Australia

17th February

Finally waking up in time we had our basic free breakfast and worked out what busses we needed to get on to get to Mount Coot-Tha lookout point. On reaching the summit we had ourselves a cheeky iced coffee and decided to do a loop of a few small walking trails, the first only being 30 minutes.

Our lacking in our sense of direction really took a hit today, we could not work out which direction the trails started. With two maps and each one showing different directions we decided to head downhill and hope for the best.

Our first walk was a 250m track ‘Litchfield Track’ which led to our 15 minute ‘Gold mine’ walk. First we started off through a thinner forest with tall grasses that led into the main forest track.

As I had previously mentions in another day, all you can hear is cicardas and we found what one looked like.

At the Gold Mine picnic area Josh spied two White Cockatoos in hollow tree branches just by chance.

Walking along the gold mine track we came across a very old and disused gold mine. The wooden tracks build were the bridges and roads for the heavy metal carts to be wheeled around on. Now most had written away apart from two small track parts and you can still see the entrance to the cave.

On looking at the map we decided it would be more fun to walk the trails back round than along the road and so we started off on ‘Powerful Owl Trail’ (1050m)…

(These pictures make the walk look easy and most of the trails were… it was only the Powerful Owl trail that was steep, scramble and with a huge amount of steps. Once we had finished we stopped for lunch and a huge rest).

…then on ‘Pinnacle Trail’ (1500m) ending up at JC Slaughter Falls.

Here we walked along the river/creek trying to spy the waterfalls – these ended up pretty small when we expected a huge one.

Being abit tired by this point we realised we then still had to walk the ‘Summit Track’ (1300m) back to the lookout point. By this time the mosquitos were starting to bite so we picked up the pace.

5 hours later Josh was pulling me up a steep slop of steps to get back to the lookout, we were hot, we’d been bitten but, I would do the whole walk again. It was so pretty. Previously on this walk we had spoken about how annoying it would be if you’d missed your last bus. Having looked up the last bus we were just in time. However, we had got it wrong and we’d missed our bus by 1h 30 minutes. Laughing now we made our way back to Brisbane via multiple busses and had some well earned beers at the hostel.