After an uneventful run from Eumundi to Southport, south of Brisbane, we moved into Heather LW’s mom’s place, re-packed and headed off to Lamington National park, via Tambourine Mountain. Both are in the foothills of the coastal range near the border between Queensland and New South Wales. The natural vegetation is lush in this area - subtropical rainforest to be exact - and the cultivated portions reminded us of the foothills of California. Except, of course, that we were driving on the wrong side of the road and observing kangaroo crossing signs!
We arrived at the Green Mountain campground in Lamington around mid-day and claimed a good campsite. The campground is set in absolutely spectacular rainforest about halfway up the side of an old, extinct volcanic crater near O’Reilly’s Guest Resort. This gave us good access to a shop and well developed amenities as well as the rugged mountain walking trails. The campground was also occupied by lots of critters who made a living from the campers including this Pademelon (no, it’s not a type of water melon!) and her Joey.
We set up camp and did some of the easy walks around the resort that first afternoon. They were a delightful introduction to the area! This little guy accompanied us on our walk through the botanical gardens.
These are the flowers of the Fuchsia plant.
Early the next morning we started on a 17 km walk up the side of the old volcanic cone that would take us from the campground to the rim of the crater that overlooks the old, eroded core of the volcano, Mt Warning.
The walk took us up along Tooloma Creek and through some of the most beautiful rain forest country in the park. Along the way, we climbed 300 meters in elevation along well maintained and well marked trails. Because the weather was rainy (perfect time to see a rain forest, in our opinion!), we had the mountain to ourselves. It was an awesome walk. This is typical of the many waterfalls that we encountered along the climb up Tooloma Creek.
In one of the pools at the base of a falls, we found one of the unique critters in this area.
This is a blue, spiny Lamington crayfish. It’s kind of hard to see because of the water distortion, but it’s shaped just like the red claw crayfish (or any other crayfish for that matter) that we caught in Lake Tinaroo, except that it’s this blue and white color! This one was eat’n size and I took the photo from about 3 feet away, so he’d have been easy to collect, but they’re protected in the park, so we let him be.
At one of the first falls, I found Karen trying to use the macro feature of our digital camera to take a photo of something that was crawling up her pants leg. "What’ca do’in, Luv", says I. "Oh, take a look at this cute little black inch worm!", says she. "Uh, sorry, sweety, that’s no inch worm - it’s a leech.", I replied matter-of-factly. "Oh", says she, then, "Yucccck - get off of me you ugly thing!!" and squashed it. We had been warned of these critters by Helen LW when she visited us in the US and she and Adrian had provided us with gaiters (water-proof boot coverings) to use when we got into this kind of country. That warning had been repeated by Vicki Banks recently, so we wore the gaiters and took other precautions designed to avoid the leeches. It’s just that Karen had never seen one in the wild before! Well, she can’t say that anymore. Every half hour or so we stopped to flick off dozens of them as they tried to climb up our well protected and tightly tucked in clothing. Being adequately warned and prepared, we managed to keep them from attaching their nasty little sucking mouths onto us. Amazingly, there was no mention of this hazard in the plethora of precautionary warnings posted everywhere around the trail head and ranger station! For you Aussies, Aerogard, Tropical Strength, seemed to have the most dramatic effect on the health and well being of these critters.
As we climbed higher it got wetter, until, at the top of the ridge, it was raining steadily. This was the view of Mt Warning from the top of the ridge.
Would have been great if the visibility hadn’t been down to about 50 feet! Reminded me of the view of Mt. St. Helens that I saw from the visitor’s center when visibility was about the same - imagine that! As we climbed back down, the rain slacked off and we stopped part way down for a nice lunch of Smoked Oysters, crackers, lemon, cheese and wine with this view:
When we got back down the hill, we treated ourselves to ice cream, but the local birds felt that they deserved some!
These are Crimson Rosilla - very beautiful birds and, as you can see, quite cheeky. This little honey eater attacked the ice cream right in my hand and then landed here as if to say "Got any coffee to go with that?"
Lamington is chock jam full of birds and other wildlife including Satin and Regent Bower Birds, Swallows, Dingos, and these brilliant King Parrots.
We spent the next day relaxing and photo hunting around the campground. Camp was broken around midmorning and we headed back down the hill for a dinner engagement with our good friends Ian and Therese Goodwin in Run Away Bay, near Southport. We had a wonderful dinner at a local Italian Restaurant which was a favorite of theirs. They surprised us with, of all things, a fine Mexican beer, Corona! Haven’t had any of those since before leaving the States! They even provided the limes to go with it! Here’s Ian and his trusty mate, Beau as we relaxed at their place.
The next day it’s off to pick Heather up at the airport and then take off for several days on North Stradbroke Island. More about that in the next installment!