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Published: August 16th 2008
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the Outback
as in the savannah Outback, not the desert Outback Way out west of Cairns, way out in the Outback itself, is a little place called Undara. There is a lodge there called the Undara Experience. The reason people go there is to see lava tubes. It turns out to be one of my favourite places of all the places I've been to in Australia. The Undara Experience have package tours out there for something like $495 for a night. Or you can do what I did and take the Trans North bus out there for $119 return and stay in one of the Lodge's three-bed dorms for $35. I don't think the Undara people really want tourists knowing about the Trans North bus though unless they're part of one of their own tours....
It turns out the bus goes through Kuranda and Atherton on the way so I could have caught it from there but that's all by the by. The trip out there was rather memorable for all the wrong reasons. Its actually a Greyhound run but the service is taken by Trans North. First of all an old New Zealand couple who must have been about eighty years old weren't on the manifest provided by Greyhound, and
even though they had tickets there were no seats available because there were still a few pick-ups along the way. The driver was going to take them to Atherton and then get them a car the rest of the way but by pure chance two people meant to get on at Atherton never turned up so the old couple stayed on the bus after all. Next, on the very windy stretch up the hills to Kuranda, the Irish woman sitting opposite me started swaying in her seat and then passed out. A French guy and I both grabbed her at the same time to stop her falling out of her seat, and after a minute she came to and started vomiting all over herself. Then another woman started getting irate because her itinerary from Greyhound had led her to believe that this was a tour bus and she was going to be getting a commentary of the sights and stops at interesting sites, when in actuality it is just a standard transit bus running from point to point. And apart for all that, I was sitting in the seat behind the driver and there was no room for my legs
so I was sitting with them tucked halfway into my chest for the whole ride. And then, five hours later when we finally arrived, it turned out that all the others going to Undara (on a $520 package tour) didn't know the details of that tour and found out that they had a two-hour guided walk after lunch, and then had to leave the next day straight after a 6.30am breakfast to get the train back to Cairns. They weren't all that impressed.
On the way we passed through Ravenshoe, the highest town in Queensland with the highest sealed road and the highest pub -- just thought I'd mention that. The countryside out in the Outback is fantastic. Hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of endless eucalyptus savannah (it covers the top third of the continent don't you know?) with termite mounds everywhere, in various shapes and sizes according, I suppose, to the species of termites that built them and in various colours according to the soil from which they are made, from big clumpy brick-red ones as large as glyptodons to iron-grey pointy ones like baby traffic cones.
As I said, the reason everyone goes to Undara is
another split rock
ah, the art of Nature for the lava tubes. The name's pretty self-explanatory I guess, but a lava tube is formed when the outside of a lava flow is cooled by the air temperature and a sealing crust is created. The molten lava keeps flowing through underneath for as long as the volcano is spewing it out, but once the volcano stops so does the production of lava, all that is in the tube drains out with the help of gravity, and the tunnel that is left is a lava tube. Very easy to understand. The Undara volcano erupted about 190,000 years ago, producing enough lava to fill the Sydney Harbour three times over, and the lava tube is the longest in the world at 160km. Of course 190,000 years have taken their toll and it is no longer a complete tube. Sections have caved in, others have been blocked off through slumping, etc etc etc. It is very impressive though. The property on which the tubes are located has been owned by the Collins' family for several generations, but the government took the lava tube part off them and made it into a national park in 1992 in an effort to protect the formations.
However they gave the Collins' family a 75 year business lease and a 10 year exclusive tourism lease. You can only go to see the tubes as part of a guided tour (although now there are two other operators as well as Undara Experience).
As well as the lava tubes, I naturally was going for the animal life. I was on the look-out for birds as always and I did find some I hadn't seen before which is all good (I even found four species to add to the Undara checklist -- I don't think they get many proper birders out there because those four were all reasonably obvious ones, especially the crimsonwing parrots flying round the Lodge!), but this was really a mammal trip. Undara has a good selection of macropods, those bouncy marsupials that normal people call kangaroos. The eastern grey kangaroo I'd seen before but the common wallaroo (also called a euro, which is funny) was new to me, as was the whiptail wallaby with its ridiculously long tail. The two I most wanted to find were the Mareeba rock wallaby and the rufous bettong. The rock wallaby is named after the town of Mareeba in
which it was first found (in fact, its easiest to see at that town's Granite Gorge because the tourist buses offload tourists with handfuls of food for them) but its at Undara too and I saw one by the lava tubes. The bettongs are little hare-sized nocturnal hoppers that are supposed to be common around the Lodge at night. I spent an hour searching without result. I wasn't going to give up because I only had one night there, so thought I'd go sit outside my room and wait to see what happened. There were already some people there though so I went round the back of the buildings, and who should I find hanging out having a little party, but some rufous bettongs. Little blighters. They are so cute. I didn't see any swamp or agile wallabies but I've seen them elsewhere, and I didn't see any black-striped wallabies either which was a shame as they are very pretty. The last macropod there is the antilopine wallaroo, which is the size of a regular kangaroo and a bright rufous-red colour. I thought I was going to miss that one too, but on a walk while waiting for the bus
lava tube
exceptionally bad photo due to the lack of light, but whatcha gonna do? to arrive I saw three with ten minutes to spare.
Undara: very excellent place. Glad I went. Wish I could have stayed longer.
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