Cloud Catcher
I was pleasantly surprised by the country town of Murwillumbah. It is a sizable town but refuses to get any bigger than it already is. I checked into the Murwillumbah/Mt. Warning YHA and it sits right on the Tweed river with views of Mt. Warning. It’s a very nice hostel and the guy who was managing it, Gary, was a lot of fun. He served us free ice cream every night at 9 pm and he always made neat designs with gummy shape toppings. We played a game that is a tradition at the hostel called Zilch. It is a dice game where you roll and try to get certain combinations while avoiding a “zilch” which means you lose your turn and, after three of them, 1000 points. I sucked the first night but the second night I got the all-time high score. Gary made a certificate of achievement and hung it on the wall.
The next day we headed up to the mountain to do the hike. It was overcast so we knew the view at the top would not be great but we had to do it because they only take people to the mountain two or three times a week. Along the way to the mountain we listened to a recorded commentary made by the owner of the hostel, Tassie (so called because he is from Tasmania). He had an interesting accent. It wasn’t that much different from the Australian one but put emphasis on certain words and was a little more sing-songey. We got to the base of the mountain after driving past cattle and banana farms and unloaded from the van with a big green mountain painted on the side door. We began the hike through the subtropical rainforest and I took my camera out to take a picture of a huge tree and realized, after several attempts to turn it on, that it was out of batteries. So I actually got to enjoy the hike, not worrying about whether some view would make a great picture. The Germans I was with (I cannot escape them!) said that they would put pictures on my USB stick. We didn’t see any rock wallabies like we heard we might but we did see these big, colorful turkeys on parts of the trail. We neared the top and it turned into temperate rainforest meaning that there are less species of trees and plants that can survive. The last bit climbing toward the top was LITERALLY a vertical, loose-rock scramble. There was a chain that you grabbed a hold of and hung onto for dear life as you tried to find the foot holds. It seemed to last forever and it took probably 25 minutes to do it. We got to the top and were not rewarded with much of a view. It was even cloudier at the top and we simply drank some water and ate an apple and then headed back down.
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