How We Goin’ Mate?

“Every picture tells a story don’t it” (Rod Stewart). The picture below tells a couple stories. The yellow warning sign with a kangaroo tells you that we’re in Australia (and that kangaroos are on the roads, especially at night). The truck in the picture is on the left side of the road and the story it tells is more complex, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Rural road in Queensland

Twenty-four hours after we left northern Colorado, we walked out of the international terminal in Brisbane’s airport in the state of Queensland. We dragged our bags to the taxi stand and a driver greeted us with “How we goin’ mate?” To which I could have replied “All good,” except that I said we’re going to Taigum. My first lesson in Australian. He wanted to know how we were doing, not where we were going. He had a mini-van and I rode in the front; I needed to get a feel for driving on the other side of the road.

Beachcomber’s Paradise

After leaving Washington, we headed for the Coastal Bend of Texas for the rest of the winter. I had been to Corpus Christi a couple times on business and the area looked interesting. The northern Gulf of Mexico is well-known for recreational fishing and the coastal marshes and woodlands are birding meccas. We were ready to leave the cold and wet Pacific Northwest. We rented a house in Rockport, about a half-hour east of Corpus (as the locals refer to it), and became honorary “winter Texans” (the Texas equivalent of "snowbirds" of the Southwest). Here’s the first of a couple posts on the interesting things we learned in this corner of the Lone Star State.

Small (coppice) dune on the beach at Padre Island National Seashore

The Crocodile Farm

According to the Ramsar Convention*, Bahía Tenacatita is one of the five most important bays on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Estero La Manzanilla, an estuary on the east side of the bay, supports a mangrove forest in good condition. It is one of three estuaries on the coast with a large population of American crocodiles. During our stay in La Manzanilla, we often walked down a dirt road by the estuary to the restaurants on the beach. A sign said the area was a crocodile farm (cocodrilario) and a sagging chain-link fence was all that separated pedestrians from large crocodiles basking in the sunshine.

Be careful. Crocodiles in this area. Do not swim. Do not feed the crocodiles. Do not walk your pets. Do not fish. 

Boca de Tomatlán

It’s cool in the morning before the sun rises over the Río Horcones. The breeze from the east is fresh and the leaves of the palm trees wobble as it swirls. White-collared swifts gather and wheel in the sky above the village announcing their presence with loud chattering. Noisy blue-rumped parrotlets fly through the trees in small groups at high speed. Great-tailed grackles are whistling and social flycatchers call from the tops of snags. 

Pangas on the estuary