1995/11 Australia trip - Lamington |
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I finally found a phone with all the books and things in place so that I could find out how to call Melbourne from Queensland, and let Edna know that we’re here and a couple of weeks away. They have the new roof on the house now, but she says things are still a mess.
Then we stocked up on food again and headed up into the mountains and Lamington Park. This is a rain forest which stretches through the mountains. There’s a road that goes about a mile into the park to a lodge and a campground, but from there on it’s all footwork, hundreds of miles of trails.
For once, there’s plenty of wildlife to see. Brush turkeys wander around the campsite looking for anything unattended. In the forest, we were trying to get pictures of the tiny kangaroos that live there, but when we came out we found that they were all over the roads and lawns. They’re called pademelons, and have all the same parts as a kangaroo, but they’re the size of a terrier.
In the forest, it’s dark with towering fig trees and vines hanging all over, but amazingly noisy with all kinds of bird calls. Apart from the bell bird, they also have our friend the splat bird, and a new one, the stepped-on-cat bird. There’s a resort up at Binna Burra too, sort of modeled on the Yellowstone idea, a collection of cabins and a communal dining area, but they were fully booked for dinner so we had to cook our own.
Next morning, Wednesday, we were woken up by a graunching noise. One of the brush turkeys was trying to turn our bucket over and get at the scraps of food in it. Looking around the campground, it looked like he’d already had everyone else’s. Thanks to the turkey, we made an early start and headed off down the Caves trail, looking out for wildlife.
This was supposed to be the best trail for seeing koalas, but walking down a steep trail while looking up into the trees is hazardous to your
health so we didn’t see any. There were of course loads of new and weird plants and trees and insects to look at closer to the ground. We could also hear lots of birds, but they’re tough to see when the trees are 150’ high. The trail ended at a cliff top, with a view across the valley. Nothing but trees and a few cliffs to see in all directions. The whole world was green except for a few white cockatoos gliding above the tree tops screaming at each other.
We climbed back up to our campsite at Binna Burra for lunch and then set off in the other direction to Burruji Falls. This trail was twice as long, and about twice as deep, as this time we got right down to the valley floor. Underneath the palms that grow in the swampy areas, it’s really dark, even though it was only mid afternoon. As we neared the waterfall, the rain began, just steady, heavy stuff. This time we had our rain gear, but we were soon steaming inside it. The waterfall was pretty, just a thin stream dropping off the cliff hundreds of feet above us, but it was hard to see in the heavy rain. After an hour or so it eased up and we started the climb back up, aware that it was getting harder and harder to see as the fog closed in. All the spectacular views were gone, but no real danger of getting lost as it would be really hard to lose the trail.
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Lamington National Park (24.41) |
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Up at Binna Burra, we just had time to make reservations for dinner and then rush over to the camp site to scrape off most of the mud, put on some warm clothes, and look presentable for dinner with the lodge guests. At least that was what we hoped. Sandie found that her shoes were full of blood and leeches, and that her feet were full of holes. As the leeches use an anticoagulant to make the food flow, she was bleeding like a pig. I used all of
our first aid kit to patch up her feet while she cleaned up the pools of blood. We were running short of time, so we just put clean clothes on over the mud and soggy underwear, and headed for the lodge. I left my bloody socks on, and just removed the leeches I could see, as I didn’t dare take the socks and remaining leeches off in case I started bleeding like Sandie.
After all this, we arrived at the lodge on time for dinner, but there was nobody else there! It turns out that although Queensland is in the same time zone as New South Wales, it doesn’t use Summer Time, so it’s an hour behind. Sandie pointed out that in that case we were up at 5.15 am that morning! So, we retired to the bar to sample some Bundy rum.
Dinner was communal, with three or four groups to a table, and we were sitting with a couple holidaying from Barnstaple, a recent German immigrant, and a British/Indonesian couple from Sydney. He’d been in St. Paul to do some camera work for the Special (handicapped) Olympics, and he knew a lot about Australian animals so we had plenty to talk about. It turned out that Nimbin IS the hippy capital of NSW. By turning a blind eye to the marijuana farming, it’s the government’s way of concentrating all the undesirables in one place. We also got lots of advice on finding koalas and preventing crocodiles from finding us. We found that our splat bird is really called a whip bird, and our trodden-on-cat bird is called a cat bird, so we weren’t too far out. Koalas can make a sound like a baby crying so we probably heard some even if we didn’t see them.
One of the lodge’s big attractions for dinner is their wall of glass overlooking one of the valleys we hiked, but it was completely fogged in until mid-way through dinner when we were treated to a big thunderstorm with lightning and torrents of rain. We were about the last to leave as we didn’t want to get wet again, but the storm was mostly over. We just wished one of us had remembered to pick up the flashlight for the very dark trip back.