(more pictures) 

It’s a little strange sitting here at a plastic table in the rain forest typing on the computer, but we were going for strange, right?  We are in Bunya National Park, the second oldest in Queensland.  It was a sacred place for the Aboriginal People because of these prehistoric pine trees that grow here.  This is the largest grove in the world.  The Bunya “pines” have unusual leaves like some kind of cactus.  They are 200 or so feet high when full grown and their cones are huge weighing 10 pounds or more each.  We came during the harvest season and they were falling from the tops of these trees making a huge crash every once in awhile out in the “jungle”.  Many animals come to feast on them, such as a bush turkey we saw on a walk.  The natives have held a festival up here every year for millennia, feasting on fermented nuts, holding court and games and stopping any hunting.  Logging almost wiped out these pines until the park status took hold.  Loggers first arrived seeking the Hoop Pine, another ancient species better suited for wood and now also rare.  We bought a product with the “Bunya pinenuts” available at the general store…pesto!

We were delighted to see that the wallabies here were tame.  One was almost Buddha-like in her meditation next to here sleeping joey.  We found out from the rangers that the park was closed for caravan camping due to campground remodeling.  He sent us back out the rather steep road we came in on to a commercial RV campground.  It was not too attractive but we found a local picnic area tucked back in the trees that was wonderful and came back to camp there after our second “track” walk of the day.

 

The ranger information station has a nice display of butterflies and they were fluttering everywhere we walked.  Most were too fast to photograph. 

 

Our first hike wound through the wet rain forest along a stream and past a couple of waterfalls.  Water was scarce, but the scenes were beautiful anyway.  The sound of birds came through the woods, including the green cat bird that sounds somewhat like a crying baby and the riflebird that sounds like a bullet ricocheting off a rock.  The floor of the forest was covered in ferns, some were hard to distinguish from trees.  Many of the trees were sheathed in strangler fig vines which eventually choke out the original tree and leave a hollow core.  The path actually went right through one of these.  (My camera batteries ran out on that walk and I don’t have that picture but several others are similar.)  One of their favorite hosts is the “Stinging Tree”.  We didn’t test it out but they are reportedly very painful.    We saw a 3 to 4 foot black snake with a red belly lying on a log near the creek, but it turned out to be dead and attracting flies. On Pine Gorge Lookout Easter Lilies bloomed, but weakly in this dry year.

 

Two more habitats make up this unusual park.  One of the kinds is called “balds”.  These high mountain grasslands have bottle trees, smaller mammals and birds of prey.  The other kind is called “dry rain forest” (go figure).  It includes “grass trees” and Bunya N.P. has a rare stand of them up on Mt Kaingarow.  We went there late in the afternoon.  Thunderheads were moving across the land both to the East and the West.  We could see rainbows in the clouds to the west stretching all the way to the ocean (and including belching towers in the distance from coal-fired power plants).  To the East there was thunder and a line of showers with a view clear to a flat horizon of the interior continent.   Mt Kaingarow, a modest 1135 meters, is a high point on the dividing range between the coast and the dry interior.  The Park’s other high point, Mt Mowbullan has a viewpoint but also hosts a series of TV and communication towers that disappeared into the mist when we first saw them.