We drove to Lamington National Park. The drive - amazing. Here's an out the window picture of the countryside we went through. The green really was that green. It kind of glowed, fluorescent-like. We kept saying that throughout the trip, not just in the rainforest. The colors were so bright and beautiful! One thing that surprised us was that we didn't see any sheep - Jessi said that we really should have because sheep are huge in Australia. But we just saw their pastoral lands.
This (slightly blurry) guy is a bush turkey. They are kind of weird looking birds. Not shy. I think this might be our only picture of a bush turkey, but we saw them wherever we went. Also some really cool ibises, and some super loud and raucous crows.
Our first stop once at Lamington (after buying a meat pie and filling up water bottles) was the Treetop Walk. This picture must be a "Mom, take a picture of this!" on the walk.
"Now take a picture of us in front of this cool tree!" I had kind of a long lens, so you can't really see the tree.
There were lots of interesting signs along the way, but we went by pretty fast. I like this one:
And here is the actual Wonga Vine, just like in the diagram. So cool.
Trees from the time of the dinosaurs!
Here's a better example of the gigantic trees - this one is hollow and you can go inside.
Help! It's eating Mattie!
So fun in there. And a little spidery.
It must have been a little dark for this camera. :) Still have to show the boys.
After the cool tree hideout, we started going up on a suspension bridge. We were up in the canopy pretty high. Not all the way up, as you can see.
Then we could climb two ladders to these even higher platforms, but only 3 at a time, so we had to wait a bit. You can see one of the ladders here on the left side (sort of).
Why didn't I back up and take an actual picture of the ladder? I'm not sure. It had a cage around it that wouldn't have stopped you one bit from falling back down it (and it was TALL), but at least it would have contained your fall to a small square footage.
This is the view from platform #1. Gorgeous.
Platform #2, even higher up. But it was encompassed about by branches, so you couldn't see the view as well even though you were higher.
This guy came by while we were waiting for ladder-climbers.
And this was the view to the ground from the suspension bridge. It turns out that Pierce doesn't like high suspension bridges. I wish he wasn't afraid of heights. It's hard to tell how far down it was from this picture, but the blurry thing in the lower left corner is the post I was standing right above. I don't know how many meters but it was high enough to be exciting.
There were lots of interesting fruits and berries along the hike. We didn't eat any of them because I guess so many things in Australia are poisonous. It's out to get you. I think Matt took this to try to later identify it.
Then we wandered through a botanic garden. Since it's fall there wasn't a whole lot in bloom, but it was beautiful.
The view looking up.
We really liked these hairy palm trees.
Sydney was so darling. She had a backpack filled with well-thought-out essentials. One of them was this "blanket", used here as a scarf.
Some fun before we went on the longer hike to the waterfall.
So many trees like this. I can't remember what this one was!
The coolest rock, being strangled by vines. Fun to climb and cool to see.
Next awesome stop - this giant vine that you can hang and bounce on.
I think everyone tried it but the moms.
It was so dark in there that my camera was hard pressed to take pictures that weren't blurry.
I told Zoe to wear something better for hiking than flip-flops. She chose chacos with stripey socks. I think she might later have regretted it as it got pretty muddy later on. But she didn't admit to it.
We kept on hiking, a little quicker now, because it was so much fun that we weren't making very good time. We didn't want to hike back in the dark. By the time we got to the waterfall, it was raining. Not pouring, but a good amount of rain. So - my camera stayed in the backpack. I was so happy that Matt had his cell phone to show me what it looked like when the boys hiked up a little higher.
Cell phone pic of the suspension bridge, cool.
Selfie on Matt's phone.
From then on - more rain, so I didn't take any more pictures. But that was the gist of it - amazing hike, gorgeous countryside. It was a little exciting to drive home in the dark and in the rain. Matt was also kind of tired (that little bit of jetlag) and working on driving on the left side of the road. I volunteered to drive instead, but he thought that himself driving tired in the dark rain with a bit of trouble with night vision was still safer than me driving on the left side for the first time. (All was better after stopping for a coke.) When we got back we enjoyed a sausage sizzle and hamburger barbeque, yum. What an amazing day! We loved it!
