TOD Tour, Day 62 – Warrumbah Gorge

Sue's elusive friend

Our last day a Carnarvon NP started with the realisation that we had visited here three times, each visit being ten years apart.

It was a relaxed morning: reading mostly but it also include morning tea with new acquaintances, Rob and Sue and for Sue, finally getting to see the platypus which live in the Carnarvon Creek beside our accommodation at Taranakka Bush Camp.

After lunch, we walked into Mickey Creek but took the right fork in the track to Warrumbah Gorge, described by some as the most beautiful place in Carnarvon NP.

Like most of the side gorges, there is a walk into the main gorge wall of a few hundred metres, to a point where the tracks divide, then a climb up into an increasingly narrow opening in the gorge wall. At a point where a NP sign informs you that the formal track ends, local encouragement takes over and you breeze on past.

What waits beyond the end of the formed track is quite spectacular. A crack which starts as perhaps twenty metres wide, with sheer walls rising on either side and large rocks littering the space between, varying but being consistently the size of bowling balls. Pools of water from the intermittent stream which flows through the gorge only after rain, lie in various states of stagnation. The water is cold and still and crystal clear. The gorge takes several turns, always with the walls closing toward each other and the passage becoming more difficult. Stepping stones help in some places but in others, passage is maintained by the narrowest of ledges and scant handholds, with pools of water waiting for any slip. Getting wait would be an inconvenience but the rocks which lie in their pools are the sleeping maleficent.

I could touch both walls
at once at this point

Sue had to call it quits about two thirds of the way before passage just became too inconvenient, at a time when the walls towered sixty metres to the surface but only a few metres apart. It was a fair effort to get that far. My latent blokeness took me on along narrow ledges, through a space where the walls closed to a metre and there were no hand or footholds and progress was only made by pressing your feet against one wall and your hands against the other and finally over a vertical climb over a boulder which blocked the gorge and required passengers to make two footholds more than a metre apart vertically over an overhang on two sides with limited handholds. It struck me as I rose over this obstruction that ascent was one thing but descent would be altogether more difficult. So it proved. A clamber over a log which had fallen lengthways along the narrow crevice completed my journey, for beyond it was a pool that extended for perhaps ten metres and looked to be at least thigh deep in places.

Enough was enough.

A bloke with longer legs and a twelve year old son breezed past and through the pool, never to be seen again … until he passed me on the way out.

I was right about the backwards decent back off the boulder. Luckily for me, a nurse by profession and an understanding and envious middle aged woman by experience, who had expressed envy of my original daring do to go over the boulder, stood waiting for my return and quietly gave me feedback about how far my feet were from the now unseen footholds.

It was a magic place and as always in such wild places, the photographs don’t provide justice to our endeavours to breach it.

This marked our last afternoon for this trip to Carnarvon Gorge NP. Anyone who likes to walk through the bush and be amazed by stunning physical scenery, geology or aboriginal culture and art work, should mark this place down as a must. Apart from walks which are relaxed stroll, right through challenging day walks up to 20kms, there is also a seven day walk which takes in both the floor of the main gorge and the tops around it. It is rated one of Australia’s great long distance nature walks.

At the entrance to Warrumbah 

They should also get here while the place is still in good stead, as the previous Qld government has reduced park staff from 11 down to 4. The park office, previously a font of information and history, is rarely staffed. The camping area inside the national park is open only for Qld school holiday and even then, severe restrictions apply as to which types of vehicle may enter. There are occasional ranger guided activities but these are usually only in school holidays and even then they are few and getting further between. Twenty years ago, there was a ranger talk and slide show every night of the holidays – it was her that our daughter Sarah first cried over Faces In The Mob - and guided walks on every other day. One of the few walks is on tomorrow but cost $50 per adult!!!

This was a good detour to make.

TOD Tour, Day 61 - Moss Gardens & The Amphitheatre

There are very few things that will get Sue out of bed before 7:00am. In fact, until this morning, I can think of none. However, when I dared to try and break through her dazed, half-sleep this morning with the suggestion we go down to the creek and see if there was a platypus about, she was up and dressed faster than a George Bailey innings.

The talk we attended in the late of yesterday afternoon, offered by the management of our accommodation, indicated that the best place to be guaranteed a siting of the elusive little monotreme, was in the creek below the camp kitchen. In fact, at least two mating pairs were said to be there.

So, in the early morning light, we made our way to the bank or at least that part of the bank we could secure, as many others had been erstwhile in following the advice. After fifteen minutes, the crowd was thinning and after twenty five there were just a few of us. It was then that I could sight of a little furry submarine sliding across the surface of the creek about thirty metres away. Even that could hold Sue for any longer, her back telling her it was time to go. That just left me and a deaf bloke chatting about the chance of further sighting. I'm not being facetious. He was profoundly deaf, declaring it to me when he arrived but we managed.

A few minutes later, when the platypus returned on the far bank, he let out a yell to alert me. After a few minutes, he went to get his wife - also profoundly deaf - and his bright little daughter who gently warned me about her parents disability. She hadn't inherited their disability. I never cease to learn things in life and it took a while to concentrate on the little fellow overturning rocks on the far bank as they signed their excitement.

The next bad day I'll try and remember these three and their joy, expressed in silent amazement.

The platypus continued on, working the far bank and oblivious to a growing audience gathering on the bank. Once the jungle drums get the beat going, a campground can empty for such things. It worked over the interface between the water and the bank, covering about twenty metres in the space of fifteen minutes, constantly shucking rocks and digging in the soft bank for tasty crustaceans.

When it finished there, it started working the bottom of the pool, surfacing for air and then diving to mud to shovel for food. Whereas capturing its image along the bank had been relatively easy, trying to snap a photo in between dives was almost impossible.

Over the space of forty minutes, I managed to get a few shots and some decent video footage ... which I took back to the van to show a very disappointed wife! Perhaps tomorrow she'll have more luck.

Our aim today was to walk the main track up the centre of the Carnarvon Gorge and visit the Moss Gardens. Like all of the main attractions in this park, the Moss Gardens lies up a side gorge which has been cut into the sandstone cliffs by small streams which come down to meet Carnarvon Creek. We have walked to all of the side gorges on previous visits (1996 & 2006) but these day, long days walking can be difficult for Sue. In fact, before beating forth from Tamworth in February, it was unlikely we would do more than three kilometres flat walking in any one attempt. Dorrigo put paid to that.

We started walking at about 8:30am, moving into the gorge at a steady pace, despite the undulations at the start of the walk they we didn't remember. After about 800m we came upon the Boolimbah Bluff track and then about an hour in, we arrived at the turn for Moss Gardens. More climbing, a long creek crossing and before long, we were sitting in a delightful, cool place, with a waterfall gently falling in front of us and moss growing abundantly on the sandstone walls. A remarkable place.

Looking at the map and charged with the fact that in two visits she had never seen the Amphitheatre, Sue insisted we walk on.

The Amphitheater is a large chamber behind a crack in the main gorge wall. It's a small space, perhaps twenty metres across and thirty metres long in a flattened oval. The walls rise vertically - and I mean that literally - and end sixty metres above you. It's an impossible place to shoot photos and evidence what your eyes see. There is no way to do it justice.

The acoustics are said to be fantastic in this place. On Sue's insistence, once other punters had left, I sang for her: "The Impossible Dream" from Man of La Mancha and "Bring Him Home" from Les Miserable.

We met a nice couple, Rob and Sue, chatted with them for a while and made a date for drinks later in the day.

The walk back to the car was quiet, particularly after the Sue stopped interrogating a lady from Rockhampton for local information. She has become the equivalent of the tourist face hugger, never letting go until she has sucked the essence out of locals.

Back at our digs, Sue made grandma noises and complained of aches and pains until I took her out to a coffee shop at a nearby bush resort and we struck up a conversation with Beth, a young tourist on a working visa from Suffolk in England. She shared with us the places they had seen in Australia and we filled in the places she had missed. Lovely young lass.

Drinks to round out the evening and then I faced the local wifi, convinced after an hour or so trying to do what I can accomplish in ten minutes at home that it might have been quicker to drive to all parts of Australia and deliver blogs personally.