Tree Frog Season

The rainy season has arrived and with it the tree frogs are making their presence known. They live in the downspouts and are in hibernation much of the year.

Perhaps in the natural world they live in hollow trees and caves, but since every house here has a bunch of downspouts, they have adapted easily to that environment.

Now the one difference is that they start to sing when it rains. "Sing" is probably too strong a word for it, they croak. Or whatever frogs do in your language. In Swedish they go

Kou ack ack ack, kou ack ack ack,
kou ack ack ack ack kaa.

as in the song Små grodorna, which the Swedes perform while dancing around the maypole.

Anyway, the tree frogs croak or kouack or whatever, but it gets severely amplified by their being resident in the downpipes. So rain here is inevitably accompanied by an orchestral chorus of treefrogs resonating from the downpipes. And once one frog sings, all frogs sing.

Its a noisy neighborhood.

Global Warming...

OK, so I have just been having drinks with some of the neighbors, one a retired chemical engineer. Inevitably, the topic turned to global warming and Copenhagen. Pretty much most of the company were skeptics, but trying to argue with people like that is a losing proposition, they have their views based on bias and faith and ignorance and little more. So this guy, retired engineer from QAL, basically says, how are you going to power the refinery without coal?:

So here is how you argue with morons like that.

Two centuries ago coal was a major export from Africa. Coal was an absolute essential to keep the plantations running, to keep Europe supplied with cotton and to keep the landed gentry and the mercantile industry functioning and in the wealthy lifestyle to which they'd become accustomed. As the plantation owners would argue "without coal, how would we ever operate... we have to keep on shipping coal or we will have to shut down. Our spinners and weavers and the clothing industry will shut down. Children will freeze to death because they won't be able to afford new clothes. It will be financial disaster on both sides of the Atlantic. Our whole town and associated industry is based on cheap coal and we just can't change that overnight. Besides, if you cut out the trade in coal, all the coal traders will be out of jobs, "

Arguing that it is necessary to keep burning coal to keep the coal trade and heavy industry running today is functionally equivalent to arguing that maintaining the slave trade was necessary to keep the slave traders of two centuries ago employed and the plantation owners in their opulent lifestyles.

Coastal wildlife...

So I have found one minor issue with living right on the coast. I mentioned Pauls run-in with a tree snake in his office, well I can top that with a coastal taipan in my bedroom.

My buddy John's son Andrew has a rubber snake that he has been known to leave lying in places where it can be found by impressionable who suffer from Ophidiophobia. So I'm tired and heading for bed and I look over at the bedstand and think "Andrew, you little %#&*^&, I wish you wouldn't leave that think lying around, some people don't find it that funny...". Then I think "hmmm, Andrew hasn't been here for a couple of weeks and I'm sure I would have noticed it before...". Then I realize it's a real snake.




It seems to have taken up residence on my bedstand. Now I have no particular problem with snakes, even highly venomous ones (I grew up with them in the back yard on the banks of the Yarra river in Melbourne), but having one in your bedroom is going a bit far.

So I enlist my next door neighbors help and we manage to get the thing out of the house. Seems like he has had similar problems in the past, we live right on the beach and there is a lot of undeveloped bushland next to us. We're hitting the hot, rainy season, and the things are getting active. Just why it decided to visit is unclear, probably looking for a nice dry spot.

I usually leave all the doors open at night when I'm home, I figure I'll have to be a bit careful now. And I often get up in the middle of the night and stagger round the house in the dark... from now on I'll be turning the lights on before I do anything.

And the thought just occurred to me that my bedside lamp is usually sitting just where the snake was - I took it away to use somewhere else a few days ago. The switch is on the power lead - I have this vivid mental image of groping around the dark for the switch and grabbing that instead!

On the beach.

So an eventful few months. Girls visiting from Sweden, a trip around China, and now moved to a place right on Tannum Sands beach. Last few days I've been doing dawn patrol surfing, with the sun coming up in the east, and small but well shaped waves.

More to come

And an even wilder one...

And that last post reminded me of my experience driving from Lanjigarh to Visakhapatnam late one night shortly before my departure from India.

*****************************
From the Travel Diaries: India Overland.


Close your eyes and picture this. A shopping mall, standard kind of stuff found anywhere in the (un)civilized world, say South Hills Village, Kin Kora or St Lukes, a long row of brightly lit storefronts, a mosaic of commerce, the establishments selling flashy clothes, computer games, flat screen TV's and phone cards, CD's, videos, barrows with candy, sunglasses and jewelery, icecreams and fast food and more candy. The usual evening crowd, milling around, wandering back and forth across the mall dividing the shops, buying fast food, generally hanging out for the evening. Its pretty crowded there. A mall. Not designed for vehicle traffic. So far, so good. Got that picture? Shops, population density, ambience generally?

It's early evening, just getting dark. The storefronts are brightly lit. Its dark overhead. Maybe we've had a power failure in the building. Just a narrow alley of shopfronts, bright lights blazing away, and darkness above. People. Shops. The usual stuff.

For some reason there are bicycles here as well. Lots of people on bicycles. Not just your typical mountain bike, in fact none of those. Three wheelers. The sort of things that you see old hippies making a living carrying peope sightseeing. A mall with bicycles.

Now lets add some cows. Yup, cows. A lot of cows. Dogs. Them too, lots of dogs. All mongrels. Indeterminate breed. The occasional goat and pig. So we have a shopping mall with domesticated livestock. And a few water buffalo as well. In this part of the world they count as domesticated livestock.

But what are these people doing? All the usual stuff, shopping, hanging out, eating takeaways. And at the edge of the road, there are some sqatting down going potty. We're not talking children here. Grownups. Right there on the mall. Then you notice that both sides of the mall in front of the shops are completely strewn with garbage. Old candy wrappers and discarded CD's. Mounds of unidentified trash.

It's raining. This is an open air mall. And the mall itsself is just a bit muddy. OK, it's very muddy, with deep potholes right in the middle of the mall, filled with muddy brown water. Trash everywhere. People defecating in front of the shops. We are about halfway there, focus on that mental image. A muddy, trashed shopping mall.



Now imagine driving down the middle of the mall at about 50mph. You have to toot your horn furiously to get the cows and people just to acknowledge your existence, let alone move out of the way.




But you aren't the only one driving at high speed up and down the mall. There are several other trucks and motorcycles and passenger cars as well. Since it's nighttime, then common sense dictates the use of headlights as well as the horn. There are several philosophies here.

(1) Leave your lights off entirely to save battery power.

(2) Leave your lights permenantly on high beam to make sure everyone
sees you coming.

(3) The best of both worlds. Leave your lights off until you see
someone coming, then blind them with highbeams.

Of course any of these approaches in isolation would be quite successful. If noone used lights, then night vision would adapt and you would see oncoming traffic. If everyone used lights, then you would at least be aware that there was oncoming traffic.

But in combination, especially combined with strategy (3), the result is fatal. The only redeeming feature is the horn, which if used regularly and with great enthusiasm, can more than make up for the lack of visual acuity. The pedestrians have learned to move out of the way at the sound of the horn.


And that my friends, about sums up driving at night through Indian villages.

A wild ride...

So I get into the office the other morning and find a gecko clinging to the base of the windscreen of my car. Its about a 25km drive on highway, so it must have been quite a ride.

Functionally equivalent to you or I clinging to the outside of a jumbo jet as it flies across the country!

Anyway, it didn't seem to have come to any harm, and given their ability to cling to walls and roofs I don't think it was ever in danger of being blown off. After about ten minutes it lost the glazed look on its face and scuttled away, and I hope it can make a new home here.

Gecko vs Spider...

Geckos are a normal resident in my cottage. Anyway, over the last few weeks there have been a lot of tiny ones around, must have just hatched. So there is one about an inch long, just a baby, that has taken up using the ceiling of my bedroom as a hunting ground. And there is a spider up there that it is out to get.

The spider is just a daddy-long-legs which I haven't bothered to sweep away. The problem for the gecko is that the spider is not on the ceiling, but on its web, suspended a couple of inches below. So the gecko can't get to the spider but it certainly knows its there. It roves back and forth just above the spider, trying to figure out how it can get to it. Once it grows a bit bigger, I'm sure it will live.

Talking about things eating bugs, I was around at my friends the other day and they have half a dozen resident tree frogs that come and sit on the window at night, drawn by the bugs which are drawn by the light from inside.

Anyway, this giant cockroach like thing blunders in and lands on the window. It's maybe 40mm long, but one of the tree frogs goes for it and manages to eat it, or at least get it into its mouth. Partway, there are still legs and things sticking out. The bug is about the size of the frogs head, and rather scaly and obviously not particularly easily eaten. Functionally it would be like you or me eating a whole armadillo. The frog chews away for a bit, but eventually gives up and spits the thing out.

Thats how we amuse ourselves here.

Publish Post

The rains came...

Its rainy season at the moment. Nine months of the year here it is fine and warm and clear blue skies, then for about three months we get hot humid weather. And for about two days of that time it is actually raining. But when it rains it rains. Heavily. We will get 50mm in an hour or two, 120mm in a day.

So during this time the small stream at the bottom of the hill is running, and it runs out onto the beach. And takes the beach away with it. So this

becomes this!

My, what a yummy mango...

I have a huge mango tree in my yard. Every year it produces several hundred fruit, of which I manage to eat at most a couple of dozen or so.

This is not for dislike of mangos or any other reason, the problem is that I share the mango tree (or its fruit) with at least four other species, all of which are far better adapted at accessing the contents than I am.

The tree is the year round home for a few million green tree ants. These are large ants, and they bite, quite painfully. Every branch of the the tree is covered with them, and they inhabit the ground around the tree as well. So actually climbing the tree is out of the question at any time of the year, and in particular during mango season.

The tree is very high, so that makes the fruit in the top half inaccessible. Using a bit of ingenuity, a windsurfer mast and some wire I have a rig that I can use to access fruit in the lower half of the tree, but the rest remains out of reach.

So during mango season the yummy fruit is there for the taking, and I will take a few from the lower branches. The rest feeds the birds and the bats.

Fruit bats. Flying foxes. Whatever you call them, they feast on ripe fruit during the summer. The bats have one constraint when dining on mango: they need about three meters of height to take off. Rather like parachuting, you need a bit of fall for the chute to open.

If they do end up on the ground, they have to find a nearby tree, and climb up high enough to launch. So if a tree is lower than this, they won't take the fruit. When you see a mango orchard, all the trees are short and trimmed that way. Fruit bats won't land on a bush because they'd never get back into the air.

My tree doenst have that problem, it's about 8m high, which is plenty of space for launching. So nighttime in summer, you hear the noisy creatures feasting away in the tree.

Round about dawn the bats retire to their castles or wherever (trees) and the birds take over. Rainbow lorikeets especially seem to enjoy a nice mango or two.

There are large mango trees all over town so there seems to be no shortage of fodder for the various fruit eaters. Probably keeps the mango growers happy having free and accessible food available elsewhere. Anyway, my tree keeps me well fed, and I don't begrudge the local wildlife the rest.

Of course during mango season you can buy the things for next to nothing anyway!

"My, what a yummy mango" was a line from a very old computer game. It eventually found its way into nethack, but I remember encountering it much earlier in a variant of adventure. There was a slime mold in there as well and if you ate that you got "My, what a yummy slime mold"

Ssssssssnakes

No discussion of dangerous Aussi wildlife could possibly be complete without mentioning snakes. It is true that four of the five deadliest snakes are Australian, but this is based pretty much on the toxicity of their venom. So yes, if you get bit by one, you'd better have antivenom handy or you will be in trouble.

But snakes here are different to those in other parts of the world in that they are generally nonaggressive. There are some species of taipans and tiger snakes down south that can be aggressive, but here in Queensland, brown snakes of various descriptions are the most common, and these are deadly but nonaggressive. You have to stand on them or pick them up before they will bite you. So it really is a myth that Australia is full of deadly snakes.

I regularly see brown snakes when I'm running in the woods. I wear gators for this reason, to offer some basic protection just in case, but I've never managed to get too close to one; as soon as they hear you coming, they will move away.



The other snakes I encounter on occasions are sea snakes. They are pretty common in the water here and you will see them when you are diving on coral out at the reef. They are highly venomous, but have tiny mouths and can only really bit you on extremities, so as long as you are wearing flippers and keep your hands clear, you are OK. Plus they are nonagressive.

Because of the tides and wind, and that we are inside the reef, the water around Tannum Sands is generally quite low visibility, clear for swimming, but not really good for seeing much when snorkling. However on occasions, usually on a clear morning at slack tide, we can have very clear water. On those rare occasions, you can see a lot of small reef fish on the rocks just in front of the beach and I will take a mask and snorkle down and float around among the rocks.

The other morning I was down there and ran into a sea snake. Because the water was quite shallow, and I was in a narrow channel between some rocks, I couldn't really go anywhere, but backwards. The snake was going in the same direction though, so I ended up having to move right over and let him past. I decide that I've had enough snorkling for the day and head back to the beach, whereupon I run into a second sea snake. In fact they are probably common, but you just don't see them if the water isn't absolutely clear.

There are a lot of harmless snakes here as well, tree snakes are pretty common in our area, and down in Brisbane a lot of old houses have resident carpet snakes, which are a small python. In times past they were accepted living in the roof, because they killed rats and mise.

So the other day, we're having a meeting at our offices. We have a pretty laid back workplace, and our conference table is set up outside on the deck (we have lunch there as well). Anyway midway through the meeting, we hear a scream from inside the building. Paul, our programmer, comes leaping out the window yelling loudly. Fortunately its a ground floor window. He calms down and tells us there is a snake in his office. It had put its head through the narrow gap under the closed office door tand he'd looked down to see it coming in. He didn't wait around to identify it, but vacated immediately via the only other exit which was the window.


The snakebusters soon chased what turned out to be a harmless tree snake out of the office and into the park next door. It demonstrated its climing skills when crossing the fence and then vanished up a tree. Impressive to watch them moving straight up the side of a large tree, somehow managing to hold on to the bark with their scales.

More spiders

There is one spider here that has actually scared me: well maybe not scared but definitely reduced to panic. The spider is the Golden Orb Weaver, and they can get pretty large. To the point where they can actually catch birds. Now they don't go out of their way to catch birds, but their webs are incredibly strong, and birds can run into them and get stuck and exhaust themselves. And then get eaten. Aside from that they can give you a bit of a bite, they are only very mildly venomous to humans. (No worse than a bee sting).



The webs are impressive works of engineering in their own right. I have seen them spanning roads, anchored in the trees on either side. Cables running ten meters into the air from the ground.

But the most impressive thing is the strength of the thread. Its like silk. Virtually unbreakable, it just stretches. You run into an orb weaver web, we're not talking gossamer thin here, we're talking fishing line.

Now the spiders like to find a nice wide open space and then build the web between a couple of trees. Trails in the woods are perfect. The spider then sits right in the middle of this construction, waiting for dinner. Which is all well and good until you come running through the woods and run into the web.

I do orienteering and hashing for fun and fitness. Its great to be out running around. Lots of wildlife, lizards, goannas, birds. But the one thing that I don't enjoy is running into the webs.

Picture this, you are running along a trail, just enjoying the countryside and not really watching where you are going. Suddenly you feel like someone has pressed a veil over your head, you are covered with sticky fibers. And the worst thing is knowing that there is a spider sitting in there somewhere.

Its a 50/50 chance whether the spider is on the outside of the web, or in the bad case now firmly attached to you by lengths of strong, sticky thread. This is the point when blind panic sets in, you basically brush away as much of the thread as you possibly can, and just hope that the spider has had the brushoff.



Someone once told me of a case where a guy had a heart attack after having a spider the size of his face attached to it. And yes, that is definitely a nightmare scenario. They do have their uses. I was on a hash house harriers run late one night and we were lost in the woods, trying to find the trail laid by the hare. We came to one section, and there was a long stretch of trail, with spider webs everywhere. It was like a scene from a horror movie. But we were able to positively conclude that the trail didn't go that way!

From last years travel diaries...

I was travelling a lot last year into all sorts of strange places. I have copious notes on some of these adventures, which I never got around to blogging, but for your amusement here is the arrival in India....

Vizakhapatnam to Lanjigarh Weirder and Weirder...

...the day gets. So I finally board the flight from Kolkata to Vizag, the second to last leg of the long journey. All I need to to is arrive in V, meet the driver and then I can sleep through the final leg, the marathon 6hr drive to Lanjigarh. After 48 hours of travelling I am ready to kick back for a few hours before the job starts.

So thats the plan, and I arrive in Vizag still in the game. But then a slight hiccup, there is no driver waiting to meet me. An hour later and still no driver. There are some other drivers there waiting to pick up passengers and they are asking me where I am going, and one offers to call my contact Satish for me. I speak to him: the car is on its way I'm assured. Anyway I give the guy one of the kangaroo pins for his trouble, and all of his mates as well. Quite a run on 'roo pins.

So the car eventually arrives and they all know the driver. I get escorted over there and we leave in great style. First he has to stop at his office and get gas. OK, but we're away at last. The view progresses from the city to lush green countryside.

Sensory overload. So many sights. A man washing a waterbuffalo. Someone carving elephants from huge chunks of stone. A staircase to nowhere. Roadside pharmacy. The 'medical research center' in the middle of nowhere. The cricket stadium and a game in progress. Fixing a tire with the car propped up on a lump of timber. A political rally, with rows of cars and buses full of supporters blocking traffic. All in the space of about fifteen minutes as we are getting out of town. If this keeps up for more than a few hours my head will explode. Dorothy, we're not in Kansas anymore.

Then the driver's phone rings. A short discussion then he passes the phone to me. Its Satish. There's been a strike, not letting traffic through. The unions getting bolshy I think, so what. I can go back to Vizag and wait in a hotel and maybe travel later in the afternoon. OK, whatever. Then it begins to sink in as the driver explains. 'Strike' is actually a terrorist attack. The maoists are active in these parts, tribal issues. The driver explains there were 50 killed in an attack just recently. The road has been closed.

So we turn around and head back to the city. I'm now parked in the Park, right on the beach, living in luxury for the time being. Your basic beachfront hotel, with tennis court, swimming pool and all. There looked like some reasonable waves, but the sea is very rocky, swimming in it would be out of the question. And there is a guard standing at the entrance to the beach. And come to think of it the beach doesn't look that inviting. A couple of scrawny mongrel dogs doesn't quite fit the image of the tropical beach.

The hotel pool lifeguard is packing an automatic weapon.

Looking at the hotel brochure. The restaurant has a "live pasta station". The mind boggles. I have visions of a seething mass of worms or something. Or just a tank with live shrimps and things that you add to the pasta. Live.

On the wall in the lobby there is a display of paintings. A little sign reads "Works of Art by Few Articulate Guests who stayed with us". Articulate? Few? We seem to have a communication breakdown here. I suspect they meant "Artistic", but why are there so few of them?



They're doing some concreting. Now where I come from, when you want to pour concrete, you just call up a truck load of the stuff which has a cement pump, and you use a long boom to deliver it to where you want it. Or at worst you borrow your mates mixer and mix up a load. Here it is rather more labor intensive. A line of women with bowls of the dry cement comes down to the beach. They toss their load into a pit in the sand. Another woman stands there with hose and a shovel, wetting and mixing. Another line of women is waiting, and get their bowls filled. They balance these on their heads and track back up the path to the hotel. Concreting: a womans job apparently. Except for guy plastering it on the roof.

Scaffolding is interesting. Just a lot of pieces of sapling, lashed together with rope. It doesn't look that safe, but I suppose there is a good safety factor built in. Or plenty of spare bodies.

Dinner last night was in the beachfront restaurant. They were having a Hyderabad food festival. Special menu for the week. Very spicy curries. Prawns done in tamarind. Chicken Murgh. Yum. A couple large kingfishers to wash it all down. Its likely the last I'll have of civilization for a few weeks, make the most of it.

Roll Clouds

There are two seasons here, summer and the rest of the year. Now in most parts of the world, summer is something to look forward to, but here, most people just can't wait for summer to be over and done with. We're practically in the tropics, at the southern limit of the monsoon belt, so summer is wet and very hot. People wind up the airconditioners to be comfortable and the water can get too warm for swimming. Further north, you can't even go swimming because of the stingers, but Tannum is at the southernmost limit of stinger territory, strong northerly winds for a few days will bring them down through the narrows as far as Gladstone.

I love the summer though (as I love all seasons here). You finally get some weather, as opposed to day in, day out sunshine for the other three seasons. Clouds and storms are a welcome change to the monotony of endless sunshine. And the storms can be fun, even frightening.

Thunderstorms arrive regularly and are often accompanied by hail and strong winds. One storm a few years ago brought down the roof of the local supermarket because of all the ice that piled up there, and destroyed a hundred new cars in a local dealership. Trees had all their leaves stripped bare, but the destruction was confined to a very narrow path. So if storms look imminent, we sit and watch the web weather radar and we can tell if we should move cars indoors just in case.



During storms you can get some spectacular cloud formations. Very occasionally, you get to see roll clouds which are spectacular to watch and move quickly across the sky.



On this occasion, there were clouds moving in different directions all over the sky, roiling around. The magpies didn't seem too worried about it.

Walking the dogs

I have a couple of german shepherds that I take for runs pretty much every day. Actually they're not my dogs, they belong to my friend John. There are real advantages in not owning a dog, but borrowing them whenever you need one. The primary advantages are economic.

* No upfront costs. Pedigree shepherds are not cheap, especially when they need to be flown from a kennel on the other side of the country.
* No ongoinging maintenance costs. Dogfood probably won't break the budget though there seems to be an ongoing stream of requirements for flea powder, chew toys and such.
* No emergency costs. Vets bills can be expensive, especially when you have to send a puppy for an emergency hysterectomy on Christmas eve as John once did.
* No kenneling costs when you go on your vacation

Add to that the convenience of being able to travel at a moments notice and not worry about arranging a kennel or dog sitter, not having to worry about exercising them every day, and not having to clean up the yard after them (though we have dung beetles here that take care of that), and you wonder why people own dogs.

On the other hand dogs are wonderful companions for a run down the beach so I'm lucky that I can borrow Stella and Candy whenever I want; they are grateful for the excursion and exercise and John is grateful that I take care of this chore for him. I do charge for dog walking: one cold beer at the end of it, consumed while the dogs are drinking a gallon or so of water. They are still learning that that drinking sea water is not a good idea, so they need some serious rehydration at the end of the run.

Stella and Candy are still young, ten months and five months old, Candy is basically a boisterous puppy, albeit a pretty large one and probably in need of some basic training. Having one shepherd is a full time job, and Johns decision to get the second one was motivated by the need for a companion dog so they wouldn't go crazy during the day when there's noone about in the house. They have the run of a large yard, but are still mad keen to get out and about at any opportunity. The original companion dog, a stray fox terrier that turned up at one of my neighbors and needed a home, was unsuited for the job and sent packing.

So the typical run starts with me arriving late afternoon and having to cope with dog enthusiasm. They go berserk when I arrive and it takes about five minutes to calm them down to the point where you can get a leash on them. I've discovered the only way to keep any element of control is to have them leashed together. When I tried running them on separate leashes I was forever losing one or both and having to chase them down. At least leashed together they aren't going far and if they do take off, the speed is limited to that of slowest dog. The disadvantage of this arrangement is that if you come to an obstacle and they decide to go either side, then you come to a sudden halt. Even worse they then run around in opposite directions and you can end up with a total dog tangle.

After about five minutes they settle down to a steady pace and we jog through the streets of Tannum. Then the real fun starts: to get to the beach we have to cross a large field, and this is where the kangaroos hang out. For some reason the dogs have decided that roos are to be chased, and they go crazy. It is all I can do to hang on to them, especially as we are going down a steep hill. The roos all scatter and we go flying across the field, out of control.

On the other side of the field its a short track down to the beach, the dogs are settled now and I can let them run free. We run up the beach to Canoe Point or the rivermouth depending on how energetic we are feeling, plenty of driftwood to throw and fetch and rock pools to investigate.

Several times a year, near a new moon in summer the coral spawn and fill the sea with this brown slick. The stuff drifts ashore and gets pretty high and the rock pools fill with it. The other day, the dogs discovered a pool full of the stuff and promptly jumped in and were wallowing in it. For dogs, the equivalent of a perfumed bubble bath. So I finally manage to drag them out and we are on our way, once we got home I hosed them down for about five minutes, but they still stank for about a week afterwards, at least to human noses.

Crossing the Creek

Wild Cattle Island is one of the magic reasons to live in Tannum. It is a short hop across Wild Cattle Creek, then you have miles of empty beach ahead of you. On a busy weekend a few people will cross the creek and venture small way down the island, but few go past the first point, about 4km away.

There is a small community of holiday houses at Bangalee at the other end of the island where there is a channel into Coliseum Harbor, so you occasionally run into a 4WD vehicle travelling along the beach, but otherwise you never see anyone.

Wild Cattle Creek is tidal, so you can only cross at certain times. You usually have two or three hours on either side of low tide when you can safely cross. So you have to do a bit of planning to make sure your visit is safe. You never want to cross on the outgoing tide: a visitor was drowned last year after being swept out to sea. I'd been for a walk on the island that day and as I was crossing back, I noticed a news cameraman filming me. I talked to him and he told me what had happened, the incident had happened several hours before and he'd just got there, delayed because of the other major local news of the day, the police catching a murderer.

(That was a story in itself, a girl had turned up dead and dumped just outside town a few months before. We rarely have murders here (except for the occasional domestic violence) and this was an unusual case especially since there were no breakthroughs for many weeks. There are a lot of transient workers at the refineries and the police assumed the culprit had left town. But persistent detective work (and matching DNA samples) finally caught the culprit, who turned out to work at one of the local refineries.)

So that evening, I'm on the news, crossing Wild Cattle Creek as background to the story on the drowning. But I digress, the creek crossing can be done safely on an incoming tide if you choose the right place to enter the water. The current will carry you up the river and you can swim a short distance and end up on the main beach. I've done it on several occasions, even once holding a camera over my head and paddling on my back.

There are occasions when you wouldn't even cross on an incoming tide: we had king tides last weekend, and huge volumes of water were coming through the mouth and up the creek, it was a maelstrom of churning sea, and at least 200m across. Most of the time, the crossing is just fifty meters or so, and you can wade ''most'' of the way, though this should only be tried if you are a good swimmer.

So once you are across the creek you have 10km of deserted beach ahead of you, and a day (depending on tides) to explore it

Turtle Season

Starting late November and through the new year, turtles come ashore to lay eggs. Its a fascinating process to watch, as she laboriously climbs up the beach above the high tide mark and finds the right spot in the dunes. Then she digs a hole, which can take several hours, lays the eggs, covers them up and crawls back down the beach exhausted. I've witnessed it close up on several occasions at Heron Island and Mon Repos.

Heron Island is fun during turtle season, especially once they start hatching. You are supposed to turn all the lights out: lights confuse the baby turtles and they end up getting lost. There are always some lights on though, which means baby turtles running all over the resort, and people gathering them up in buckets and helping them on their way to the water.

But we get turtles here on the mainland near Tannum Sands as well. This season has been exceptional for the number of turtles: on Heron Island they had over two hundred in one night come ashore to lay. There just isn't enough space on Heron for all those eggs, they end up digging up existing nests, so the rangers have been gathering up eggs and relocating them to the mainland.

The numbers are definitely on the increase: the various conservation programs help, but perhaps also because a lot of the big fish which predate on the hatchlings have been fished out, and jellyfish, which are a staple food, are on the increase.

So this year one comes ashore right on the main beach in front of the surf club in the early evening. The nippers (junior surf life savers) were all there training at the time.

Wild Cattle Island is the national park just south of Tannum, and I assumed it would be a good place for turtles: ten km of deserted white sand beach and dunes. Sure enough, a couple of months ago I was walking down there and there were fresh tracks running up into the dunes. Its a very distinctive trail, the body making a central groove, with the flippers flailing on either side. So for the last couple of weeks I've been going down there to see if anything had popped up.

The last few nights have been full moon, and sure enough, there were a number of freshly hatched nests, the empty shells lying around. I counted half a dozen nests in a hundred meters of beach, there were probably more further down.

So I'm expecting a lot more turtles on the mainland in future years.