Chillagoe Part II

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Part II
On the way to Chillagoe, we stopped and picked up some more groceries and also found this cool little place called Coffee Works. It was a little store and it had a coffee tasting room along with a lot of different kinds of chocolate. My favourite type was the chilli chocolate which tastes just like regular chocolate but at the very end you hit the heat of the chilli, it was very interesting. On the way to Chillagoe, which is in the Bush, we were passing all of these wild cows, and there were even these warning signs depicting a cow destroying a car! A lot of the roads were dirt and we got to go through a few water crossings. If the water was much more over the road we would have need a snorkel, but since we are at the end of the rainy season the rivers were not very high. We stopped at the Almaden railroad hotel for a rest stop and it is exactly what you would think an old pub would look like in the middle of the bush.

We finally made it to the bustling town of Chillagoe around mid-day. It was in the middle of the Tropical Savannah and in less than 30 min outside of it was the Tropical Rainforest region, it is magnificent to see the diverse changes in the land (sadly most of the Rainforest was chopped down for farming purposes). Actually, Chillagoe is so small there isn’t a stoplight and it would take you no more than 2 minutes to walk from one end to the next. Anywhere you want to go is directed as to how far away from the pub it is, “oh, you want to go to the butcher,? It’s just down from the pub, the police station you say? Its across from the pub” and so on.
We were going to camp but it was a really tight fit as it was so there was no way we would be able to fit all the camping gear in as well. Luckily for us there was the Chillagoe Caving Clubhouse where we could rent beds for $10 a night ($5 if you were a member), plus it had a communal kitchen and bathrooms. They were in the process of building a nice new bathroom and shower area that was not quite finished when we got there but were functional, and that’s all I cared about.
It was a very rustic place with the clubhouse being an old style Queenslander house, raised off the ground (the communal kitchen and hang out area was underneath) with thin wood walls, and no air-conditioning, but hey, it was shelter.
My room was in the very centre of the house, it was a very large room with a very small bed and lots of junk in the corners, plenty of spider webs, a few wasps nest, mud-dobber homes, and a few other things on the walls that I couldn’t make out (the ceilings were very high) and didn’t really want to know what they were. The beds were made but I wasn’t about to sleep directly on the sheets since there were quite a few stains of unknown origin. Luckily, we all had sleeping bags and just unrolled them on top of the beds. Even though I had my own room theProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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was no such thing as privacy, my room was directly across the veranda from the steps and my doors were half wood, and half glass, with one of the panes completely missing. Since my room was in the centre of the house it also had a door on every single wall . The wall my bed was against had a huge plywood board between the bed and the wall and when you looked behind it there was a doorway and the plywood was acting as the door, luckily this was the wall I shared with Heather and Simons room. There was a random bed on the veranda that a guy who mistook me for a Canadian (I was happy ) stayed. Later that night Heather and Simon and I were examining the subtle nuances that made the rooms “unique” such as the huge wasps nest in their room, and we were joking that only the best for the Travelling American! We jested that this place was truly 5 stars (in truth this place would probably wouldn’t get any stars, but hey for 10 bucks you couldn’t beat it, camping was $7). I was joking that there were a few things on my walls that I couldn’t make out, and not that I wanted to. Simon wanted to check it out to see what I was talking about so we went to my room and I told him I thought it looked like a dead bat. Simon is a bat guy, it is his main area of study with ants at a close second. As he is trying to figure out what this thing about 12 feet up on my wall is it leaps off the wall and starts flying around my room, it was a bat!! Simon instructs me to turn off all the lights and to shut my doors (which is useless since the glass is missing from parts of them) and he will be right back with his Avabat which he will used to record the bats calls then download them into the computer and we can tell what kind of bat it is. This is great and all but by this time it is late and I am locked out of my room because of the wildlife, great. In all honesty it was fun and made the night memorable and interesting.

After we record the bat for a while we try to persuade it to go outside but instead it lands behind the giant plywood sheet behind my bed, Simon is worried that it would get crushed so we try to get the bat out from behind it, this is when we realize what the plywood is for and that the bat is now in Simons room and it is now his problem! While looking for the bat behind the plywood I also found out that is the home of a few geckos. Even though we are staying in a “house” I am still roughing it with the wildlife! I was happy to lie down in bed and get a good nights rest but it was quite hot and since there wasn’t any air-conditioning I figured I would turn on the ceiling fan, but they didn’t work. It wasn’t too bad since my doors were open, there really wasn’t even a front door to the house anyways, and the veranda wasn’t shut in, so the breeze really did flow in nicely.

Ok, enough about the accommodations, the whole purpose of this trip was for Simon to aid his student in her honours research project on bats. Her name is Laura, and her assistant and boyfriend was Hunter. They both live in Cairns and Hunter already has his Masters in Zoology and is going back for his PhD and hoping to work with Krock on it. Laura is trying to see how bats can survive in some of the hottest caves in which they choose to roost. So it was holidays for everyone but Simon on this trip, we left him and his student to go to a hot cave to do some research while Heather, the kids, and I went to the local swimming hole.

The swimming hole was a beautiful place, with rock waterfalls, a deep swimming hole, and a shallow river. There was a metal swing that you could grab onto at the top of the stairs and swing over some rocks and then let go at the right moment and drop down into the deeper portion of the water. It looked like so much fun I just had to try it. I had just finished applying sunscreen when I got up to wait my turn but some of the kids that had been doing it over and over again let me go first. I got up and grabbed onto the metal bar and thought that my hands seemed a bit slippery against the metal, but that I would be fine. Well . . . . . not so. . . my hands were slipperier than I thought and as soon as I swung off the stairs my grip loosened and I fell directly down on the rocks about 20 feet give or take below. Not my plan. As I came to a stop everyone rushed toward me and asked if I was ok, I was, but I had the wind knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe much less talk. It took a few minutes to gain the ability to talk and to tell everyone I was alright. I did have to just sit there for a while as I was pretty scraped and banged up. Luckily I landed mostly on my right side of my butt and thigh and that took most of the beating, I also hit the left side of my back and and forearm on something as well as slicing open the bottom of my right foot. Now keep in mind this the first thing we have done since getting to Chillagoe, we are still supposed to go to a tourist cave that afternoon and crawl around in another cave the next day. Way to go Barrett!

We hung out at the swimming hole for a bit longer then raced off to the clubhouse to get the first aid kit. Like I said no major injuries but just to take some painkillers and bandage up my foot so I could walk and put antiseptic on my thigh. I wasn’t too worse for wear! I kept telling Heather that I have done worse, but it usually included a horse. The kids were really sweet and kept asking me how I was doing, and how was it that I didn’t cry.

We got to the tourist cave that afternoon, and it was so interesting to drop down into the earth and see the beauty of it all, the stalagmites, stalactites, cave coral, chandeliers, and more, and to learn how it is all formed.
After we returned from our tourist cave we hung out at the clubhouse and waited for Simon, Laura, and Hunter to return then we all went to the pub for dinner. There we learned that Hunter was from Texas! Yay, another American! Both Hunter and Laura are around my age and it was great hang out and chat with them. I would have stayed out longer but I was fairly beat up from the swimming hole earlier and really wanted a shower since I hadn’t had one in a few days.
The new shower facilities were actually quite nice, it was a cinderblock building about 50 feet from the clubhouse and it had hot water (most of the time). It was a completely unisex building and across from the showers were the toilets. At one point during my shower an old man came in with a friend talking about how something was coming out (I thought he was talking about an animal) but it turns out he was by himself and was running for the toilet, the sounds that came out of that elderly fellow were hilarious after I realized what was happening; I had a hard time concealing my laughter.
After the bat incident and figuring out that the fans didn’t work I finally was able to go to

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Photos

Max and Emily
Max and Emily at the Chillagoe swimming hot=le

Deeper side of the swimming hole
you can barely see the kid catapulting himself from the swing

Driving to Chillagoe
The unpaved roads to Chillagoe

The doors to my room
my "privacy doors"

Steps to the swimming hole
To the left is where the metal swing was

Tourist cave
Cool formations

Tourist cave
The chandeliers in the tourist cave

Simon recording the bat
In my room

The plywood behind my bed
covering up another doorway

This is where you start with the swing
I got the don't hit the tree's part down

The rocks I fell on
I didn't get the don't fall on the rocks part down