Life as locals

With the threat of the weather taking a turn for the worse (it didn't) we had another quiet down day which translates to no major organised tour expenses. Another early stroll down the beach front

for a coffee and chat underneath the lush tropical vegetation watching the world of Trinity Beach going through it's morning ritual: fit people doing their thing, council workers pretending to be effective and the local dericts behaving as if to script. All fascinating stuff. Two of us then repeated the exploration of the headland with the explicit intent of collecting wild fresh mangoes (success). We also tried for bananas and coconuts but to no avail. There are locals living in humpy's hidden in obscure places who are most likely cleaning up all the edible food well before we came through. The headland offers some fabulous views which we spotted a sea eagle also enjoying. He was brilliantly perched on his tree stump with commanding views of the entire domain.

Leaving the scatteted debris of party animals behind us we watched some indigenous folk wading through the water spear fishing - exactly where the signs advising of crocs and stingers reside. so what goes on? Do these supposedly dangerous critters only attack tourists? ....Maybe it's only tourists that have access to lawyers if (on the remote chance) something goes wrong.... Following the sound advice from yesterday's captain we jumped into the blue rocket and headed off up to the swimming hole favoured by the locals and not on the tourist lists. And it was great. In comparison, Mossman sucks - this place rocks.

With fresh, crystal clear water cascading over a series of falls through an incredibly narrow, cliff hugging rain forest canyon we trecked up the easy pathway to the pool beneath the main falls to spend a lazy hour or so cooling off in the overall tropical ambience. This is the stuff they make ads out of. It was also at the complete contradiction to the signs telling us to do otherwise. Apart from the freshwater crays being mistaken for underwater scorpians all was calm and peaceful... An easy drive back to the gated compound was followed by a quick game of down ball on the apartment veranda (suspect this had not been done before - a first for us - yay!) and then dripping we headed next door for another very pleasant dinner on the bistro balcony watching the setting sun light up the (try hard) storm clouds over the ocean.