WYNDOVER MOUNTAIN RETREAT IS A NEW LISTING on booking.com. We are their first guests — but certainly won’t be the last! Located in Beechmont Queensland, Wyndover is thirteen kilometers from Lamington National Park as the currawong flies — four times that via the road. But it has O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat in the park beat by miles.
Just like home, if we had a home — Wyndover Mountain Retreat
We have an entire apartment with a fully equipped kitchen/family room, spacious bathroom, large bedroom, balcony, breezeway and fabulous grounds at our disposal. Satellite TV, of course, and quite adequate wifi. We also get to borrow Elfie, Kym and Russell’s border collie. I was concerned at first with the lack of air-con — it was 32°C today — but the ceiling fans keep things comfortable during the day and the evening breeze has you reaching for the comforter at bedtime.
Bedroom
Elfie
Breezeway entrance
The road to Lamington NP is long and winding with many single-lane switch-back turns but Matilda, our new GPS, waltzed us easily to the park. It’s a scenic drive with a kangaroo or wallaby (never did figure out which was which) around every bend. When you finally arrive, everything is “O’Reilly;” lodge, cafe, gift shop, guides and tours, not to mention the vineyard you passed along the way. O’Reilly has even usurped the paradise bowerbird as its mascot. A double room here costs one-third more than our entire apartment which makes the hour-long drive even less of a chore.
Wallaby Crossing
Satin Bowerbird
Paradise Riflebird
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Lamington National Park is a birding hotspot. Albert’s Lyrebird, Paradise Bowerbird, Satin Bowerbird and the Regent Bowerbird were at the top of our target list. All three bowerbirds are officially “birds of paradise.” We saw all of them and three dozen others but we had only fleeting glimpses of two lyrebirds.
Binna Burra Trail, Lamington NP
There are some long trails in the park but we kept our walks to 4 or 5 miles. The trails are spectacular, winding through forests of species like hoop pine and Antarctic beech that date back 550 million years to the supercontinent of Gondwanaland. The forest is filled with birdsong, punctuated by the distinctive C-R-A-C-K of the eastern whipbird, whom we have heard often and finally saw.
Noisey but elusive, Eastern Whipbird
There is a lot more to Queensland than surfing and beaches!
