[15 Jan 06]
Going for a ride on the back of a motorbike is fantastic. But going through beautiful rainforest, & curvatious mountain roads on one is even better. My mother, step-father & i decided to head to Mt Tambourine. It is a beautiful place with many walking tracks to enjoy, and it's only about an hour south south-west of Brisbane.
The tracks arn't huge, infact any fit person could do two in a day, but its not how fast you walk that counts, it experiencing the forest. So take time walking, and look at the beauty that surrounds you, take the time to listen, who knows what might be along the way.
We decide to do the smallest track, McDonald National Park & check out the Mt Tambourine Botanic Gardens. It was that time of year the cicadas come out of the ground & seek a mate, they are white grubs in the soil for about a year eating compost & grow little legs & semi-wings before they crawl up the nearest spot with hight, then they go all hard shelled, which later cracks open & they pop out fully formed, they then suck the sap from trees to live till mating season is over & they die. The tiny drops of rain you sometimes feel in forests when there isn't a cloud in the sky is cicada piss, don't worry though, its pretty much just water. Now you can always hear them in the heat of summer, but this time it must have an exceptional season for them, as it was no ordinary sound. So loud you had to shout to the person next to you to talk, it was constant and in strong pulses, like, zzzzuuuuzzzzuuuuzzzzuuuuzzzzuuuuzzzzuuuu, a few hours in there & you'd surely have gone insane.
But the walk itself was nice. There were many fungi, & some great big strangler figs on trees.
And i got a pic of two thick shiny black lizards, i've been told their very shy of people & are rarely seen, if you know its common name let me know.
The Botanic Gardens were alright, it had picnic tables and a small lake. We spotted some tiny baby frogs & a big golden orb spider (common in queensland).
But in itself it's not really special. But worth a look if your going that way.
Mt Tambourine has much more to offer, and i will go check it out another day.
P.S. If you want to see a great Botanic Gardens, go to the ones at Mt Cootha, just 10mins west of Brisbane City Centre.
