Tamborine! (not tambourine)

Yesterday I went to Mt. Tamborine with Arcadia! I originally wasn’t sure if I could go since my essay was due that night, but I wrote most of it by Thursday (because I had nothing else to do). People also dropped out last minute so there was room for me on the bus :).

Mt. Tamborine is up in the mountains near the Gold Coast, so it took a forty-minute car ride on top of the train ride to get there. The road is windy like Highway 17 going to Santa Cruz, but the view on the way was amazing! We could see all of the Gold Coast from inside the van. Because of last week’s rain, the mountain was very green, and we gradually drove into the rainforest!

Our first stop was the glow worm cave (Note: glow worms are not fireflies. Glow worms only live in caves in Australia and New Zealand, and the adult insects cannot fly and do not glow.). Mt. Tambourine has a man-made cave where visitors get to see glow worms without destroying their habitat. They spin delicate webs that trap their prey, and our breath can break the web, which takes days for the glow worm to fix. The website said that glow worms look like stars in the sky, and it was true! Their shiny blue bums in the dark caves give the illusion of nighttime, it’s breath-taking.  Apparently the brighter ones are the hungrier (more desperate) worms, and if they get really hungry, they’ll eat each other… 

Glow Worm Caves

We then went to Tamborine National Park for a rainforest hike, and the trees are super tall! There are a lot of gum trees (aka eucalyptus trees), and the insides are hollow so we got to stand inside one of them (it was really dark and you can’t see anything). There are also these strangler fig trees that grow from the top down. Birds drop the seed atop another tree, and the strangler fig starts growing on the host tree until its roots reach the ground, and it eventually “strangles” the host tree. We also saw bats! Walking through the rainforest showed me that things have to die 😔. We walked between massive tree trunks that had fallen on the path, and there were lots of leaves and fallen branches on the ground. But without death there wouldn’t be room for new life. The rainforest also showed me that green and brown can be beautiful colours, too.  It doesn’t always have to be sky or ocean blue haha. And of course you can’t leave the rainforest without a few mozzie bites.

Strangler Fig

TALL trees with Bats

We saw waterfalls, too! We were able to swim in the second one, but Gizmo (our trip coordinator) didn’t tell us to bring swimsuits until we were on the train, so I didn’t have mine. But it was still cool climbing around the rocks and putting my feet in the water. I almost fell in at one point, but thankfully didn’t. Pretty neat experience!

Curtis Falls

Cedar Creek Rock Pools

After hanging out at the waterfalls, we went to the Mount Tamborine shops for cheese and beer tasting, except we ended up just doing cheese tasting. And I ATE CHEESE and am OK, thank God 😃. There was one that was infused with beer (on the left) and another one with cranberries (on the right), which were nice. But since I haven’t had cheese in so long, I couldn't tell what was "good" cheese. I don’t understand why people like cheese so much. After spending some time wandering through other touristy shops, we headed home. 

Cheese Tasting

I also bought mangoes and papayas from the farmer’s market today. They are SO DELICIOUS I need to live in the tropics because fruit here is too amazing (and @媽媽 I got you a 芭樂! It’s waiting for you). Up next: Noosa!