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Published: September 16th 2009
Start of the day
We parked the truck in the car park and started our walkDAY 312
I am getting used to Andy bringing me tea in bed again, it is a habit that I like him to keep up with, but I am sure it will all change when we are back out on the road again.
We are up and about getting ourselves ready to have another walk today, still in the Barron Gorge National Park, but we want to do a different section, by the time we leave Cairns we expect to have walked most of if not all of the available tracks.
So the Camelbak is full of fluid, we have a few extra bottles with us to ensure that we have plenty of fluid, the sandwiches are ready, well almost ready, I have just buttered Andy a roll, he is taking a small tin of tuna with him and will put it on his roll when we stop for lunch, a little bit more glamorous than my cheese sandwiches.
We check everything we need, put it in the truck and we hit the road, driving out of Cairns on the Western Arterial Road, taking the road to Karunda, we will pass Karunda and turn off for Speewah.
No sooner than we leave the driveway we realise that something is fundamentally wrong, there are a few spots of rain on the windscreen, this is not good news and something that we had not hoped for. It was cloudy yes, Andy commented that every time I see clouds I say that it looks like rain, well today that was true!
We debated for a moment if we needed to cancel our walk for another day, but it was only a few drops and looking across to the mountains it does not look too bad, there is in fact blue sky right over the mountain that we are heading for.
It was not actually easy to find where we needed to be to start the walk, we followed the signs for Douglas Track without realising that there was another sign and another turn off to the same walk, confusing yes, so we ended up going down a track to find that it was a dead end and then had to reverse back up.
We found the starting point and donned our boots and rucksacks and off we hiked onto the Djina Wu track which in Aboriginal
Djina-Wu
Means "Get ready to walk" so we are told in Aboriginal means “Get Ready to Walk” this part of the track is classified as easy and is only 30 minutes one way, however it does lead onto the Douglas Track which can be steep in places.
The weather is ok up here, it is very warm again today, but not too sunny at the moment, although for the best part of the walk we shall be in Rain Forest anyway so there will be plenty of shade, just as well as I forgot to bring my sunglasses with me.
The boardwalk plunges us straight into the Rain Forest and onto a wooden bridge over a dry creek bed, I am sure this flows well in the wet season. The bridge then takes us to a flight up steps upwards and soon we are onto the dirt track.
We join up with the Douglas track and follow the signage, although we think it is great to have the signage to indicate which track goes where, we have noticed that the distance is not matching up with the map that we have so one of them is going to be wrong, but at least there is a vague indicator of
Ronnie & Pam Elgar
Some people are just so good the distance that you will be or will have walked.
While we walk we stop to listen to the Rain Forest sounds around us, everything is silent apart from the noise of the insects and the birds, some birds have an enchanting tweet, while others have more squawks, but one bird is completely different, we have only heard this before at Henrietta creek. Andy describes it as a laa laa whoop, we wondered if it would have been Cassowary, however the call of a Cassowary is described as deep booming and as neither of us have heard it before then we have no idea.
There are plenty of scrub Turkeys lurking around as usual, often we hear things but we cannot see what they are, the foliage around us hides them well.
Looking around us you can still see evidence of Cyclone Larry when it unleashed its power on the Rain Forest, the tracks have mainly been cleared, with the occasional obstacle of a tree trunk or two to step over and of course watching for the stinging trees, the palms that have thorns, the vines that have thorns and some sort of fern that has a
serrated edge.
We hiked up 4.5k’s of the Douglas track and arrived at the turn off for Glacier Rock, today we chose not to do the final bit up to Glacier Rock as we hiked up there on Sunday, we only wanted to hike to this point as that meant we had done the whole track.
We stopped for our lunch here, it was a good place to stop, we rested for 20 minutes, topped up on fluids, checked the remainder in the Camelbak and then used the spare bottles just to top up the Camelbak, so we knew that everything we had was now in the Camelbak.
We headed back the way we came, stopping at intervals for a breather and a few mouthfuls of fluid to help keep us hydrated, some of the track was much easier now as we were coming back down the mountain, but you just had to be careful for lose rock, soil, tree roots, the occasional obstacle that we needed to climb over and every now and again we had to cross a creek, of course they were mainly dry, so there was no problem there, just the steep climb
back out of the creek bed and continue on the track.
We got to the part where another track intersected the Douglas Track, the Gandal Wandun (To Link) Track, which would give us a circuit to complete, however we stopped to look at the distance and work out if it was worth doing today, I did feel that we had done plenty and was not going to gain any enjoyment by doing the additional kilometres on the circuit, so we decided that would be for another day.
The walk was uneventful though fun and of course quite tiring, by the time we got back to the Djina Wu track, I could just see the green marker boards through the foliage and shouted to Andy with glee “great I can see the green boards, only 765 metres to go!” With that I heard a laugh and saw a woman standing by the sign. I shouted out to her “that sounded a bit desperate!”
On arriving at the sign board we stopped and chatted to the people, they told us that they had arrived last night and were camping at the Speewah camp ground and after a lazy morning
were venturing out to see the rain forest, though they knew it was late and were not doing anything serious this afternoon, just a bit of a scooping mission, they just asked us what type of walk we had had and did we enjoy it. We explained we had just done a wonderful walk, it was fairly tough but well worth it and suggested the view over Cairns from Glacier Rock was well worth the hike up.
Soon we were on the last 765 meters on the boardwalk and we were back at the truck, desperate to get our boots and socks off and put our thongs back on and cool down, we had “touched the car” at 3.25, so had been walking for 4 hours thirty five minutes including our lunch break, stop for a breath and hydration, and the 20 minutes while we chatted to the couple on the walk, not bad.
We had worked out whilst walking, that so far we have done walks totalling about 38 kilometres and we both have thoroughly enjoyed them and are really feeling the benefit.
The drive home was about 50k’s and just under and hour as it
Then......
... Caroline before christmas 2008.... was back down the mountain from Karunda at about 4.15 we were back and had a shower and a cup of tea.
The blog had to be done, so Caroline made a start, and in the blink of an eye it was teatime, so as tonight was Cheap Tuesday, tonight was Pizza night, so we phoned our order and went to collect.
The thing we appreciated most was that we had worked hard for our little indulgence so didn’t feel too guilty whilst eating it.
I have included an old photograph I took of Caroline when we were on our way to Noosa just before Christmas last year and she was definitely “Tubby Custard” I have also included a photograph of her walking today and I think she has lost a fair amount of weight and looks so much better for it. Well done!
Caroline’s mum and dad left us a voice mail on Skype this evening, so Caroline called them back, amazingly Shirley had told Caroline that finally after two months of waiting, they actually received the batch of back up DVD’s of over 10,000 images of our tremendous journey, Australia Post actually despatched it
...and Now
Caroline Looking Trim...mer on September 12th after we posted it in Darwin on 9th July.
I am sure that they have been held up in Customs while they review every single picture on every DVD to ensure that we were not sending anything dodgy, I wouldn’t mind but for it to take 2 months when I paid for airmail at least expecting it to be a couple of weeks! In the meantime I have re burnt all of the photos onto DVD’s, which have been hand, delivered to England for me. I expect Mum and Dad will be busy for a few weeks looking through the photos!
The rest of the evening was just relaxing and watching some TV which was nice and by 10.00pm my eyes were hanging so we had to go to bed.
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Mum and Dad
non-member comment
"WOW"
Hiya.....you certainly look good Caroline....and you dropped a whole dress size too.....bet you feel great about that.......has Andy lost any weight? Mum xxx