Jungle Camp

Moni and Florian caught up with me in Cairns, and together we went up to the very far north, as far as you can go in a normal car: Cape Tribulation.

On the way, near Mossman, we said hello to a pineapple farmer, Ron Schild, who is a friend of Werner. He showed us how his pineapples grow and gave us some to try - yum!

Then we got to a point where you have to cross a wide river that has no bridge -- on a ferry. It is Daintree River. After that, the National Park begins. Welcome to the jungle! We stayed two nights on a campsite that I called our "Jungle Camp".

There are fantastic rainforest walks, some started right from our campsite. There were also kangaroos, wallabies, snakes (in a cage), baby crocodiles (ditto), a white pet cockatoo and parrots. The only animal we didn't see was a big crocodile. I took lots of rainforest pictures on these walks. The example to the right shows a swampy mangrove forest.

We were also at Cape Tribulation Beach -- a beautiful large beach as you can see, with green pristine rainforest covered hills in the background.

And then came the proof of the "small world phenomenon". At our campsite, when we checked in, we noted that just minutes before us other people from Augsburg had arrived as well. I looked at the name, Josef Mayr, and remarked "I once had a teacher by that name".

To make a long story short, it was him! He had been my class teacher in the late 1980s, when I was a student in Koenigsbrunn, and he had also been Moni's teacher in geography. And he had been the supervisor of the student magazine (Schuelerzeitung) in which I had been the editor-in-chief. He is still at the same school, 20 years later. And now we me him, with his wife Uschi, travelling in Australia, by coincidence on the same small campsite.