Murwullywoolambubby-something-or-other

Four nights in Byron Bay and we were ready to head onwards. We chose to head slightly northwards and start making our way back up to Brisbane, so the next place that appealed to us was a hostel in the town of Murwillumbah (I have no idea if I spelled that correctly) at the base of Mt. Warning. Mt. Warning is the center of the largest volcanic caldera formation in the southern hemisphere, and so has excellent hiking, lots of wildlife, and as there isn’t a single beach in sight the hostel is a damn sight quieter than anywhere else on the Gold Coast. We were ready for some quiet nights and real sleep. Besides, the hostel in Murwillumbah serves free ice cream every evening at 9pm!

There wasn’t much to see or do in the town itself, but the hike up Mt. Warning was fantastic. There are three distinct zones of vegetation: sub-tropical rainforest at the bottom, temperate rainforest in the middle, and heath vegetation at the top. Plenty of wildlife roams around the walking track, mostly lizards and birds. As far as lizards went, we saw big fat skinks, various unidentifiable lizards, and a teeny little juvenile snake. Most frequently sighted are the bush turkeys. They are everywhere, males and females alike, and are excellent scavengers. We had a male follow us up the walking track for some distance, and two males were waiting for scraps at the very top of the mountain.



Ugly sucker, ain’t he?

There are also flies. I’ve become convinced that every fly around the Gold Coast decided to host a reunion on the lookout decks at the top of the mountain. The noise from the buzzing was incredible, it was as though we walked into a swarm a million flies thick, but we could only see about 20 of them at any given point in time.

The flies couldn’t compete with the views, though. They were exceptional – from the peak of Mt. Warning you can see the full caldera formation all around. It feels like you are at the top of the world, only there’s no snow and you don’t need a respirator to breathe. Provided, of course, that you don’t keel over after reaching the top. It takes about 2 hours of good, quick paced hiking to get up the mountain, and the final 100 meters is a vertical scramble aided by rough rock formations and chains. Believe me, you need the chains.




It’s really, really, really freaking steep. On the way back down, Glen decided that we needed more undignified pictures of my ass:




So I yelled at him:



Back at the hostel, we were spending our time eating ice cream, feeding water dragons (the resident hostel dragons will take bits of apple right out of your hand, and apparently one of them got so bold that it would climb onto the laps of people eating on the deck chairs), and chasing various forms of local wildlife. The highlight of this urban wildlife bits was the advent of a magnificent carpet boa that was slowly wending its way around the hostel ground, shedding it’s skin.





Isn’t it magnificent? And we were able to watch it shed its entire skin, in two pieces. Carpet boas are really lovely creatures and are quite harmless to humans. They’re great to have around houses, though, because their primary source of food is rats and mice, so they are excellent for pest control.