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Published: March 14th 2006
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Caldera views
The guy walking infront is an old street sweeper turned poet. He puts incredible amounts of thought into everything. I loved his hat which had allmost completely worn away. Taking a chance to spend some time with my grandparents I had agreed to head off for a weekend with them and the naturalist club they were members of. My uncle questioned whether spending the weekend with retired people was really what I wanted to do but to me it was a great chance to spend some time with them and see something of Australia. As my grandparents correctly told me before I went the other naturalists were all interesting people. Many of them were botanists, geologists or something similar. Most of them were eccentric and could talk forever, which was tiresome at times, but generally just meant there was always something interesting to be listening to.
The weekend was spent in a giant ‘caldera’ - I use the inverted commas as it’s not a true caldera and was formed by water erosion around the central plug of the ancient volcano. It's located at the border between Queensland and New South Wales, is 80km across and is made up of several national parks.
The weather was warm, the scenery beautiful and the vegetation sub-tropical. There were various activities throughout the weekend involving visits to interesting things in the area.
More Caldera views
In contrast to a lot of Australia this place has lush vegetation Incidently did you know that there is a tree here which can sting leaving needles in you that will hurt like hell for up to 12 months! The pain is said to last for anywhere between 2-12months, is worse when you're in the water and there is no cure for it! It's not like this is the only poisonous thing out here either, there's dangerous stuff all over the place!
One of the highlights of the weekend included stopping in a small village for ice cream where we discovered amongst lots of other cool things an amazing fruit called Buddha’s hand. The villages around this area are apparently renowned for living the ‘alternative’ lifestyle and all seemed to have a bohemian feel.
After the first night the club asked me to write up a report of the evening spent visiting the glow-worms for their newsletter. I’ll attach a copy of what I sent into them below:
Glowing in number.
Being a 22 year old male many people my age would question why I had agreed to, even looked forward to coming away with my Grandparents for a weekend with a group of Naturalists of a
The Grandparents
I reckon I demolished 90% of the fruit cake on the table. As a rule of thumb my Gran would double what they both ate to get an idea of how much I needed similar age to them. Fortunately I know better. Though the people there don’t sleep until midday or drink copious amounts of alcohol in the evenings while listening to loud music they are all interesting, knowledgeable and yes even fun to be around.
I’ve been asked to write up the glow-worm trip of our first evening on Friday 10th March 2006 and while I don’t feel up to the task I thought I’d have a go.
Not long after arriving at our Spacious, Clean and Fully equipped ‘camp’ we had eaten dinner and organised ourselves into a convoy of cars to head down to the caves where we would find the glow worms.
I was surprised to find that the place was really quite busy but less surprised when I saw that most of the people there were Japanese package tourists, who delighted in saying hello to every person they past.
Having heard lots of stories about Australia’s variety of deadly poisonous or outright fearsome and dangerous wildlife I was surprised to discover that one of my first experiences with it would be with a colony of small, timid and extremely fragile glow worms. I can’t see
Natural Arch
This is the cave, which extends a long way in, that lights up like the starlit sky with glow worms each night. that one of these glow worms could possibly be directly the cause of even the most minor accident but they are a stunning sight and worthy of the great deal of attention they seem to receive here.
A few flights of stairs of shuffling and bumping in the dark leads you past, apart from lots of Japanese tourists of course, what is beautiful rainforest in the day and in the dark home to occasional glow worms. When you reach the bottom you enter a large cave where you can just make out the white glow (and can’t miss the sound) of the waterfall gushing down in the middle of it. The roof is plastered with so many glow worms that you forget for an instant you’re surrounded by so many people and could be forgiven for thinking you’re staring at the starlit sky. After a couple of minutes we’d had enough so that was the end of our short trip and we headed back for the camp where more wine awaited me.
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