This past weekend my housemates and I got a chance to go into the outback! Although a majority of Australia is made up of scrub and dry sclerophyll forest, rather than rainforest, it takes quite a bit of time to get out to this famous outback. The drive from Cairns, over the Kuranda range, to Chillagoe took about two and a half hours.
As soon as we got there we stopped at the local pub for a huge spaghetti lunch, which, although delicious, was very difficult to eat since it was about 95 degrees. After filling up on spaghetti, salad and huge amounts of pineapple we were on the road again.
We drove out to the balancing rock. Which, as it sounds, is a huge rock balanced on a smaller rock. We also got an introduction to the awesome limestone formations that are pretty much the only things that modify the flat dry landscape of the outback. It’s incredible to see this dry light brown landscape of dirt and grass and eucalyptus with a huge black rock jutting out of the ground suddenly without any other lumps or bumps in the landscapes for miles around.
We then took a drive out to the old abandoned copper smelter. It seems so bizarre to me that a huge amount of 20th century machinery that was known to be very dangerous and hazardous to the health of people would just be abandoned, along with the huge pile of slag created by the smelter. But fear not, they are only keeping the pile because there are traces of gold in it and mining companies plan to process this weird melted rock in yet another dangerous process to extract that gold. This is in addition to their other questionable mining practices. Now that gold has been found in the areas around Chillagoe they are using planes with x-ray-type machines to scan the landscape for gold, then a company takes a core sample and if they find traces of gold they gently extract it from the ground. By “gently extract” I mean that they blow a huge hole in the ground and bring away all the debris in trucks. I don’t know where that debris goes but of course I didn’t read their EIR (environmental impact report) that is, assuming they even have one.
Next we drove to a freshwater river where we were able to swim. And considering that we were all pretty much sitting in puddles of our own sweat, this was very welcome. After splashing around in a beautiful stream we went back to our cabins, had a little pool time and watched some lawn bowls on TV.
Our guide made us some bizarre pre dinner drink and then we walked across the center of town, about a minute and a half, to the local pub for a huge steak dinner with garlic bread and salad. Sadly we weren’t able to do any star gazing because a storm rolled in and clouds quickly covered the sky but we turned our AC, or air-con as they call it here, and slept well.
The next morning we had a huge breakfast of fruit and yoghurt and rolls before setting out to the caves.
The Caves were perhaps the coolest thing of the entire weekend, and not only because they were a much more comfortable temperature than the outside. We all got a light hitched onto us and into the caves we went. Geological summary: limestone melts with water, it’s kind of bizarre to think that rock is capable of simply melting when it interacts with something that we’re made of but it does. As a result the formations in these caves are quite amazing: stalactites and stalagmites, bizarre formations that look like a walrus, and a cat and a lit candle, just to name a few (sadly no bunch of grapes). After almost two hours we had to make our way out of the wonderfully temperate caves into the heat of the outback.
Our guide picked us up and took us for a lunch back at the same pub of huge beef burgers and heaps of watermelon. Before leaving town we stopped at the house of a man who had once been the only service man for Ford in this region and now has so many old Fords that his entire yard is a graveyard of old cars.
We drove back a bit and stopped at a coffee-roasting factory. I got one of the most amazing iced mochas of my life, mainly because of the giant scoop of ice cream on the top, and bought some coffee. Then we were on our way back. On the way we watched the landscape change. The understory got more crowded trees got greener and their leaves were different shapes. The cows disappeared when the plants got too thick that it would have been impossible for them to walk around. And then we were over the ridge, out of the rainfall shadow and into the tropical region of far north Queensland.
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