Judy & Brian Tour Oz

Undara / Atherton Qld  30-31 July 2019 A couple of travel days for us. Last time we came up here we did the Charters Towers to Atherton 580 km step in one day and frankly it was too much. So this time we stopped at the Undara Lodge (390km) where the Lava tubes are, but only for the night. I will have to say that they are very pleased with themselves, having closed the reception / shop right at the front door, and transferring those operations inside into the bar. I suppose it saves on employment costs but is hopelessly unprofessional. Who wants to compete with drinkers and  book-in over the bar? Anyhow, we had a swim, read a book in the sun, had a drink at the fire pit and retired for the evening. Today we completed the journey up to Atherton (190km) easily enough, even if we got stuck behind a caravan of caravans doing 75kph, for something like 40km. The trouble is that the road is quite undulating and winding and overtaking is not much of an option. After 20km we pulled ...

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...

Atherton, Qld August 6th 2013 When you leave Undara and head east, you effectively leave any semblance of the outback. You start to climb a bit, up past Mt Garnett, and then it starts to get serious with lots of climbing and twisting and turning up through rainforest until you get to Ravenshoe.   On the way through, we stopped at Innot Springs, supposed to be a hot spring fed creek to splash about in. What you have is a caravan park that has sucked the creek dry to feed its six(yes 6) swimming pools with varying degrees of hot water. For only $10 a head you can get a day pass, or you can dig a hole in the creek bed and sit in that. We saw some people sitting in mud puddles near the bridge, so we took the third option: drove straight on and dreamt about Mataranka and Katherine springs.   We stopped at Ravenshoe for a cuppa and a bit of a look around. We found a fabulous olde worlde milk bar / café which had fantastic coffee and even better jam drops, fresh out of the oven. They...

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...