Women Over Fifty

We rented a car and drove south from Cairns in search of the shy wild cassowaries.  Here’s a picture of one from the crocodile farm.  We were told we could see them on a certain highway about twilight.  So we took off driving on the left side of the road and getting hopelessly boggled on the traffic circles.  Fortunately there isn’t a lot of traffic on those roads, at least not on that day.

We had lots of time and decided to stretch our legs and have a look at a waterfall advertised in our tour book.  I should note here that even though we brought tour books with us, the ones we could pick up for free in the hotels were just as good and more up to date.

The waterfall was in rain forest and guess what?  It was raining.  Still, the greenery overhead offered us some shelter from the rain.  The path was deserted and there was nothing in the air but the sound of turkeys.  Turkeys?  Yes, there in the underbrush we saw any number of wild turkeys who seemed curious as to whether we would feed them, or maybe just curious.

We were pretty wet by time we found the waterfall, but it was worth it.  The waterfall was full and lovely and a good goal for two tourists looking for something not in the tour books.  Maybe we were in the mood to discover something about Australia for ourselves.

Back in the car and warm we decided to find something to eat.  Not that there was an eatery to be seen on most of that stretch of road.  We drove towards the ocean and found a little town and some food.  Then we went walking along the beach.  We saw the most extraordinary little creatures.  I never really saw more than a bit of them as they came up out of their hole and deposited a bit of sand outside, then disappeared again.  Their holes and little sand piles made circles in the sand.  They almost looked like aborigine drawings - the ones made of circles and spots.  You can see these in the header.

Soon it was time to look for cassowaries.  As night came on us, we searched the roadsides for the elusive cassowaries.  We just knew they would turn up, but they didn’t.  Not a one.  We were so disappointed.

I inserted the picture of the kangaroo just so you could see how big they can get.  That’s a small boy looking at him.

We drove back to Cairns in the dark.  Pitch black dark.  At one point my husband stopped the car, turned out the lights and told me to get out of the car.  Puzzled, I did so.  Then he pointed upwards.  There was the whole southern sky so bright and beautiful with jillions of stars I’d never seen before.  We discovered the southern cross, but we didn’t know the names of the others.   It was like being inside the Milky Way there were so many stars.

On the way back, we talked about how my husband, the land surveyor who never got lost anywhere, was always getting lost in Australia.  His sense of direction was awful.  It was pathetic.  I had always relied on him to know the way because he usually did.  He has lead me out into the bleak Mojave Desert until I could see no landmark, no building, no highway, nothing, and he would unfailingly direct us back to the road and our car.  I trust him to be able to do that.  His brain seems to work on different information than mine.

Now he was always getting lost in Australia and that bothered us both a good deal.   We wondered if he could sense magnetic north, and now it was magnetic south.  We wondered if it was because the ocean was east of us instead of west.  We wondered if the stars had something to do with it.  We had no answers.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about Melbourne.  It’s one of Australia’s English looking towns.

Marilynne

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