Article: Great Barrier Reef Skin Cancer Threat – For Fish


You read the title correctly. There is now clear evidence that fish in the Great Barrier Reef are beginning to suffer from skin cancer.

For more read the article via the link below:
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/skin-cancer-threat-to-great-barrier-reef-fish.htm

Montserrat: Return of the Mountain Chicken Frog


The link below is to an article reporting on what is hoped will be the beginning of the return of Montserrat’s Mountain Chicken Frog after a mission to save the frog from a deadly fungal disease.

For more visit:
http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/one-of-worlds-largest-1431654.html
http://www.mountainchicken.org/

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Check In: Day 2 of Holiday


I have had a most interesting couple of days on the road and in the bush. Currently I’m in a motel room at Woolgoolga, near Coffs Harbour on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, Australia. ‘Hardly the wild,’ I hear you say, and you’re quite right – it isn’t. The weather was beginning to change I noticed on the final leg of my day’s itinerary, so I decided to hide out in a motel room for the night – good decision, it’s pouring outside.

I won’t give all away – I’ll leave the main description of the holiday to the website – but just some of the ‘downlights’ of the first couple of days for this post.

I didn’t arrive at Cathedral Rock National Park until just on dark, but did get the tent up prior to darkness arriving – when it did, it was dark! The campfire took an eternity to get going as all of the timber was damp and by the time I got it started it was time for bed – all-be-it an early night (7.30pm). I had decided to not spend the money on replacing all of the gear I needed to replace for camping, following the loss of a lot of gear over the years due to storage, etc. I hadn’t done much in the way of bushwalking or camping for years due to injuries sustained in my car crash and a bad ankle injury, so I left it all a bit late. I figured that for this holiday I’d make do and replace the gear with quality gear before the next trip. In short, I’ll get by – but it would have been nice to have some good gear just the same. It was a very cold night let me tell you – and long.

When I reached the heights of my first walk today, standing on top of Cathedral Rock National Park, my digital camera decided to die on me. I knew there was something wrong with it during the ascent as it was really chugging away taking pictures. I did get a couple of reasonable panoramic shots on the top of Cathedral Rock before it died, so that was good. I took stills with the video camera I was using, so it wasn’t a complete loss. When I completed the Woolpack Rocks walk I made the trip to Coffs Harbour to seek a replacement and got one for a reasonable price. It’s just another compact and so I will also buy a digital SLR prior to my next trip I hope. My previous SLR was basically destroyed when the camera cap came off during a multiple day bushwalk and all manner of stuff got into it. It wasn’t digital so I didn’t bother repairing it.

So tomorrow – off to Dorrigo National Park I hope and several lengthy walks I haven’t done before. Hopefully the rain will clear.

 

Holiday: Time to Start Planning Again


It is time to start planning for my next holiday, which I am hoping to take sometime towards the end of June 2010. I’m not too sure just where I’ll be heading at this stage, but I am beginning to think that it might be good to head out west again (either to the Broken Hill area or to Uluru region) or to head north to the Daintree region.

So, in the next week or so I need to settle on both a date and a destination.