Girraween and Stanthorpe Pt 182 & 183 April 17^th to 20^th (Pictures)

Girraween National Park is in southern Queensland at the top of the “Granite Belt”. You come to appreciate what a big deal this is after traveling through the outback for hundreds of miles over old seabed soils that hardly support agriculture. The granite in these high mountains is full of new minerals that weather into the soils on the slopes below making the region around the nearby city of Stanthorpe , an agricultural region known for apples, grapes, olives, peaches and other fruit crops. Because it freezes (a rarity in Australia) the weather also carves the granite into huge boulders. We saw plenty of them in Girraween and then many more on our hosts (the Geno’s) property near Stanthorpe.

While in the park we only took time to walk the loop over Boulder Creek to the Rock Arch, but there are some big things going on there in the eyes of the National Parks. A new species of glow worm was discovered in a cave nearby and a special frog as well. The water was low because of the long drought and the rangers were taking advantage of it to capture invasive goldfish out of the creek. Our walk was impressive in itself because of the granite (see the pictures). Even more impressive are billybongs (small lakes) nearby with platypus in them (though we unfortunately didn’t see any).

Stanthorpe is a busy tourist town priding itself on wine, apples and the fact that it freezes and even occasionally snows there, hence the name of their winter celebration the “Brass Monkey Balls Festival”. (To avoid any anatomical confusion, a brass monkey is a fixture on a ship that holds the cannon balls. Ice tends to build up on them in cold weather.) They have a brass monkey statue downtown on a street corner. We liked some parts of Stanthorpe. The lake was pleasant, there were no flies there, it finally looked like an autumn scene with the coloring maple trees’ leaves and they had a good Internet Café. Wolf’s Internet Café is actually managed by Tom Breve, son of Wolfgang Breve, who once owned the land that the Genos now have. We were the oldest patrons by far. The usual clientele were young fruit pickers, mostly Asian. It was doing a brisk business each day we were there.

The Genos land is an isolated patch of old growth forest. The giant rocks twist the trees up making them poor quality for lumber and hard to log. Larry came out and showed us the two solar-powered houses and their pond, still holding water during the long Australian drought. We stayed there for a few days, visiting one nearby winery, but failed to make any significant improvement in the ailing A-van and then went back to Toowomba.