Undara Day 1

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The railway carriages we slept in were as uncomfortable as they were picturesque to look at. Curt was the only one to get a decent night sleep but this did not put of the boys and they surprised us at 06:10 with presents for our wedding anniversary. They had bought some very nice crystal slabs and a fossil stone artwork. We slowly got ready and went to the bush breakfast a few hundred meters into the wilderness. It was a true experience with coffee and tea out of a “billy”, a tin bucket, and bread toasted over an open fire to complement the bacon, sausages, eggs and vegetable stew. After breakfast we went to the reception to see if we could get two rooms next to each other. This was possible and we could even get an upgrade to connecting rooms, which we did.This was really an improvement.



Once this was done we decided to take a walking tour a few kilometres further up the road. The walk took you up the side of an old volcano crater and around the rim. It gave a very nice view of the savannah woodland landscape that dominates the area. From the top of the crater you could clearly see darker strips of vegetation cutting through the landscape, these where stretches of rainforest remnants running along the lava-tubes that this area is famous for. The reason the rainforest survives along the lava tubes is that the ground is covered in basalt, lava stone, which keeps the grass away. Without the grass the frequent but relatively cool bush-fires that shape the savannah landscape do not reach the vegetation around the lava tubes and so the rainforest flora is preserved.



We went back to the station for lunch and Jennyfer got three stone necklaces for our wedding anniversary, one for each of her boys.



In the afternoon we took another walk, the Atkinson’s Lookout walk. It too was nice and it ended on a large granite slab overlooking the racetrack volcano, named for its race-track looking crater that is almost a perfect circle.



After dinner there was a nice presentation on the solar system by the campfire. We watched a bit of it before going to bed.

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