Take a Hike

After a reasonably early breakfast we phoned home to see how the Gramps were getting on - waking them up in the process, at 9 o'clock no less.

And so we set off on our selected hike around the headwaters of the Albert River. We expected the 20km hike to take all day. We started out on the Border Track and made our way at a pretty good pace through rapidly thickening rainforest with the sun filtering through the canopy on our left.

After 5km or so we were starting to lose our bottle as our expected turn off to the track we were after didn't turn up, but after a while we saw the sign and started to head uphill, only after a kilometer or so to reach a barrier declaring the track closed.

We thought about it - the previos sign seemed to have said that the track was a lot longer than we thought - and decided to head back. And would you believe it we got lost at a junction we hadn't seen before, turned around and took the other track only to have the sinking feeling that that one wasn't the one we'd walked up either... and went down the first one again, sticking with it and getting back to our start point eventually, chaste with the knowledge that things don't look the same from the other direction.

We'd decided to press on to the NSW border and walked around Mount Bithongabel and up the rim. At high altitudes the most ancient remnants of the jurassic rainforests cling on, adapted to conditions when Australia was a cooler, wetter place. These Antartic Beeches are mighty things, massive trees some 2000 years old with huge convoluted roots, naturally coppiced with imperious trunks overgrown with bright green moss.

As we climbed the temperature dropped with a cool breeze spilling over the mountain, and we stopped for lunch at Wanungara Lookout with views over the NSW border to the massive volcanic crater with Mt Warning at its centre.

The Toolona Gorge was where we were now headed and we stomped off downhill again alongside a creek which collected waters as we went down, waters which gathered speed and cascaded over waterfall after waterfall. In all I think there were ten waterfalls, which is more than I would want to shake a stick at.

As time marched on, we started to worry that we might not make it back in time, and the light was starting to fail as we took in the magnificent Elabana Falls and began the climb back up.

But we made it back for about five o'clock as the sun was going down, after what we worked out based on the highly dubious distances quoted on signs to be a 25km hike, and after a cup of coffee drove down the mountain again to be back in Brisbane for 7.15 and a well deserved mashed potato concoction and a detailed breakdown of Eloise's couple of days, which I don't really feel the need to go into here, other than to say they weren't traumatic. You'll be relieved to hear.