Photos Journey to a Lost World rainforest

[Currawong]

G’day adventurous Hogs!!

Here are some photos, along with a yarn or two, from a trip I just did to a hidden and barely known rainforest on Cape York Peninsula, Australia. The Cape is one of the most remote parts of Australia, an area of tropical savanna and rainforest in the far north. It is legendary as the place to go for serious four-wheel-drivers and overlanders, particularly if you like fishing; it’s beaches run for 1,000 km alongside the Great Barrier Reef. It is also a bit of a ‘wild frontier,’ with few roads or towns and little help if you get into trouble. It has a population of only 18,000 in an area the size of Great Britain.

* Warning: long.*

This story is told through ten pic-filled posts! Reading it will take almost as long as my trip to Cape York did !! You have been warned !!! However there will also be danger, fear, pain, mystery, and even a little INFI-flavored pork along the way, so it won’t be a total waste of your time.

1/10: Journey to the Cape

From where I live in south east Australia it is a loooong drive to the Cape. At the outback town of Bourke, New South Wales, I was greeted by emus grazing at the edge of town. The Australian Outback is sometimes called ‘the back o’ Bourke’ so I was on the edge of civilization here.

After days of driving through the desert, I reached the Daintree Rainforest in far north Queensland, and traveled down the Bloomfield Track. The Daintree is part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, and apparently is the oldest rainforest in the world.

A baby croc sunning itself below the waterfall. Potato quality photo because I had to zoom right in with my phone. This one is only about 1.5 metres long. You have to be careful up here because death lurks in every coastal waterway.

At the edge of Cape York is an Aboriginal rock art site, Split Rock. Some of these ‘spirit figures’ live in the giant crack that split rock is named after.

On short walks the Infidu was always with me.

I arrived at the tiny town of Laura at the start of the Cape. I parked my 4WD ute (4x4 truck) and walked across the road to the general store to get some supplies. These wild birds are called Galahs. They just stood there and watched me, and shuffled slowly out of the way as I walked through. There were no people in sight; you could see the entire town from this spot. With supplies in hand and a full tank of diesel I was ready to head to my destination on the Cape.

 

[Andy the Aussie]

Hurry up and post ya bugger..!!!

 

[Currawong]

2/10: Savanna country

So….. what was my destination? I was heading for Cape Melville. This fairly remote national park in the south east of Cape York contains the mysterious and barely-explored Melville Range, a 15km-long series of hills covered entirely in giant boulders, with a tropical rainforest growing on top. This place looked both strange and amazing. I wanted to go to Cape Melville anyway to do some beach fishing, so I was googling around and found an article from National Geographic.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com...d-australia-gecko-frog-skink-science-animals/

A team of scientists went into the boulder hills a few years ago and discovered a number of new animal species. The Melville Range was described as a ‘lost world’… ‘almost impassable, surrounded by a fortress of car- and house-size chunks of granite.’ The terrain was so formidable they needed a helicopter to get in.

A Lost World?? A mysterious cloud forest, perched atop house-sized boulders, so inaccessible and little known that they are still finding new species in there?! If I went to Cape Melville, this was where I wanted to go!! Unfortunately I didn’t have a helicopter, so I would have to attempt it on foot. Sounds like a good challenge, right?! Well it turns out this was one of the stupider things I’ve ever done, and I’ve done some reasonably stupid things.

The long drive in, 200km of dirt with only the occasional four wheel drive going the other way:

The road kill here is feral boar! I saw lots of feral pigs across north Queensland along the roads, both alive and dead. I had a pig sticker with me that lives behind the driver’s seat, but never got to use it… it is hard to drive past those things and just ignore them. I did chase a few pigs by swerving around on the sides of the roads with the ute as they ran by, but they’re pretty nimble it turns out so I didn’t get any.

There is a legend out in the desert, still told around some remote outback region, I can’t remember where exactly, of the largest boar ever caught in that part of the country. I know who caught it because it’s one of my mates. He and his brother got it twenty or thirty years ago. Both are life-long hunters who have done a lot of pig hunting, and who went out to the desert and savanna country pretty regularly in those days. They were driving along an outback road when a giant boar crossed in front of them. It was one of those ‘holy grail’ boars that hunters see once in a lifetime. It was gone too fast to shoot, and disappeared into the scrub. Something got into his brother, a kind of ‘hunter’s battle rage’. He swerved off the road without even slowing down, and drove across the landscape smashing through branches and bushes, bouncing the car over humps and ditches. The boar must have gotten tired after a time because they eventually caught up to it. They drove the 4WD straight into it and ran it over - basically crashed the car on a pig - and killed it. Between the two of them they managed to drag it onto the roof. They drove into town like that and parked in front of the town’s only pub and went in for a beer. Everyone came out to stare at the giant boar on the beat-up 4WD. Maybe a couple of decades later, my mate did another trip through the region, and in that town or perhaps a nearby one he stopped and someone recounted the story of the giant boar that was hunted down with a 4WD. They even had a photo on the wall. My mate said “That was me and my brother!” and I think he got a free beer out of retelling the story.

There are Salties around here!

It’s well known about crocs being a constant danger in the North. People still get killed by them, usually those who don’t take the threat seriously and wander around the wrong locations taking photos. I may be guilty of this, we’ll have to see.

I once knew a woman who got attacked by a big croc in Northern Australia. She told me the story one night, years afterwards, when I was staying with her. She was canoeing on a wetland at Kakadu, when a croc began attacking the canoe. Eventually it grabbed her and dragged her in. It pulled her underwater and put her into a ‘death roll’. This is where it takes you underwater and then rolls around its length / axis as violently as it can, with its prey still clamped in its jaws. It does this to disorient its prey so it can’t escape, and eventually drowns it. She somehow got away and swam to the surface but it grabbed her again and rolled her a second time. She got away again and tried to climb up some tree branches overhanging the water, but it came out and pulled her back under, and rolled her for a third time. She eventually ran out of air and went limp, and it thought she was dead. Crocodiles have a habit of stuffing their prey under a log or root down at the bottom and leaving it to rot so that its easier to eat. As soon as it left her she escaped to the surface with her last seconds of consciousness, and then swam to the edge of the swamp. She was badly injured and had to hike out but somehow made it to help, big chunks of flesh hanging from her legs and abdomen. She lived a long time after that, but ended up getting killed by a snake bite while working in her veggie garden, just a few years ago.

The river crossing at Kalpowar. One thing I’ve been told by friends who’ve spent a lot of time up there is not to get out and check the route across a river on foot like you normally might, because that’s when a croc can strike. Especially if it’s flooding. You just have to drive through it and hope for the best. It turned out to be an easy crossing. Lucky it's dry season!

Big wetland birds called Jabiru at a waterhole. There are no crocs down where I live, so I think I was overly nervous around waterholes and creeks at this point, and was looking around for crocs more than birds.

Giant termite mounds are spread all across the landscape. Many are 3 or 4 metres high.

This Perentie was sitting on the road and didn’t want to move as I approached it, running into the grass at the last minute. Perenties (according to google) are the largest lizard in Australia and the fourth-largest lizard on Earth. This one was about 1.5 metres long.

It was digging a nest hole. Note the footprints and the puddle of urine it used to mark it. You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning feeling a bit flat? That’s how this Perentie was going to feel the next day.

 

[Currawong]

3/10. Cape Melville

Some kind of snake slithering across the road.

The trail started to get a bit rough. Lots of ruts, humps and deep sand driving. It got worse than this but I couldn’t stop to take a pic of the worst stuff or I wouldn’t have gotten going again. There was about 40km of four wheel driving in all.

After five hours of dirt road traveling since Laura I reached my destination: ‘Crocodile Camping Area,’ a two kilometre long beach. But why was it called Crocodile Camping Area??

As I looked around, it became clear. The sea stretched along the front of the beach for 2km. There was a mudflat partially covered in water and mangroves along the full length of the back of the beach. And there were two estuarine creeks at either end of the beach. The campsite was literally surrounded by croc habitat, forming a kind of smorgasboard of campers pre-packaged in their tents.

Behind the beach, across the mudflats, was my first look at the mysterious hills of Cape Melville, my ultimate destination. A Sea Eagle was flying overhead.

Not a bad campsite!

I was camped here on google maps for reference.

I went for a walk to look around. Everywhere I went I was looking for signs of crocs, like tracks or mudslides. The TGLB was on my hip just in case. Not that it would probably help much but you never know. It felt safer with it on.

I had most of the beach to myself; there were only a few people right at the other end, about 1.5 km away.

I got back to camp a bit before sunset.

There were extremely strong winds and they only got worse as it got dark. I couldn’t get a tarp up, after trying for about half an hour I gave up. I just wrapped it over my ute tray so I could cook without my gas stove getting blown out. The car was rocking from side to side in the gusts. The problem with this was that I couldn’t hear anything except the howling wind. It got pitch black with nightfall. I couldn’t really see anything, I couldn’t really hear anything, I was surrounded by croc habitat, and night time is when crocs hunt. As I walked around I was constantly wondering if a croc was creeping up behind me.

I turned on the three bright rear lights I have on the back of my ute to take this photo, just to give an idea of how it looked at night. With my flashlight on it was like this but with 1/20th the amount of light, I basically couldn’t see a thing. In the end I just had to leave my back to the darkness and assume there were no crocs there. Isn’t camping meant to be relaxing?

 

[Currawong]

4/10: Climbing the Melville Range

By now you are sitting in the back of the car, listening to this story and asking ‘Are we there yet?!!’

Well, we are there!

The next morning, having not been eaten by crocs, I set off for Melville Range. I drove as close to the edge of the hills as I could get and then headed in on foot. There are no trails of any kind. The entrance to the boulder fields lies across a rainforest creek.

I had no idea really of what it would be like, and this was my first good look at it. It would be less hiking and more climbing and clambering it seemed.

This is the view back from a little way up, with the sea in the distance.

A balanced rock, which I was very tempted to try to push over. If I got my aim just right I think I could have bounced that rock all the way down to the bottom.

Here’s an explanation of how you have to climb up these rocks, using the pic below as a reference. From the small rock at the bottom left of this pic I jumped across to the one on the bottom right, which is about two metres high, and scrambled up its side. From there, I jumped onto the rock in the middle of the pic, and then back to the right onto the side of the tall rock at the middle right, climbing up its sloping side to the top. Then there was a metre and a half drop down onto some small rocks behind it, and then up the big rock on the middle left. I kept zig-zagging like that all the way up the slope you can see behind.

… I was gradually turning into a mountain goat by this point. I kept on towards the ‘v’ of the valley on the horizon, one jump at a time.

The hiking belt I was carrying. It contained a lightweight raincoat, flashlight, headlight, spare batteries, leatherman skeletool, first aid kit, emergency beacon, and a Bushwacker Mistress fixed scout style underneath the pouches. I also had two litres of water on my back. I was glad I had decided to go light-weight.

The view to the side.

Somewhere around here I grabbed a tree branch for balance and felt a biting pain on my arm. I had been stung by a wasp! I got a brief glance at what looked like a wasp nest in the branch I had shaken. There was a furious buzzing all around me, and many more wasps would have attacked at that point except they couldn’t catch me!! Have you ever seen a person sprinting on a boulder field? I think this was the fastest part of the entire trip.

Looking back down the way I had come. This was only a fraction of the way I still had to go.

 

[MattinLA]

Are you sure those "termite mounds" aren't Alien Birth Cacoons !?

 

[Currawong]

5/10: An (almost) impenetrable landscape

The rocks started getting bigger and harder to climb as I went on. The boulder on the right is 5 or 6 metres high.

I kept hitting dead ends, where vertical faces or deep crevices between the boulders would block my way. Sometimes I’d hit an area with no way forward in any direction - I couldn’t go over, I couldn’t go around. In those places I had no choice but to climb underneath the boulders. This seeming dead end for example turned into a small cave which was only apparent once I got right in there.

The climbing was still getting steeper and harder!

Jumping from rock to rock often required death-defying leaps over gaps and crevices that went down a long way between the boulders. When I looked down I noticed that the boulders I was standing on were themselves sitting on top of other boulders! And these were sitting on more boulders that were even further down!! It was layer after layer of boulders under my feet. In some places these crevices went tens of metres down between the layers before disappearing into blackness.

The photo below is looking directly downwards into one of these crevices. My camera has such a wide angle that it makes every object in the distance look small, so its hard to get a feel from this pic of the depth and how big the rocks were down in the gaps. The rocks in the middle of the pic were probably 10 metres below me, and the ones in the dark cracks, that are harder to make out, were maybe 20 to 30 metres down.

You get a rush when you jump from boulder to boulder and look down and see a drop like that. I did that a hundred or more times I think but I still didn’t get used to it.

A house-sized boulder, surrounded by truck-sized ones:

It was like this on either side.

Sometimes vegetation would grow across the gaps. This was a big worry to me because if I hit a branch mid-jump it could bounce me sideways into a crevice. Even a slight deflection could be fatal because you often had to land exactly on one spot, so as to have a stable landing and not slide into a crack on either side.

Lucky I was carrying a bushwacking tool. (They were all dead branches that I chopped by the way, I wasn’t going around hacking up the rainforest)

There was still a long way to go. These rocks may look small, but they were all car-sized, truck-sized or bigger.

 

[Currawong]

6/10: Lost in a maze

I got to the top of the main hill slope and found myself lost in this maze of giant boulders. Actually I got myself into pretty serious trouble at this point.

Sometimes the only way forwards is by jumping one or two metres down across a crevice onto a much lower rock. In these cases, while I could make the jump down I couldn’t make the jump back up again. So these manouvers were one-way jumps. I did this a number of times and at some point I found myself in a large area (about a hundred metres by a hundred metres) from which I just couldn’t escape. There was just no way out that was either safe or physically possible to do. The rocks in this pic are all about 3 to 5 metres high and contain a network of deep crevices between them that can’t be seen in the photo. You can see some palm trees at the top right of the pic that gives an idea of the scale.

I was trapped!! I literally couldn’t get out of that area no matter which direction I went. I was walking around and around looking for an exit, basically going in circles and passing over the same rocks multiple times.

Here’s what these rocks look like when I was down amongst them jumping around. The boulders rose over my head, with vertical sides often five or more metres high and big gaps between them, so it wasn’t as simple as just jumping across the tops. I had to weave my way between them.

The area was full of crevices that were too big to jump over. This photo below is looking straight downwards.

In the above pic, in the middle you can see a second layer of boulders that the top ones are sitting on, like the rock my shadow is on. These were a few metres down. Then there is a third layer of rocks below that, which are the white-coloured ones down in the gap. The boulders are black because they have black lichen growing on them. The white ones are deep enough that they don’t get enough light for lichen to grow and are maybe 15 metres down.

Strangely, I thought I started to hear things down there, as though something was moving about in the darkness. A couple of times on the climb up to the maze area, and now a few more times within the maze itself, I was sure that I caught glimpses of shadowy shapes jumping around in my peripheral vision. It was always gone so fast I assumed I was just hearing things and seeing things. I thought maybe heat exhaustion was starting to get to me. I had run out of water by this stage. It was a hot tropical environment, and I was surrounded by black rock that was soaking up the heat from the sun. It was like being in a cauldron. I was pretty thirsty by this time and this only added to my worries.

I tried climbing up this way and hit dead ends.

Tried this way, same thing.

Another crevice blocking my way. There was movement down there again, I could swear it! I really thought at this point I was hallucinating.

Many of these cracks were filled with spider webs sometimes a few metres across. Maybe there were giant spiders down there??

Honestly I felt a bit of a sense of panic at this stage. I’d been there for about an hour trying to find a way out. I was considering some risky jumps and climbs, but could only think about breaking a leg or arm and falling into one of those deep holes. I sat down and thought about life for a while because basically I didn’t know what else to do. I was extremely thirsty and extremely hot. At least the view was nice!

One of the boulders where I was sitting looked a bit like Andy the Aussie.

After weighing my options, eventually I realised the only route I hadn’t tried was downwards. Because there were layers of boulders below, I figured there may be a way out under the surface. Once I went down, I might not be able to climb back up again. So if I was going to do this I had to commit !!

I went down.

 

[Currawong]

7/10 The underground world

I made it down and started working my way sideways. There were more drops below me so I had to be careful !

To my relief it was possible to crawl around and make some distance in directions I hadn’t been able to go on the surface. I did some jumping, climbing and belly-crawling. At least it was shady down there.

And I heard those furtive movements again, off in the black shadowy places. I spent a bunch of time just sitting there staring at the darkness and listening for sounds. Noises echoed a bit under the boulders so it was an eerie environment to be hearing things in.

Then I stumbled across this on the top of one of the rocks. Animal scats!

I used to be a wildlife surveyor (about twenty years ago) and one of the things I specialised in was scat and hair analysis. You can sometimes discover the existence in an ecosystem of ‘cryptic’ species (ones that are difficult to detect directly, because they hide) only from the secondary evidence of things like tracks, scats or hairs. I immediately recognised these as Rock Wallaby scats. I looked it up later and it turns out they are Godman’s Rock Wallaby, a relatively rare species that only lives in a small part of the Cape and just to the south of it, in a few isolated rocky environments.

The mystery was solved !! I wasn’t seeing things and I wasn’t hearing things, I’d just stumbled across a population of Godmans rock wallabies. I had been disturbing them as I jumped and crawled around.

Rock wallabies are pretty amazing things. They are basically small kangaroos that live in the most precipitous of rocky environments, where predators can’t reach them. They are known to hop up cliffs which have no ledges or purchase whatsoever, by bounding between opposing cliff walls in a zig-zag fashion, to go both upwards and downwards. They can live deep in boulder piles where they go as far down as they can and find inaccessible (to everything else) ledges to safely sleep on.

Well that was much better than the giant cave spiders, rock crocodiles and Dreamtime spirits I’d been imagining in my heat exhaustion-induced state. I was getting haunted all this time not by monsters but by cute furry animals; I was both embarrassed and relieved.

Damn was I getting thirsty. All I could think about was water. Further on, I found tree roots descending. I could hear water somewhere below. I really needed to find that water !! So I decided to follow the roots downwards.

I chased that echoing, gurgling sound, and after a while I found this little stream emerging from the rocks. It was flowing over sand and small rocks that seemed to be sitting on top of a giant boulder. Downstream it disappeared into crevices that kept going down to even deeper layers.

Just upstream was this pool of water. A pool of water never looked so good! It was a few meters across and about a foot or so deep. I lay down and drank until I was full. I washed water over me. Life flowed back into me. I filled my water bottles too.

I went along another passage off to the side and kept going, climbing upwards wherever I could. After a while I could see patches of direct sunlight! I was close to the surface.

I came into a ‘chimney’, where there was lichen appearing again and a vine growing down. I could see the sky above.

I finally found my way to the surface. This is looking back at the cave that I exited from, screened with vines. I was now standing on the edge of the rainforest!

 

[Currawong]

8/10: A beautiful but hostile rainforest !!!

Now I was outside the maze and instead of bare rock there was a profusion of vines, epiphytes, basket ferns and orchids growing all over the boulders.

A birds nest fern. Its leaves are shaped like this to funnel falling vegetation and rain to its centre, to supply nutrients and water, thus allowing it to grow on bare rock:

Trees with roots going down into the crevices to reach pools of water.

The rainforest edge.

I was ready to go deeper into the rainforest. It is apparent on google maps that there is some big old growth rainforest in there, right in the middle of the range, possibly with giant rainforest trees growing on top of the boulder field. It sounded flat-out extraordinary !! This was the place I really wanted to get to. I started to push my way in, but almost immediately felt stinging bites all over me. I was covered in ants! After backing off fast and spending maybe 10 minutes swatting myself, I took this photo of what I had walked into. Can you see it?

Let me help you by zooming in.

It was an ants nest hanging in the bush, made from leaves bound together into a ball by some kind of web. I looked around and saw another one next to me.

It got worse the more I looked. Here is a picture of a single bush. Every patch of brown leaves is an ant’s nest !! There were about ten that I could see in just this one bush. I looked up, down, to the side, behind me; many or most of the bushes and trees contained these ants nests. I could see maybe a hundred of them from where I was standing !!

The bushes and trees were connected by vines that wove their branches together. I had walked near to a bush and pulled on a vine, which had tugged a branch, which shook the other branches, and the ants had poured out of the nest, down the branches, and maybe a hundred of them had gotten onto me. This was just from one nest! I got bitten a lot of times, and each bite didn’t hurt too much by itself but they all added up and it felt pretty bad. I was still finding ants on me at the end of the walk, hours later.

It was clear that to get to the big rainforest at the centre, I would have to spend two or three hours walking through Ant City, covered head to toe in probably thousands of ants. Thus was aborted my mission to get to the middle of the rainforest.

 

[Private Klink]

Brother, you have guts for sure! Great pics and story....glad you survived alright!

 

[Currawong]

9/10: A three-dimensional ecosystem

I decided to explore the edges of the rainforest, even if they were just the scrubby patches around the perimeter. Many of the trees seemed very small, barely rising above the rocks:

I went over to have a look. In fact, it turned out that this was a full size tree! I was looking at just the very top of it - the canopy - sticking out from amongst the boulders!! The trunk went downwards between the rocks to about fifteen metres below. I jumped and climbed around and found that many of the gaps between the rocks had trees growing out of them. There was a forest growing on the second layer of boulders down, and the trees rose until their canopies reached the sunlight just above the top layer of rocks. Here is a pic looking down into one of these grottos. I had to lighten it a bit on the computer as it was so dark down there you couldn’t see anything. The trees have taken root in the dirt and humous layer lying on top of a giant boulder. You can see a crevice at the middle bottom of the pic where it dropped down to deeper levels.

More of these rainforest grottos and ‘emergent trees.’

I explored around them a little but they were basically impossible to get down into - between the cliffs surrounding them, the thick vegetation and the guardian ant colonies it was too difficult. So I had to content myself with viewing them from above. It seems like there is a whole ecosystem existing on different layers in this boulder field. There’s the layer of vegetation growing on top of the surface rocks - orchids, vines, epiphytes, bushes. Then there are trees growing on the next layer down. And there seemed to be moss, ferns, vines and the like on the third level below that. Who knows how far this ‘vertical garden’ went down?

The Bushwacker Mistress proved useful in getting around. I didn’t chop down the rainforest, I was being very careful, and just helped myself a few times when I got stuck.

A birds nest sitting in the canopy of one of the ‘emergent’ trees.

A stream flowing out of the rainforest.

It was getting late and was time to return. I can only be left to imagine: if the edges of the rainforest were like that, what must it be like deeper in where the rainforest gets much bigger and better developed? I’ll probably never go back so I guess I’ll never know.

The view on the way back down.

Looking on the map I only penetrated about 1.5km (about a mile) into the boulder fields in a straight line, or 3km for the return trip. But between all the zig-zags, circling and back-tracking I believe I went three or four times that distance. So in all it must have been about 10km of hopping, jumping, crawling and climbing. By the end of the walk my thighs were so sore I couldn’t touch them without pain. My hands were scratched up because the granite rocks were covered in sharp quartz crystals, and my knees and ankles hurt from all the crawling around on rocks and the jumping. I had blisters, a wasp bite and lots of ant bites. I was beat up !! If a croc wanted to eat me now I would probably be considered tenderized.

I got back to camp a bit before sunset. Despite all the physical effort, pain and fear, at least it was a day to remember!!

(Edit: now I think about it the pic above is actually dawn the next day not sunset, it was just the next photo in order. I spent that day recovering and attempting a bit of fishing but didn't catch anything. Nothing biting and the line kept getting tangled in the wind )

 

[Currawong]

10/10: Going home

You have made it this far !!

Dawn on my last day at Cape Melville. My last view of the boulder hills and the mysterious multi-tiered rainforest.

Driving down the beach on the way out.

I decided to spend the morning looking around for crocs, along the mudflats, swamps, creeks and wetlands I passed on the way.

I didn’t find any, and maybe that’s a good thing.

On the drive out through the savanna. Now I was thinking about home.

Well, that’s it !! There was plenty of other cool stuff but I couldn’t fit it in this thread, it was already way too long. I hope you enjoyed this adventure to Cape York, even if it was only a small one. If you made it this far, you deserve much praise for your endurance! Thanks for coming along!!

 

[Armithius]

Sounds like one hell of an adventure! Glad you were able to make it out of the rock maze ok. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Andy the Aussie]

Brilliant stuff mate, and it was nice to know that when you ere on your chin strap I was there with you ...

My last trip into the NT was before I was a member of BF so it is not documented here, we spent nearly 7 weeks going from Sydney across and up the centre then back down through QLD with a few days in lawn Hill NP thrown in. I do love visiting the north and FNQ is still on my list !!

 

[Robdude]

Wow...I love these adventure pic threads..
Reminds me of Andy's "Africa" thread...thanks for sharing this

 

[oge14]

Very cool ride, thank you for having us along.

Many thank's for the picture's and writing's.

 

[Hard Knocks]

Stellar thread Currawong! A beautiful and wild country is your Australia. Cheers friend!

 

[duramax]

Great write up and beautiful pics !!!! What an adventure !!!
Thanks for sharing

 

[RobStanley]

Holy crap awesome trip mate!!! What an adventure!!! Getting stuck in amongst all those boulders was certainly a heart thumper for sure! Bloody hell. I would have been quietly sh#tting myself the whole time. But wow, something you will never forget. And those bloody green ants!! They're bastards!! Thanks for sharing your trip mate