National parks & rain forests

This Friday I couldn't avoid bundling the upcoming needs of the household and spontaneously decided to take a morning off. It's not accidental that I have the time for spending some time for blog maintenance, i.e. for you. What you could have observed are the less frequent reports, as the little time left between work, travel and community life must be put to good use here.

Yesterday, with the beginning of twilight, which sets in here in the late afternoon, Julien celebrated his farewell, a long-time employee of SAP Research CEC Brisbane, whose farewell evening cheered us up not only by amused speeches and some slides, but also with an enjoyable evening meal. Julien organized a room full of pizza boxes for us and brightened the mood with his friendly nature. So, one evening follows the next and keeps you busy.

But the real story here revolves around our drive into Springbrook National Park, two hours away, which has the most exciting waterfalls, cliff hikes and rainforests in place. The journey went into the wilderness by using three cars. Cars number 1 and 2 were guided by the navigation of the occupant-controlled iPhones, car number 3 got stuck in a traffic jam that caused us to wait two hours, car number 2 got lost due to a lack of map reading skills.

So it was the four of us who embellished the two hours in the manner of frivolous Americans with their Starbucks cups in their hands at the beautiful lookouts. It wasn't quite as remote as expected in the Springbrook National Park, but that didn't deter the group from their uncivilized plan to spend the night sleeping in the camping area, which was equipped with a barbecue and camping tables and surrounded by a recently renatured area.

The pretty "Best of all lookouts" lookout gave us a view to the former origin volcano, which did not form the landscape glacially, but through natural folding and elevation. At an ambient temperature of 30 degrees in Australia, the rain forest has a temperature of 5 degrees, so we could see our icy breath (especially to Stefan's benevolence, who had just changed into shorts). Harry's Lookout gave us an overview of the later march and revealed a view to some of the beautiful waterfalls in the area. On the way we discovered another wallaby next to the road, but it disappeared just as quickly as it hopped on.

The hike began after the arrival of the rest of the group, a short picnic with the bread they had brought and the setting up of the tents (which still took some time for the thirteen-strong group). Unfortunately, the 12km Warrie Circuit was closed, which took us at ease onto the shorter 4km trail. Nice group photos that were taken have to be looked for by the participants first. I will then show them to you after my return to Germany, of course I promise. We also had a few youthful characters on this trip: Of course, our boys here didn't miss out on climbing all the cordoned-off lookouts and waterfalls. But these cliff photos were one of the most beautiful shots. The baths at the waterfall pools were tempting, there is no more beautiful nature around Brisbane. After the exhausting hike, we treated ourselves to milkshakes, sundaes and iced chocolate in a rustic "jungle ice cream shop" in order to acclimatize to civilized living conditions.

The Natural Bridge is one of the most beautiful natural stone constellations created by abrasion. The water ate into the stone in such a way that a pool burst out and undermined the stone. A flock of hundreds of thousands of fireflies then accumulated in this undermining, which we approached at night with real and simulated flashlights (the kind of smartphone applications). Here we got to know the true nature of the fireflies, which in Germany is veiled by a false name. In truth, a distinction is made (and this is obscured by the common name glowworm) between glow worms and fire flies. Only in the larval stage before the pupation do the Glow Worms glow at full intensity at certain times in the dark. Luminous flies, on the other hand, are rarer and glow throughout their lives.

Then the group set out to camp in the nightly cold, which made them shiver with partly missing tents, partly missing sleeping bags. The return trip was quiet and enjoyable and gave us the feeling of satisfaction at having seen a beautiful piece of Australia again.