Creatures crawl in search of blood

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Our next destination was Lamington National Park on the border with New South Wales, which straddles subtropical and temperate climes thus providing a home for many different animal and plant species, some unique to the area. It also has a plethora of walking trails of various levels of difficulty, so has options for everyone from serious hikers to lazy plodders.

We stopped at Canungra to enquire about accommodation options, and discovered that there the road forks to the 2 main resorts in the park - Binna Burra and Green Mountain, with 1 hr 20 mins of narrow, twisting roads between the two. Green Mountains looked better from the point of view of range of accommodation as well as recommended walks. There's a famous guesthouse called O'Reilly's at Green Mountain, which was willing to offer us a standby rate of $145 for a mountain view room. A quick perusal of the brochure, containing critical info such as the fact they had a heated outdoor plunge pool, sealed the deal. It only felt sweeter when we arrived at the place and discovered the standby rate was precisely half the normal cost.

The road from Canungra to Green Mountain was almost Corsican in nature, with blind corners, sharp drop-offs, and single lane stretches along its 20km length. Arrving at O'Reilly's, we were struck by how busy the place was. It's very popular with twitchers, as you can apparently see ~50 bird species without even leaving the bar balcony. I was slightly put off by the swarms of crimson rosellas that were around the complex, tame enough to perch on people's arms and heads for photo opportunities but, such cheesy things aside, O'Reilly's was extremely well-run.

The room was precisely what you'd expect for something normally costing $290 per night, with its own mountain-facing balcony and a carport underneath. I did not feel one ounce of guilt for betraying backpacker ideals.

The loop circuit from O'Reilly's via Blue Pool and Elabana Falls is recommended as the most comprehensive day walk at Green Mountain so we undertook that in the afternoon. I'm not sure either Odie or I would say it was particularly enjoyable. The first couple of kilometres was downhill, a gradual descent to the creek floor through 400m elevation of subtropical rainforest including stands of red cedar. We heard many different birds and rustlings in the undergrowth but saw nothing except scrub turkeys. On reaching Blue Pool, a quick calculation revealed that, even though we hadn't been dawdling, we were making exceptionally poor time.

From Blue Pool, we headed south-east along Canungra Creek. The path criss-crossed the stream at various ill-defined points, supposedly all marked with an orange arrow but we found several places where the arrow was non-existent or hidden from view. With rain having recently fallen, the water level was sufficiently high that it was impossible to avoid getting your feet wet on some of the crossings, and squelching noises accompanied us for the rest of the way.

Unfortunately the recent rains had also brought out leeches. This was a novelty for me, as I'd never seen a leech before (and was quite disappointed at how small they were), but Odie had encountered them in South America and clearly was not enamoured of them. We each picked up 5 or 6 during the course of the trek. As I was in shorts, I merely had to pull them off my ankles - no easy feat given how slippery and tenacious the little blighters were - but Odie was in long trousers and there was a certain horror movie element to seeing a leech trying to eat its way through the fabric. With this unexpected excitement, we were loth to hang around at the crossing points so the pace picked up somewhat.

The path was also blocked at various points by (possibly recent) tree falls that required either clambering over or crawling under, leading to us being possibly not the least mud-free walkers ever to have attempted the hike. Progress was still slow, and we were slightly worried we might still be out there after sunset so, powered by a couple of Milo bars, we stepped it up and fairly zoomed the rest of the way, most of which was uphill.

After the meagre sightings of leeches and brush turkeys in the previous 5.5 hours, it was slightly depressing to arrive back at the lodge and find hordes of red-necked pademelons (a type of wallaby) nibbling there, including a joey that was simply leaning out of the pouch to eat, as well as a deep blue satin bowerbird.

When we mentioned the leeches to reception, they weren't surprised and helpfully added there were also some dangerous ticks out there. Seems as though the best way to check for these is, in the words of the receptionist, to "get naked" and conduct a close-range inspection of all skin. I think both of us felt this might be inappropriate having previously had no experience more intimate than sharing a box of Milo bars, so we took our chances on our own individual self-examinations. (Though I subsequently understood why the receptionist had suggested it, when I saw he'd checked us in as husband and wife).

The average age of occupants of the dining room was somewhere north of 60 so we repaired to the bar for food and a well-earned bottle of O'Reilly's own Platypus Play Semillon.

I fancied a post-prandial wander along the Treetop Walk, in the hope of seeing some possums and other nocturnal denizens. With me with my less-than-lighthouse-strength Maglite, and Odie with some bicycle lights, it perhaps wasn't the best-equipped spotlighting trip in history and we saw nothing, though the random creaking and swaying of the spans seemed scarier in the darkness.

We'd left our socks and shoes on the balcony to dry overnight, but the socks had been scattered all over the place by morning - presumably by the same cheeky crimson rosellas and stunning black/yellow regent bowerbirds that attempted to share our breakfast with us.

We decided to tackle the Morans Falls walk, a gentle leech-free trail through more subtropical rainforest, including many figs. Part way along the track, we surprised 2 large brown lizards, whose skin was snakelike in texture, warming themselves in a patch of sunlight. We subsequently saw several others but were never fast enough to get a photo. We did however hear, and then see, a spotted catbird, whose call resembles a yowling cat (or a crying baby, as we first thought).

Moran Falls are the highest in Lamington and from the top you get a panoramic view into NSW. We followed the path on to Balancing Rock which we (and, independently, some geotechnical experts) decided would probably need renaming in the near future. A sloughed-off snake skin provided a tantalising reminder of the wildlife hiding around us.

It would have been criminal to leave the lodge without sampling the outdoor plunge pools, with the jacuzzi obviously requiring the longest investigation. One minor quibble was that, from a comfortable neck-deep position in the jacuzzi, it was impossible to see the surrounding countryside due to the presence of some bushes but, given the environmental damage caused in Australia by the mass clearance of natural vegetation, I would suggest relocation of the jacuzzi as the solution to this rather than chopping down the bushes.

Once the bubbles had stopped after the 3rd jacuzzi cycle, we reluctantly got out, towelled down, dressed, and jumped back in the car for the journey to Currumbin.

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Photos

Waterfall
Detail

View to NSW
From the top of Moran Falls