Girraween National Park

A bit of a rude awakening yesterday, and by rude I mean obscene. And by obscene I mean 0520 hours Brisbane Time.

It's alright for Valerie, she's a gardener at Nicole's hospital and she gets up at this time every morning, but for me it means several hours of wandering around in a fog of confusion.

Still given a purpose anything is possible and when the alarm clock went off, after ten subjective seconds of considering just another few minutes of blissful sleep, I jumped out of bed, fed the dogs, had a shower, packed by bags and wondered what I'd forgotten.

I opened the door at around 6 am to find Val parked outside patiently waiting. And then we were off.

We shared the driving on the way there and I had the pleasure of driving an automatic transmission Mazda 4WD with cruise control. Which was very relaxing.

And with no map, only one piece of emergency re-navigation was required, a wrong turn in Warwick.

It was raining unfortunately and the skies were grey but as we drove past Mount Barney its lower slopes were shrouded in clinging mist which was an enthralling sight, and the winding road up to Cunningham's Gap showed us a vista of low cloud trickling over the rocky wall of the Main Range.

We made it to Girraween at around 9.30am and, watched by a wallaby and her joey, limped out of the car with my buttocks as numb as root canal work, and proceeded to have coffee and cake.

The cake attracted the local wildlife before long, and a naughty somebody might have fed a very bold Satin Bowerbird, an amazing creature with plumage of the darkest velvet and eyes that were actually purple.

After eating and drinking and those sorts of activities, we embarked on a walk which took us through a landscape of forests punctuated by otherworldly blocks and boulders of unbelievable size balanced precariously on the ground and one another.

Our stroll took us up to a Granite Arch made of a huge boulder balancing on two other huge boulders, quite a daunting sight, with a sign right next to it - specifically placed to ruin photographs, I'm sure - telling us how amazing it was to see a huge boulder balancing on two other huge boulders.

Apparently, according to the sign, lichens eat the felspar in the granite and then it weathers away. So now you know.

The path we then took led up an increasingly steep rock staircase, which we laboured up with our packs full of stuff resting every ten minutes.... or was it every ten steps....

Just as we thought it couldn't get an steeper, it didn't, flattening out for a while until we reached the tree line only to be confronted with the rocky promontary of the hill, a very steep face of very steep granite which had to be scrambled up.

A path, consisting of the odd white painted mark, led us up through a gully and then the hill got really steep and after several hundred metres of climbing we broached a plateau and a view of the Balancing Rock and the Second Pyramid, a huge (really huge, several hundred metres tall) hill of granite.