Likes: long walks on the beach...

Where to start... It's Monday the 10th, and I am finding that I have too much to write about and too little time. This past weekend was another big adventure deserving its own entry. I'll get it written as soon as I can, but I have more to write about first.

Last week, Brad and I went to pick up a friend of his who had been camping up the coast a bit. We launched his bigger boat in the morning and loaded up. From the river mouth at the coast, we headed north up to where the Cedar Bay National Park meets the ocean. Brad told me that it was a big hippie pilgrimage spot back in the 1970's, where people went and basically just lived on coconuts and rice and did drugs. He also warned me in advance that his friend that we were picking up is one of those hippies. But that's not the exciting part of the story.

It was about a 25 minute boat ride from the river to our destination. I got to drive the last five minutes.

I got dropped off a kilometer or so up the beach from the camp spot, so I could walk the beach, check the area out, look for seashells, whatever, and Brad would go up the beach and pick up Kelsey and her kids. When we were pulling up to the beach, where the water was no more than four feet deep, there was a reef shark, maybe four feet long, in the water. I tried to get my camera ready for a picture, but it sped off before I could snap one.

I jumped out of the boat and when my feet hit the water, it was like jumping into a bathtub. Okay, maybe not quite, but the water (Pacific Ocean) was very, very warm, and very clean and clear. Not too warm though, it was perfect. As Brad turned around behind me, he shouted "Watch out for feral hippies! Don't let 'em bite'cha!"

The sand was clean and white, and all hosts of tropical rain forest trees and plants lined the coast, including many coconut trees. There were many old, dried coconuts and husks laying around, but I managed to find a nice green one. I shook it to make sure there was milk inside.

I continued up the beach a while enjoying the scenery, the sun, the waves; casually searching for good sea shells or maybe another reef shark in the water. Nothing of the sort was to be seen, however. After a while I - wait. What's...

Is that...

A sack of onions!?

Yep, sure was. No hippies, no campers, no soul in sight. No clue where this could have came from.

I found a nice Nautilus sea shell a few minutes later.

Anyway, back to that coconut. As I walked, I worked at removing the outer husk. Now this is no small task, especially considering that I had no tool whatsoever that would help me in doing so, only my hands. I eventually got it all off, and ended up with this.

I found a piece of broken glass on the beach to puncture one of the 'eyes' to drink the milk. This alone took me another ten minutes of sitting there working on it, trying to get to the sweet nectar locked away within the tough shell. And how sweet it was! I finally got a hole punched and drank it all up. Then I found a good rock and smashed the nut open, and continued to devour the inside flesh. 

This picture is actually taken in the direction I came from. The opening to the Bloomfield river is ~2 km down the coast from the other side of that hill.

Beyond the ten meters or so of beach, there was nothing but super dense, thick rain forest.

That's about it for this one. I met Brad, Kelsey, her kids and dogs up the beach, and we all loaded up and headed back home.

Like I said, I've still got plenty more to write about. I'll get around to it eventually :)