As they say, some days are diamonds. And up here in the tropical paradise, those days are pretty darn frequent. But recently my day was chocolate heaven – in preparation for our Chocolate Week beginning 3rd July. I can’t wait, but first a frog fact or two…
My cousins the Australian Striped Rocket Frog (litoria nasuta) can jump a distance of 55 times their body length. That’s like a human jumping the length of a great big footy field. What’s their secret? Their legs are twice as long as their body and their leg muscles are one third of their weight.
Impressive? Not as impressive as my record. Yes, your froggy friend Gav can eat triple his bodyweight in chocolate. Proven recently on my chocolate heaven day – our practice run for our famous ‘Kids in the Kitchen’ school program Chocolate Week, where the whole resort is consumed by all things chocolatey.
As the founding frog funster of BIG4 Adventure Whitsunday Resort, it’s my responsibility to ensure all activities are up to the highest standards and the best fun. So I got serious. I tasted every chocolate coin to find the best for the treasure hunts. To help in the clean up I scoffed all the leftover chocolatey morsels they cooked up, picked the best chocolate movies, supervised and tasted everything at the chocolate making demos and fulfilled one of my all time frog fantasies!
You see we had a chocolate fountain. And I had something high on my bucket list – to swim in chocolate. So when everyone had left the room, I hopped in. OMG! Froggy heaven. And then it hit me.
Time for a science lesson: Chocolate contains tryptophan, which influences the levels of endorphins in your brain, which increases the production of serotonin, (stay with me here) which leads to elevated states of euphoria.
Yep I was floating on air, high on chocolate. It was the best. But after a few hours I got all wrinkly and a wrinkly frog is not a good look.
Covered in chocolate I was heading back to my pond to clean up when the maintenance guy clobbered me on the back of the head. What the?
As he yelled ‘bloody cane toad’ my euphoria turned to terror as I realised my dilemma. Covered in brown chocolatey goop, I looked just like a cane toad! (Cane toads are public enemy no. 1 up here – and I won’t go into gory details on what they do to them!)
So I licked and licked my skin and croaked as loud as I could to get their attention. Lucky they realised who they’d captured and after lots of apologies, they escorted me to my pond to clean up.
It was a close call, but all in the name of putting together ‘Kids in the Kitchen’ Chocolate Week, for the school holidays So I hope to see you all there at the ultimate sweet fix!
Gav Adventure,
Paradise
Footnote:
After eating three times my bodyweight in chocolate I did feel a tad green. And my frog poop smelled like chocolate (is that too much information?)
Mental note to self: find out if Freddo Frog has the same ‘problem.’