apple, a rollinia, I think it's called. Digby says you pick one, and carefully carry it into the house. Once it sits on its own weight, it bruises almost immediately. It was pretty good and different. Digby told us all about how the fruit grows, how it's used around the world, commercial uses, etc. He's also a rainforest advocate, and actually had about half of his land put back into the national park system.

Ludger and Ina were at the tasting, too, so we all went out for dinner at the Dragonfly Cafe. Good food, if you're ever in the area! We saw a white lipped tree frog sitting in a hanging basket, another successful wildlife sighting! We relaxed and enjoyed supper for a couple of hours, then headed back in the dark.

Dark is an interesting time to be driving in Australia, and everyone will warn you against doing it. But up here, it seems to be OK. It's not like you're going to have a big kangaroo hop across the road or anything, and I think that cassowary aren't nocturnal. But we did see a flattened bandicoot (really tiny kangaroo). Ina and Ludger were driving in front of us, when all of a sudden they came to one of the one-lane bridges and stopped... out jumped Ludger, who was running after something... a bandicoot! He had his camera out and was chasing it across the bridge! I don't think the bandicoot was too impressed, and as soon as he could, he was off into the bush. I hope Ludger got his photo op!

Drew and I stopped to take a walk along the beach - the owner at the Dragonfly said the stars were nice! But when we got there, all we had were clouds... so much for the romantic beach walk!

Actually, it was nice to get to bed fairly early. Tuesday was going to be a long day!