After sea world, we decided to do something a bit more back to nature.
There are a few places in Australia that have glow worms. I remember them from my New Zealand trip as being amazing so I really wanted to find some again. There is one north of Brisbane, but it is a man-made tunnel. There is one west of Sydney, but you need to rent a 4x4 to get to it. The best seems to be at Springbrook, so we planned to be there for dusk.
We lazed around the resort and the kids swam, played in the awesome splash pad, wrote in their journals, and bounced on the bouncy pillows.
We also tried pack a picnic, so we researched a real grocery store, not a food yard-sale like the last place. Apparently Coles is the place to go and there was one right down the street!
We headed out under threat of clouds. Springbrook is on top of a plateau and has some really nice lookouts and waterfalls. But it is a very steep windy drive to the top on a road with no shoulders.
The first hike we tried got rained out and we didn't have enough snacks, water, or lightning proof portable Faraday cages, so we went back to the car to regroup.
The second hike was to "best of all lookout". The outlook at the lookout was the inside of a cloud, so we'll have to take their word for it. But along the way we saw some awesome Jurassic Park like flora. Actually, older than Jurassic. The Antarctic Beech trees are the kind of trees that were here 105 million years ago. The ones growing there are actually 2000 years old!
The rain was letting up a bit, and we could see the canyon at canyon lookout, so we pressed on, which is good! The kids were doing great considering the weather!
We couldn't find any of the rumoured coin-operated BBQs we were relying on for our hot dog dinner, so we loaded up on snacks for our hike to Twin Falls.
This is a 4km loop that I really just expected a nice waterfall at the end. But the trail is fantastic! The rocks and ferns and palms all show that this place feels so old! It was familiar (due to the hiking through 'just another' forest), but very alien (due to the exotic trees and bird calls all around). The mimic lyrebird was all around us, apparently, though I wouldn't know its mimicry from the real birds.
We got to twin falls and walked behind the falls, which was really cool.
On the way back, Cathy noticed a small black speck on Avery's ankle and confirmed it was a leech. I had read that they were on the trail, so Cathy had packed some salt and she got it off easily. But the rest of the walk was a lot of paranoid stopping and leech checking. I didn't have any leeches on me, but I noted at the end that I had 10 or so little wriggly worms land on me from the trees above. Cathy informed me they were actually leeches so I revised my count from 0 to 10. Only Avery gave blood though.
We got out of twin falls loop to discover a cute wallaby on the path,. Very cute! On our drive to Natural Bridge, we saw 15 or so more. I guess they are as common as squirrels are to us...
At natural bridge, it was getting dark, which was good, so we powered on through the nicely paved and stepped path to the cave. It has a cool waterfall inside of it. As I took some pictures, we started noticing the lights on the ceiling of the cave. These are the glow worms! A few thousand of them.
The glow worms are the larvae of a fly that doesn't even have a mouth, since the fly is destined to be food for their children. The worm secretes a silk thread with mucous (snot, for the kids), and crawls down to the end and starts to glow. The light attracts their parents (the flies), who then get caught in the silk and turn to worm food. Very circle-of-life stuff.
A great day, and I am so glad we (and the kids!) pressed on through the weather. Well worth it!
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