Finally the last Undara post! On Sunday morning I took a tour of the lava tubes at Undara. They load you up on a bus and drive you out to the middle of nowhere, with the assurance that there's a helicopter landing area if they need to airlift you to a hospital for some reason. (Hmm.) I took the Active Tour, which meant climbing down rocks instead of taking boardwalks, which was the other tour. The tubes were neat!
The entrance to a lava tube!
Sometimes stuff gets in that can't get out.
The ceiling is about 40ft high. (Far side is the exit.)
See how the sides are still expanding in that last photo? That's because the floor isn't really the floor. After the lava was gone, water flowed through these tubes and left sediments that settled on the bottom of the tube. Nobody has drilled to see how far down the real bottom of the tube is.
The entrance to the first part of the tube!
This section of the tube was about 100ft long.
This was the entrance to the second part of the tube. The first section was fully open and lit, but this one was dark!
This was totally black without lights. (My camera's flash is amazing.)
The walls were once black, but over time the minerals seeped out. Pretty!
The entrance from afar. This tube is probably even deeper under all that sediment.
I also found some bugs in the lava tubes, which is weird considering that there isn't much down there in the way of life. I also found a few mummified toads.
I think this is a Huntsman but I couldn't get close enough to ID him for sure.
Amazingly, this is the only cockroach I saw in the tunnels. What a difference from the caves of Bonaire!
Froggie!
Exiting the lava tube.
Once out of the tube we were back into the savanna.
This is a Bottle Tree! They hold lots of water in their trunks.
Look at this wasp! The abdomen is tiny!!!
The savanna forest. A bright sun and not a cloud in the sky--that's my definition of a perfect day.
A messy panorama. There are a few floating trees in here if you look closely... but from afar it looks okay!
After the tour I was supposed to go back to the campsite, but I got distracted by a flock of beautiful Rainbow Lorikeets. They were drinking from a man-made pool of water and they let me get quite close to them. I almost missed my van, but it was worth it!
Just had a bath.
I didn't know that the individual feathers were multiple colours. Gorgeous!
I loved this guy. They look so personable!
Drinking from the faucet.
I wish I'd had more time to play with the shutter speed!
I love their little feet, they can climb around on just about anything.
I can see why people keep them as pets.
Thanks to the internet, I think of Leonardo DiCaprio every time I look at this photo.
Lorikeets at the drinking hole!
It's really hard to catch them in flight! I just kept scaring them until I got my shot.
And last but not least, here are a few photos of kangaroos! My friend Jessica took both of these--I haven't actually seen a live kangaroo yet, but I've seen three dead ones on the side of the road. I will keep looking though!!!
Eastern Grey Kangaroo!
This might actually be a pair of wallabies but the mama and joey look
like they're holding hands! So cute!!!
That's all for now! I'm meeting the family in Sydney on Thursday, so I've got lots of preparing to do. Hopefully my next batch of photos will have my mom and grandma in them! :)
After breakfast and platypus spotting on Saturday morning, we took off to see a fig tree called the Curtain Fig. It's a pretty cool tree. If I were a feral child, I would live in that tree.
Photo from EarlyForest.com.
The life cycle of the fig tree is kind of odd. First a bird eats a fig fruit and poops out the seeds high up in the canopy. The seeds sprout in the canopy, on top of other trees, and grow their roots downward until they hit the ground. The fig grows over the host tree until eventually the host tree dies and rots away, leaving just the fig tree. In the case of the curtain fig, the fig tree grew so large that the host tree collapsed under its weight, falling into another tree, which the fig also took over. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see the collapsed tree part on the left, and the upright second tree on the right. (Those trees have actually rotted away, and what you see is all fig.)
Photo from claassans.com.
Check out this Wedge-Tailed Eagle (Aquila audax) and the huge hole in his wing!
These guys are about 3ft long and have a wingspan of over 8ft! Huuuge! (That's 1m and 2.5m respectively.)
After the Curtain Fig we all hopped back in the vans and drove to Forty Mile Scrub National Park. Apparently a lot of things are named by 'miles' because the British folks who originally landed here used to use miles, and also because "Forty Mile Scrub" sounds better than "Sixty-four Kilometer Scrub."
We ate lunch and then actually did some sciencey things there, like doing a transect and measuring trees and such. Boring stuff. But fortunately my Australian teachers are all big believers in the "poke stuff" method of science, so the rest of our time was occupied by turning over rocks and logs to look for cool bugs.
These ants had army-green bodies with a black and white bum!
A lovely spider I found under a log! I've never seen this kind before, and I have no idea what it is.
Another spider!
I rolled over a rock and this huge Huntsman spider almost crawled onto my hand! He was lightning-fast.
Our teacher-driver-dude Steve picked up the rock with the Huntsman on it, so we could all get photos.
Spiders really are beautiful if you can get past the creepiness!
After Forty Mile Scrub we piled back into the vans and headed to Undara. We stopped just outside the park and did more sciency stuff followed by more looking under rocks.
This is how we got from Cairns to Undara. It takes about four hours if you drive fast.
This is what you see when driving through non-coastal Queensland. Not a bad view!
This hole is large enough to fit two softballs down it... and it was made by ants. The ants here are freaky!
This is the molted exoskeleton of a cicada! It's not alive because the actual bug shed this 'skin' a while ago.
Still looks pretty scary though!
It's a centipede! These guys are venomous, but they won't kill you. Check out those fangs! (Photo by Jessica Richmond.)
An assassin bug!
Walking Stick bug. (Photo by Jessica Richmond.)
Finally we drove the last bit into Undara. We passed a ton of cattle farms, which are a lot different than American cattle farms. The cows are free-ranging on massive plots of land, as opposed to the American farms that stuff hundreds of cattle into tiny caged areas. This land also happens to be full of wallabies and kangaroos. I saw plenty of wallabies, but the only kangaroos I saw were roadkill.
This is a Pretty Faced Wallaby (also known as a Whiptail Wallaby or as Macropus parryi). They're small and cute!
Pretty Faced Wallabies are generally non-violent and cough to show submission. How cute is that?
Undara is a national park for lava tubes. A volcano called Kalkani spewed out lava for somewhere between 10-100 years--nobody actually knows how long, because hey, nobody was around back then. Over 23 billion cubic metres of lava flowed out over 55 square kilometres. That's enough to fill the Sydney Harbour three times. (It's a lot of lava.) The main lava tube, from which most of the others branched off, was once over 100km long! Today a lot of sections have collapsed, so we can get inside!
"Undara" means "a long way" in some random Aboriginal language, which refers to the lava flowing a long way. The native people of Undara didn't have a name for the area and didn't much care what they named it, so some random guy with a book of Aboriginal words from various areas just picked it arbitrarily. Good story, right?
We took a little hike after settling in, which ended at a rock bluff. The bluff had a terrific lookout:
Click to make me bigger!
After dinner we all had to do 'presentation' of everything we learned during the day. One group did a rap with interpretive dance, one did a silly play, and my group did a game show skit. The' hosts' were our teachers (one of whom was extremely drunk during the performances), and the contestants were two two stupid Australians and two Americans, a Texan and a valley girl. We like to make fun of Australia, so the Americans got all the answers right while I (a stupid Australian) talked about 'cracking tinnies' and randomly yelled "Crikey!" We also had an infomercial about vegemite and a rap about orographic rainfall. We won, of course. :)
While waiting around for our inebriated teachers, a few fearless bettongs wandered up to our campfire looking for food! The endangered Northern Bettong is only found in three areas of Queensland, all within 80 miles of each other. They're adorable and will come right up to you if you put out your hand out. They bite though, so I didn't pet one.
He's got a carrot!
It's like a cross between a rabbit and a wallaby. It's got a really long prehensile tail!
Check out the claws on this thing. They apparently use them to dig up tubers.
They're nocturnal, so they need those super-reflective eyes. Still a bit scary to see though.
I'll finish up with Undara tomorrow--between mine and Jessica's cameras, I have over 900 photos to go through, so it's taking longer than usual! Until then, here's a video of the bettong.
