Rainforest/Wallaman Falls

View of the falls from the top

View of the falls from the bottom

So two weeks ago I was able to do one of my goal trips, which was to hike around Wallaman Falls.  Wallaman Falls is the tallest waterfall in Australia (over 1000 feet including about a 900 foot free fall) so I was pretty excited to do this.  I signed up for a weekend trip in a group of 8 people and we headed out Saturday morning.

During the day Saturday we spent most of our time exploring the rainforest and learning about the area.  The Wet Tropics of Queensland are a world heritage area because they are the oldest rainforest on earth and a critical ecosystem for this area of the world.  Queensland is the only place in the world with two World Heritage Areas (Wet Tropics and Great Barrier Reef).  Our guide Ross was really knowledgeable about the rainforest so it was cool how much he taught us about it.  We did a couple of different hikes through the rainforest, and also got to stop at some waterfalls to swim.  Cool stuff.  The highlight of the day was in the evening when we went down to a river to look for platypus.  Platypus are extremely rare and only like 15% of Australian's or something like that have ever seen one.  We were in one of the few areas of the country where you can see them on a regular basis.  We ended up spending about an hour watching them and got to see a bunch.  I was really surprised at how small they are-only about a foot long.  For some reason I had an image of them being like 3 feet long and the size of a beaver or something.  Still, it was really cool.  Later that night we also did a night hike and saw bats, gliders, possums, and a ton of what they call "kangaroo rats"  which are basically tiny wallabies.  It was pretty neat.

Platypus!  This was the best picture I could get, but we did see them consistently for about an hour

Diving through a waterfall

Sunday was the big day we got to go to Wallaman Falls, which was the highlight of the trip for me.  There was viewing observations across the gorge of the falls which provided great pictures, and then we did a 2 km hike down to the base of the falls.  It was really amazing as I've never seen anything near that big.  We were there during the dry season, so I can't even imagine how powerful the falls must be during the rainy season.  Crazy stuff.  It was an awesome trip and great weekend, not only did we see some cool stuff but we also learned a lot about the area as well.

We went to a spot to look for Saltwater Crocodiles, but no luck.  

Rainforest Panoramic

Panoramic of the falls

Photography Class

These are the pictures I turned in for my first assignment in my photography class.  There were different techniques we were required to use such as controlling depth of field, light painting, freezing and blurring motion, and all that jazz.  We had to submit three sets of two photos to fit the theme "day/night" so this is what I turned in.  You'll have to trust me that they look way cooler at full size/quality.  I wasn't a huge fan of having to deal with themes and stuff but I think it went alright and my teacher seemed pleased.  We'll see I guess..  

I was kickboxing the other day with my friend and I saw a rhinoceros beetle.  It was huge.  And awesome.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for the weekend to go to the rainforest and Wallaman falls.  The thousand foot tall highest waterfall in Australia.  It's gonna be freaking awesome.   

Pics

The link for the rest of the photos from my diving trip is:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ozziejeremy

They are also all on facebook.

Ugh

I screwed up again and put everything in backwards order.  There are a bunch of new posts so just scroll down till you get to whatever you have read before.  A couple posts down will explain about the SCUBA pictures.  

Additional things

Some more

No way!

Octopus!

I wrote a huge long trip report about diving this past weekend.  I did it mostly for myself as a way of logging dives more than anything, but I figured maybe someone would find it interesting.  It goes in to way more detail than necessary and is really long, but I liked writing it and remembering everything about the dives.  Because I spent a ton of time writing it I am not going to post anything about the trip on here, but feel free to check out the trip report at:

http://media.clicktoboat.com/blogs/jeremybender

Loggerhead turtle

So I uploaded all of the pictures from my trip to Picasa Web Albums or whatever it is called.  I was really pleased with how they turned out, I got some really good ones.  However, for some reason when I uploaded them the quality went down the crapper.  So I am pretty pissed off. For now I am going to put a few videos and just a couple of my favorite pictures on here until I can upload the pictures somewhere else, probably facebook I guess.  If you don't have facebook and want to see the pictures just let me know (put it in the comments or something) and I'll send you the link to the crappier versions of them.

Loggerhead Turtle

Barracuda!

GIANT Trevally

Banded sea snake eating a fish! 

EDIT: The pics are on facebook now but I'm still not pleased with the quality that they upload.  Oh well.  I think it is because I did a lot of editing on the computer so maybe that screwed some things up.  I kept about 150 of the pictures I took that turned out pretty good, my favorites are in the next couple posts so you can get the gist of it.  At least the videos are pretty sweet.