2002/11 Australia trip - Border Ranges |
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We should probably have spent a couple of days finishing our shopping and getting the campervan organized but decided we’d do that boring stuff as we went along. So we headed out of town on the Pacific Highway. That was busy with holiday traffic, so we got off onto side roads as soon as we could. October is springtime in Australia and a beautiful, comfortably-warm time of the year in northern New South Wales.
We felt lazy and stopped for lunch at a little café in Kyogle. From there we were onto a narrow dirt road through pretty farm country with lots of rickety one-lane bridges. Eventually the road took us into Border Ranges NP.
We stopped at the first campground we found. It was a beautiful spot, shaded by enormous gum trees, and it had the most amazing sound, dozens of bellbirds all dinging away. There were other birds, catbirds that howl, and whip birds that 
sound like Star Wars weapons, but the overwhelming sound was all that dinging. We’d heard them on earlier trips but never so many at once. The campsite we chose was already occupied 
by a 4-foot long goanna, who climbed a nearby tree and then glowered at us for disturbing his peace.
We just had time to take a short hike down to Sheep Station Creek, all palms and ferns, and a pretty waterfall, Brushbox Falls We had to hurry back as it was dark by 6.15, not yet into New South Wales’s summer time.
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Border Ranges arrival (11.26) |
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All the parks in this area are part of the massive Mount Warning caldera, with spectacular cliffs and pinnacles, mostly buried under a riot of vegetation. This park backs directly onto Lamington National Park in Queensland, which was full of pademelons (rabbit-sized kangaroos) back in 1995, so we’d expected to see some here, but we didn’t see any this time.
Sunday October 6th
The kookaburras started an hour before dawn, and all the bellbirds chimed in soon after, so we 
made an early start. Today was to be a mixture of driving and hiking. We took the campervan along a one-way track up through the forest, and then hiked down from the Antarctic Beech picnic area to Brindle Creek. This is jungle country, with giant ferns, strangler figs, vines, everything growing on something else, so there’s plenty to look at.
The trail was rugged, with lots of ups and downs. We followed the creek down to two waterfalls, one a veil and the other a small spout, both beautiful spots with masses of greenery. Most of the 
birds were too high to see, but 
there were red and brown rufous fantails flitting around the falls. There were also yabbies in the creek, crayfish almost as large as lobsters.
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Border Ranges hikes (30.30) |
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It was a tough climb back up to the picnic area, but Sandie made it all the way up and then crashed down onto the gravel a few feet from the campervan. Now there were two of us limping! We spent the rest of the day driving the tracks to overlooks and taking short walks. Some of the tracks are one-way and some two-way but people seem to forget which they’re on and we had to take to the bush a couple of times to avoid collisions.
Monday October 7th
Monday was to be a traveling day, and we were hoping to get about halfway to Carnarvon, our next scenic stop, so we were packing up early. As I emptied our bucket, it went thud. Thud? The thud was a small possum. No, he wasn’t playing possum. Rigor mortis had already set in. He must have followed the smell of food, fallen in, and drowned.