Lamington National Park

Lamington left me breathless. What a magical place.  To spend your day walking in a mist among 40 meter high trees, and then by full moonlight walk through a field of grazing pademelons (miniature kangaroos).

An hour south of Brisbane, we headed west onto a windy mountain road up to Binna Burra, an ecotourism resort on the top of Lamington Plateau. Unfortunately we arrived in pouring rain and as our accommodations (permanent safari tents) were not ready, we and all our gear got soaked.  That wasn't going to slow down our fearless leader, the Terrestrial Ecology Professor John Hall!  He had us all out for a 5km hike in the rain, lecturing the entire way.

 John Hall in his trench coat and hat lecturing.

Team Alpha

Our safari tents were up on platforms, some with tin roofs.

A pademelon hiding at dusk.

The students had an intense schedule of 5 am bird watching and 12 km daily hikes.  It was easy to wake up at 5 am with the kookaburra's monkey-sounding mating call!  But all the effort was well worth it.  The bird watching couldn't have been better. 

 Crimson Rosella

Female and male King Parrots

 Bowerbird's nest.. love the blue decor!

Even the pigeons are beautiful in Australia - the rare Wonga pigeon!!!

Students were busy at field work, measuring the heights of the trees and the percent canopy. Sure beats working in a lab (shhhh...)! 

 View of Egg Rock from our trail.

My kids valiantly managed a 12 km hike, but were pretty beat the following day.  So, we took it easy with a slow 5 km hike to Kweebani Cave, where the Yugambeh people took refuge during bad weather, and cooked their meals during the wet season.

 Tired but triumphant after 12 km!

 Kweebani Cave

 I spy a lace monitor off our trail..

Couldn't resist a little swing on the vines.

Despite the hard work, we managed some fun as well. We had a campfire one night.  I had brought smore-making supplies, OZ-style.  There are no graham crackers in Australia, so we experimented with TimTams (if you don't know what these are, ask any Aussie kid), hob nobs and biscuits.  One of the students started us off with story telling by the fire.. and the night went late with ghost stories and strange tales from our lives.  On the final night we had a Bush Dance!  No one was up for it (physically or mentally) but as you can see for the pictures, we all had a fun time.  The Bush Dances were a cross between square dancing, line dancing and random Australian silliness, we couldn't stop laughing!  Someone (Emil....) deleted the videos off my camera.  Too bad.

On the morning of departure, we had a tour by our Bush Dance leader Damo (short for Damian), who spoke to us about the sustainability efforts at the ecolodge.

Lamington was so magnificent, I may have to sneak in a second trip one weekend!

St. Helena Island

It's been a very busy 2 weeks in Brisbane!  The students have been studying full time at 'uni', and by full time I mean 4 hours of lecture a day - something none of us are used to!  Everyone seems to be getting along well with their homestays and adjusting to the peculiarities of OZ-life, such as the 4 minute shower rule, or outlets having on/off switches.

We were lucky at the end of this week to get a break from sitting on the hard historic benches of lecture hall 257 in the Goddard building, and go for a trip to St. Helena Island.  St. Helena is part of the National Parks system, and was a male convict island across Moreton Bay from Brisbane.  The Aborigines called the island Noogoon.  Of course, the British renamed everyone and everything, so after an Aboriginal named Napoleon was exiled there, they decided to name it St. Helena!  Got to love the Brits.  It was established as a penal colony in 1867, and closed in 1932.  One of the prisoners, while trying to steal a bag of flour or something, etched the first version of the Australia coat-of-arms in a wall.  There's a picture below.  We had a tour of the island from two comical fellows who relished in telling us gory tales of torture.  No one (prisoner) ever succeeded at escape.. except for a fellow with only one hand who managed to make it across the bay on a desk that he had stolen from the head warden (this was after he tried escaping in a bathtub).  How an one-handed man managed to pull either a bathtub or a desk down the hill for hundreds of meters, let alone paddle it across a shark-infested bay just adds to the mystique of the island.  The island was rather successful as penal colonies go, it was completely self supporting.  The prisoners worked to make goods that were sold and traded.  It was so successful as a business that others would come from afar to study it as a model for building their own prison systems.  In additional to the comedic-historians we had on the island, several times wild wallabies would hop across our path, or lounge among the ruins.  When we were returning to the boat, we even caught one going for a swim!  Apparently wallabies and kangaroos are very good swimmers, they just hate water.  Hmm... sounds like a few kids I know!  - Apologies for some of the pictures being overexposed.

After St. Helena we were dropped off at Southbank, where the Brisbane Festival has been underway. I took my children for a ride on the "Wheel of Brisbane" - it was amazing to see the city from that height!

We leave very early Monday morning for Lamington National Park.  Unfortunately there is no internet or cell service, however there are public phones for calling out.  Likely you will not hear from us until next weekend. Have a wonderful week!