2010/09 Australia trip - Undara |
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To protect the Undara caves all visitors have to have a guide, and this responsibility has been handed over to a private enterprise run by the original landowner. Part of the deal when it became a park was that he’d have exclusive rights to tourism for ten years. This deal had recently expired and Undara now has some competition from Joe and Jo at Bedrock Village, where we’d stayed on Saturday night.
The net result though is that it’s a lot more expensive than visiting an average national park and so, at the Undara Resort, we handed over large chunk of change to camp for the night and take the tubes tour the next day.
We had a late evening visitor, a bettong who had found Sandie’s bag of bird food, mainly the remnants of a raisin bread loaf. Bettongs are tiny kangaroo-like marsupials, similar to the pademelons and quokkas we’ve seen in other parts of Australia.
Tuesday October 5th
We were up early to take the half day volcano tour as we had to pack up everything and check out. We weren’t staying another night: not really our kind of place, an expensive and crowded simulation of bush camping. And too many opportunities to eat and drink expensively. Most people were in campers and caravans, but the place also has railway carriages and eco-tents for other visitors. All of the people on our tour had come up from Cairns on the bus, a day trip for them.
Our tour guide Kris was perfect for the job, the daughter of a man who loved the bush and hunting, and liked trying bush tucker out on his kids. Despite spending much of her life in the Outback, she said that she’d just seen her first ever scorpion. The only snag was that it had been in her bathroom! She also told us that what we’d originally thought was a pademelon was actually a bettong, well known for his raids on incautious campers.
She drove us out to the Wind Cave. The whole Undara area was covered by volcanic lava from the Undara volcano some 200,000 years ago. Some of that lava flowed under the solidified stuff and left empty lava tubes behind; these are the caves that we were going to explore.
The caves are similar to those in Craters of the Moon park in Idaho, except that these are very colourful and quite a bit larger and they don’t have ice in them. They do however have bats and cockroaches and the snakes that come in to eat both of those. Our guide harped a bit on the safety issue as rocks do occasionally fall from the ceiling and the floor has a skin over it that occasionally collapses. Some of the deeper caves have pockets of carbon dioxide and are very dangerous.
The colours in the roof are from water percolating through from the surface, a reminder of how thin and fragile the roof is. Kris was worrying about how often she could go into the caves before her luck ran out.
She took us on a clamber through the Wind Cave complex, avoiding the widow rocks hanging from the ceiling and the bits of the cave that are sacred to the aborigines; all looked the same to us, and we couldn’t spot sacred. If footprints are found in the sacred bits then the cave gets shut down, so I suspect that the guides carry little brooms to clean up when someone transgresses.
When Kris shone her lantern on the ceiling, bats would explode out of the vents in all directions, an indication of how many were hidden up there waiting for darkness outside.
The other cave on the regular tour had recently suffered a collapse, so she took us to a completely different area, stopping for a Devon tea at one of the old station huts. The Road Cave was a deadender with a wooden walkway and displays of skeletons of animals that have crawled into the cave to die: kangaroos, wallabies, dingos. This odd-looking bug was just outside, a spider with its legs parked in pairs.
Kris had recommended a walk around Kalkani, one of the volcanic cones at Yarra. After the tour we made a side trip there, and took a steep climb up to the summit and then a walk around the crater rim. It was a very hot walk, but interesting with its views of the surrounding volcanoes and also of the differently coloured vegetation where the lave tubes cross the valley.