January 6, 2005 - Chance Bay, Whitsunday Island - (The day we played with the manta rays)

Here's the sunset over Whitsunday Craig, aka, the Manta Ray Playground. (The Aussie's say manta ray in one smooth word that sounds sort of like "mawndaree." Mawndarees are worshipped like Gods here - with tattoos, with t-shirts, on names of stores and restaurants. Now we know why!)

So maybe we'll get some sleep tonight? No, not with all the jungle noise coming out of the woods on Whitsunday Island. If you listen closely you can differentiate a dozen different sounds, most of which seem to be birds. The most loud and obnoxious of all are the kookaburras. They apparently chose tonight to have a kookaburra stand-up comedy jam. They screech all night like deranged chimpanzees. I pteradactyled them back a couple of times. Still learning kookaburra.

BTW - The word on the reef is the kookaburra only laughs when it's going to rain...

Even more distracting than the birds is all these stars! I've seen star-filled skies before, but out here they have stars wrapped inside galaxies wrapped inside universes. These stars have stars upon thars! I don't think they forgot a single star tonight - they're all up there. The night sky in the southern hemisphere is unrecognizable - no Orion, no Big Dipper, no North Star. Not a single constellation I can name. If they're there, I can't find them... because of all the stars! I might as well be on Planet Klingon observing the Moons of Zontar.

BTW - we also saw shooting stars! And we slept maybe 4 hours.