Filling A Day

November 1, 2001-Yum!
(Photo: Toby sleeping on boat-train)

The best part of today was dinner. We found a Greek restaurant called Fetta’s & indulged. We’d passed it the other day, read the menu, & moved on. When we stopped this time, a waiter remembered us & asked if we were ready to make a decision. It sounded good, so we took a seat on their porch. I asked the waiter where in Greece he was from. He laughed & said he was from Chile & that’s why he remembered us. David had on the same Trek Ecuador shirt that he’d worn the other day. How embarrassing! They served us anyway.

David had perhaps the best lamb souvlaki he ever tasted. I had dolmades (grape leaves) with Greek salad that was fantastic. The staff was very friendly & the guy from Chile & the owner were drinking with a table of women near us from time to time. Occasionally there would be a shout of. “Opah!” & one of the waiters would smash a plate. We spoke to the owner for a bit & complemented him on the food. He’s from a town 15 minutes from the canal at Corinth. He started out selling coffee at ten years old & worked his way up to having his own place. We talked about the tasteless Australian cuisine & he said that the chefs here learn from books & that’s no the way to cook. We noticed he had a thick Greek accent until he used a typically Aussie phrase like “straight away.” It came out in pure Australian as “strite awhy.”

There are a lot of Italian restaurants here & we have hesitated going. We find they just don’t put enough sauce on. Even the pizza is under-sauced. We realize that’s the way they cook in Italy. They emphasize the pasta, not the sauce. We’d better re-think going to Italy. We might need to bring our own Ragu.

Daintree

We did go on a tour today though it was disappointing & in some ways tedious. It was a lot of looking at green things. We looked at them on foot, from the bus, & from the water. Once again there was a lot of travel time involved. We spent a little less than half of the 11 hours of the tour in the bus. There is no avoiding it. Distances are so great. We passed what seemed to be endless fields of sugarcane. I asked the driver if the cane farms were privately owned & he said that they were. The farmers are told how much to grow by the refinery, so if you don’t have a contract with the mill, there’s no point in owning a farm. If you don’t make your quota there’s a chance the refinery will cancel the contract. I guess farmers own the sugar cane farms, but their lives depend on the kindness of the mills.

Our first stop was Daintree National Forest. It’s a lowland rain forest. It’s certainly dense, but the plants weren’t as large or dramatic as highland rain forests. I think there’s a better one to see near where we live. We walked on a concrete path to a suspension bridge, did an about-face, & returned to the bus. We did see a water python just off the path & there was an aborigine sunning himself on a rock. We’d just watched “The Secret Life of Plants” on TV & it was interesting to actually see the vines & ferns up close.

Our next stop was at a fruit farm where we had tea, banana bread, paw paw (papaya) scones, banana jam, & banana cream. We had a brief lecture on tropical fruit & got to taste them. If exotic meat (gator, frog’s legs, etc) tastes like chicken, these weird fruits tasted like bananas or citrus. They all looked like some variation of a deformed lumpy ball on steroids. One in particular was exceptionally odd. It was called black pudding. The inside looked like chocolate pudding & had the same texture, but the chocolate flavor was very mild.

An hour later we were at our lunch stop for pan-fried barramundi. We got to play with a Chihuahua puppy named Zack & then took off for our river ride. We rode on a river train that’s a series of boats hooked together to resemble a train. It came with a narrator/driver, our guide, another group’s guide, & the narrator’s husband. It was a good thing they were all there because the object of the cruise was to spot wildlife. It was amazing how they could see things that were so camouflaged, but since it was a hot day, there wasn’t much to see. They did spot a tree snake coiled on a branch & one swimming in the water. I never thought I’d say that a snake is cute, but when it was swimming it kept its little head out of the river & really was cute.

The Daintree River is a salt-water river & it is noted for its crocodiles. The crocs are huge getting up to 10 meters in length. The only one they spotted today was a baby lying under a branch in the water. The boat ride was 1-½ hours plus a stop for tea & a walk in a mangrove forest. We were really glad we had our little spray bottles of OFF 99% Deet with us. The mosquitoes were fierce. There was a lot of down time sailing around looking for something to look at. I took the opportunity to take a nap. If something notable turned up, I’d hear the commotion & wake up. I was right.

Our bus driver also served as a guide on all parts of the trip & was very knowledgeable. He turned out to be the most fun part of the day. He’s 60 years old & from New Zealand. He & his wife are planning a trip to Turkey & points beyond. He said guides usually keep them at the front of the line because they’re older. In case they drop dead, he’ll see them & not leave them behind.

He told us about his first experience with drunk parrots. Evidently some of those birds feed on umbrella trees. There’s a toxic/intoxicating effect. The parrots lay on the ground with their feet in the air or fly into cars. He passed around a comment book & asked us to write in it. He bragged about how one tourist wrote something in German thinking he wouldn’t be able to read it. He got it translated & could get any language translated. David wrote in Hebrew. It would be interesting to see what he does with that.

Toby