For a country in the middle of a drought, it certainly seems to rain a lot (part two)

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After NYE, I flew up to Brisbane to meet up with Sean. He instantly whisked me away for my Christmas present - a night at O'Reilly's Guesthouse, on Green Mountain in the Lamington National Park. We'd been there very briefly last year, and I'd said that I wanted to go back - so we did.

The lodge is set at the top of the mountain, in the middle of the rainforest. So technically, it shouldn't have come as a great surprise that it was raining. However, it didn't let up at all the whole time we were there! Nonetheless we did still manage to go for a couple of walks, one the afternoon that we arrived and the other the next day. On the second walk, we started the West Canungra Creek Circuit, which is meant to be one of the best walks in the area. We didn't get to complete it, though, as when we reached the 'creek' it turned out to be more of a raging torrent, thanks to the rain, which was positively frightening just to look at. The rainforest is very beautiful, full of all sorts of strange creatures, including the Lamington Crayfish, a unique species that only exists in the national park. We saw three of them on our walk, and what struck me as so strange about them was that they're blue, which is pretty unusual. At first glance I thought it was a child's toy that someone had dropped, until it moved! Unfortunately because of the rain, neither Sean nor I had our cameras with us, so I couldn't take any photos. The other creatures that we came across a lot were leeches - the wet conditions being ideal for them. Eww!!!

The lodge itself was lovely - although to be fair, my standards have come down considerably of late. Just having our own en-suite bathroom was a luxury to me. Sean had booked a room with a mountain view, which unfortunately we couldn't see thanks to the clouds. Still, we had our own little balcony from which we could imagine the view - complete with a parrot who paid us regular visits.

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Photos

River in Lamington National Park
Like the Canungra Creek, this river was also a lot higher than normal

Ewww, leeches!
This was from the first walk, when we did take the cameras