The end of the first day

Miriam and I have signed up to go kayaking our first evening. We have second thoughts because we are so tired, but go anyway. It is WONDERFUL.

From the shore, before we even go out in the boats, we see very large whitish shapes on the opposite shore. They turn out to be pelicans with white bodies and black wings. Standing on land, the big ones are four feet tall. We paddle out and see dark shapes downstream. The guide tells us they are black swans.

We travel upstream as the sky gets darker. We see osprey, heron and a pair of azure kingfishers. Mangroves grow at the water’s edge, their trunks standing about two feet above the waterline on thousands of root-legs.

There is a small forest fire close by. Smoke drifts across the river; it smells good. After a while we pull off, get out, and Dean, the guide, and his wife offer us water or an orange flavored liquid we do not recognize and can not pronounce, and “biscuits” (cookies). They taste good. Evidently we taste good too, because we begin to be bitten by midges. They are too small to see, but definitely not too small to feel. Dean sprays us with something that repels them, mostly.

We talk to a man who has come down to the river with his two young sons and his dog. The dog is a Queensland blue heeler. He is beautiful.

We paddle back. Some of the river is quite shallow, and the guide tells us not to worry about the stingrays. We ask more about them. Apparently in deeper water they get up to six feet in diameter. Steve Irwin's zoo is just a bit of a drive from here: he was killed by a large stingray in deeper water. Here in the shallows they are rarely more than two feet, and the biggest the guide remembers seeing is about three feet. He tells us that he once had one push his kayak aside, calmly and determinedly, so it could get to where it wanted to go.

The guide is delightful. Very knowledgeable about the wildlife. He is tall, thin and muscular, and wears an Indiana Jones style hat. He once was a shipwright, built his own sailboat, and spent some time sailing around Australia with his wife, Debbie, who has a smile that lights the world around her and an attitude to match. Now they run Blue Water Kayak Tours in Caloundra. Highly recommended! He made all the kayaks himself, which are excellent and easy for us novices to handle.

At the end some of us travel beyond the takeout point to see the black swans. It’s almost dark and we get close enough that several take flight. They are big birds. We paddle in as the light fades, pry ourselves out of the kayaks, and head back to our hotel.

We grab fish and chips at a “takeaway” next to our hotel, eat it in our room, pretend we are going to read, crawl into bed, and lose consciousness. It’s Sunday evening and we left home Friday morning. Even allowing for the fact we crossed the international dateline, it’s been a long day.