Chillagoe to Undara, Queensland
We do three (nominally) guided cave tours at Chillagoe, then drive south to Undara Lava Lodge where we camp for the night. The Chillagoe caves were great. It was a good day.
Chris had purchased tickets for the three guided cave tours at Chillagoe: Donna, Trisze, and Royal Arch... but before we did any of those, we drove 15km west at 7am to add another 'cave' on our own: Archways.
The Chillagoe area is just riddled with caves, and many of them have multiple entries and many daylight sections. Archways was one of these, and fully self guided. It was great: this huge 30m tall wall of black limestone, sliced and eroded into caves and archways and tunnels. I started to get rid of my phobia for taking pictures and took several here. We then looked briefly at an Aboriginal art site (very bland). I was distracted for a bit by some huge flowering bottle trees (Brachychiton australis), then went back to meet our first guided tour at Donna Cave.
Donna Cave was OK. Just OK. It wasn't particularly ornamented inside, just big, and rather vertical, with several false floors through the cave. The second cave, Trisze, was much better. While the ranger let you in, you got to poke around at your own pace on an elevated boardwalk. There were several shelves with decorations, and the strangest 'chandeliers' I've seen in a cave system. Guess it's because these caves are so windy. Plus, I was amused by this bat we kept on seeing there, it would hang off the tips of stalactites, checking us out, until someone held up a camera--then it would fly away. Obviously picture shy--or at least it had learned that camera=bright flash = blindness.
For lunch, we went over to the old copper smelter above town, which is slowly rusting into oblivion. It makes a great 'Mad Max' kind of setting. Then our last tour was to Royal Arch cave. This was crowded... at least 30 people were in our group, so Chris and I headed out kind of on our own. The cave had many daylight openings, was very level, and it wasn't lit--the ranger gave us torches to use. So we kinda sort assumed it was semi-guided. Aha, no--Chris got a berating when we ran across the tour group later on. Then we were bored until the rest of the group saw the cave. Grrrr. It was a twisty turny kind of cave, but not all that interesting to me. Very few decorations. Just kinda big and lumpy with passageways.
After the cave tours, we drove south towards Undara, stopping at Forty Mile Scrub National Park. There's not much to see there--it's primarily a plant reserve for dry rainforest. I love that term. It basically means its rainforest that gets dry for a few months during the year. A more correct term is dry vine thicket woodland, but that doesn't sound as good. We stretched our leg on a 300m walk around the picnic area, then drove on.
Then it was to Undara, where we set up camp for the night.
Weird Wildlife Sighting
We're seeing much more the further away from the coast: black cockatoos with orange under their tails, a variety of macropods like wallaroos and kangaroos, and some more strange birds. Nothing too strange, though!