Julie and I were supposed to be hiking the 5,000km Continental Divide Trail in the US in 2020, but COVID-19 derailed that plan. Instead, we will have an adventure in Australia, circumnavigating the country on our bikes, a distance of about 16,500km taking approximately five and a half months. We will use minor roads where possible and occasionally catch ferries across rivers and inlets to avoid busier inland routes. We will camp some of the time and stay in motels, hotels, etc, at others. There will be stretches of up to five days with no accommodation or resupply available, so we will need to be self-sufficient.

Round Australia Bike Ride - Day 035 - Undara Volcanic National Park

Day:  035

Date: Wednesday, 05 August 2020

Start:  Undara Volcanic National Park

Finish:  Undara Volcanic National Park 

Daily Kilometres:  0 (but about 15 kilometres walking; click here for Julie's Strava and photos)

Total Kilometres:  3664

Weather:  Cool to warm and mostly sunny

Accommodation:  Tent (glamping)

Nutrition:

  Breakfast:  Bush breakfast (fruit, cereal, eggs & bacon, toast, etc)

  Lunch:  Muesli bars and chocolate

  Dinner:  Chicken schnitzel, salad & chips/Crumbed steak, salad & chips, ice cream.

Aches:  Nothing significant

Highlight:  The tour of the lava tubes was awesome.  One of them is the biggest, in terms of height and width, in the world and it was populated by microbats and had the roots of trees from the surface, five metres above, descending like stalactites.  In the places where the lava tube ceiling had collapsed, a kind of terrarium had been created of remnant rainforest.

Lowlight:  None really

Pictures: Click here

Map and Position: Click here for Google Map

Journal:

We started the day with the "Bush Breakfast", put on by the resort, which was an "all you can eat" affair in a bush setting a few hundred metres from the resort attended by about ten guests.  A couple we chatted with were retired Queensland cattle station owners who were touring in their own light plane.  Us and them, the two extremes of grey nomad travel!  We ate our fills, because we don't yet know what the breakfast cost, but it I'm sure it will be expensive!

After breakfast, we joined the 8am tour group to some of the lava tubes in the National Park, which turned out to be excellent (see above).  Looking across the vast savannah woodland, you would not know the lava tubes were there apart from the small thickets of rainforest poking up from collapsed tube sections with their little micro ecological systems.

Soon after returning to the resort from the two-hour tour, we headed out on a 14 kilometre bushwalk that visited different parts of the savannah woodland.  The lower parts, near where a swamp forms in the wet season (November to April), it was teeming with birds and butterflies.  There was less obvious life on the plains and on the plateau we hiked along to several spectacular rocky outcrops.  We only saw three other people in the four hours we were hiking, and felt privileged and awed to seemingly have the vastness and peace all to ourselves.

We got back from the walk around 2:30pm, and then spent a lazy afternoon, before returning to the resort's impressive al fresco eating area for dinner.  This time, the kookaburra got the better of us, swooping from behind, momentarily perching on Julie's hand while snatching a chip from my plate, then flying off in a flurry of feathers and turbulence.

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