Judy & Brian Tour Oz

Yesterday we travelled from Charters Towers up to Undara via the Gregory Development road, that is a road with a strip of tar about a truck wide and gravel on either side. When another vehicle is approaching, the smaller one gets off the bitumen and they pass safely. We saw this large truck coming, i got of as far as i could, right up to the edge of the 1m gully, and waited for  the truck to react. We weren't right off but we had no where to go. Finally he saw us and hit the brakes, leaving us with the disconcerting sight of his second carriage swerving right across the road. Fortunately the driver got it all back together and blasted past leaving us unscathed. We stopped at a tiny dot on the map called The Lynd, a neat and tidy but tiny roadhouse, for lunch before moving on to Undara. Undara is home to the, rightfully, world famous lava tubes. Basically a huge stream of molten rock following a watercourse or valley, that has cooled and set on the outside while the inside has kep...

Day two Undara’s claim to fame has to be the lava tubes. What’s a lava tube? When lava pours out of a volcano and runs out across the countryside in one solid stream, gouging a deep bed, it cools a bit at the outside edges. These cooled bits set and basically build a wall up either side of the stream and eventually a roof as well. Now this I found hard to believe, but the lava pouring out of Undara volcano, a shield volcano, ran in one stream for some 130km across the land to the west. Even harder to believe is that when the volcano stopped spewing, the lava kept going along its way, leaving an empty tube behind.   In lots of places these roofs have collapsed leaving gaps where you can climb down into the tubes and go and explore. Which is what we did on the two-hour ‘Archway’ tour. These tubes are pretty big, maybe 40m across and 20m high. There are tree roots coming down from the ceiling and bats hanging about all over the place. To the unknowing eye, they j...