High on Mount Tamborine

As I mentioned in this morning’s post, the day trip I went on out of Brisbane today took me to Mount Tamborine in the afternoon.

Before you ask, no I didn’t see any musical instruments on Mount Tamborine, tambourines or otherwise. What? You weren’t going to ask? I guess you’re not a dad. Neither am I. But I tell dad jokes without a license. Please don’t report me.

As part of this afternoon’s activities, I saw one of the most fascinating, beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. That’s not a huge hurdle to leap over. But, still, wait for it.

Lookout!

Sorry. The exclamation mark shouldn’t be in the heading. It is not a dire warning, but rather introduces the fact that the tour’s first stop on Mount Tamborine was ten minutes at a pullout by a clearing in the trees on the mountain.

This lookout provided a spectacular view of the lush valley below and the mountain range beyond it.

Clouds covered the sky. But they were high enough to not obscure the view excessively.

As stunning as it was, that was not the fascinating, beautiful thing I referenced earlier. Wait for it.

Lunch

As I mentioned in this morning’s post, the tour took us to a cafe in a small town on Mount Tamborine for lunch.

My fish and chips were quite tasty. However, that wasn’t the fascinating, beautiful thing either. But we’re getting close.

The Glow Worm Cave on Mount Tamborine

A glow worm cave on Mount Tamborine? Now, that sounds more like it. But before I get to it, there’s always a boring short. (You have to be a fan of one of Woody Allen’s first movies, “Take the Money and Run,” to get that.)

The glow worm cave facility also has a room they call “Frog Hollow.” We went there first, probably because our group didn’t have an exclusive tour of the glow worm cave, so we had to wait until the facility took in a tour that included other visitors.

Frog Hollow is a hut with some small aquariums that mostly contain frogs. Although, there was one with snails.

Most of the frogs were so well camouflaged that I had trouble spotting them.

I couldn’t see the frogs at all in a couple of the aquariums. Maybe they were empty of frogs, but I don’t think so. One aquarium had a sign on it saying it was empty. I didn’t count that aquarium among the couple where I couldn’t spot a frog. If they labelled an aquarium as empty, I imagine the couple of aquariums that looked frogless to me simply had frogs that would have no trouble winning a hide-and-seek game.

Glow Worms

On to the glow worms.

Glow worms don’t normally live in caves. They live out in the open, I think on vegetation like trees.

But in their natural habitat, it’s difficult for tourists to see their glow. For one thing, they are nocturnal. So they only glow at night. For another, if you’re not careful around them they’ll turn off their lights.

That’s why the facility built an artificial cave where they can control the environment and show the wonder of glow worms to tourists during the day.

Before heading into the cave, everyone got a plastic necklace with a glow-in-the-dark cutout hanging from it. (There were star and crescent moon cutouts. I got a star.)

We then went into, not the cave, but a small theatre. I got most of the information I provided above and will add below in that theatre. Inside, the guide said a few words about the facility and its glow worms. She also turned down the lights and showed us a brief video about bioluminescence in general and glow worms in particular.

Turning the lights down wasn’t just to make it easier to see the video. It was also so our eyes would get used to the dark of the cave to come.

Some interesting facts from the video or guide:

• It’s the glow worm’s butt that lights up.
• Glow worms drool out a thread that drops down from where they’re sitting. The thread is sticky and can trap insects like a spider’s web.
• The glow worm’s light attracts insects that become the glow worm’s dinner.
• Glow worms can turn their lights on and off. Because lighting them requires energy, they turn them off when they don’t need them. For example, they turn their lights off when they are in the presence of ambient light because their lit bums would be of no use then. They also turn them off when they’ve had enough to eat and don’t need to attract more insects.

Before we went into the cave the guide gave us some rules:

• We had to turn the loaned necklace around so the glow-in-the-dark cutout was hanging on our back.
• We couldn’t take any photos, flash or not. And we had to either turn off our phones or keep them in our pockets. (So, you won’t find any pictures of the cave here.)
• If we had a smartwatch or other light-up watch that couldn’t be turned off we had to keep it covered.
• If we looked at a glow worm closeup, we had to cover our mouths so we wouldn’t breathe directly on it.

With those instructions given, we headed into the cave. The pitch blackness is why we were told to turn the necklace so the glow-in-the-dark cutout was behind us. That way, we wouldn’t bump into the person ahead of us.

Inside the cave, the ceiling and upper portions of the walls were alive with thick constellations of points of bright lights.

According to the guide, glow worms are colour-blind and can’t see red light. The facility put infrequent small points of red lights on the path to direct people through the cave. There are also railings on the sides of the path through the cave.

The glow worms’ colour blindness also allowed the guide to use a red light to show what a glow worm looks like beyond just a point of light. I’m glad she did that, otherwise I would have left wondering if they were really glow worms or just LED lights the staff affixed to the ceiling and walls. I can be a tad skeptical and cynical at times.

The staff at the facility keep the worms fed by catching insects in nets. At a time when there isn’t a tour going through, they release the insects in the cave and let nature take its course.

The experience was spectacular. And, yes, that was the fascinating, beautiful thing.

We had to hand the glow-in-the-dark necklaces back to the cave guide on the way out. We couldn’t keep them as souvenirs.

By the way, according to the dictionary, “glow worms” can also be spelled as one word, i.e., “glowworms.” However, the facility uses the two-word spelling. So that’s what I went with here.

But, wait. There’s more.

Skywalk on Mount Tamborine

The next stop on the tour was the Rainforest Skywalk on Mount Tamborine. This involved a walk through a portion of Mount Tamborine’s rainforest. Near its beginning, the walk is over a long metal bridge with a metal grate floor suspended a few hundred metres above the floor of the rainforest. The bridge isn’t much wider than necessary to walk single-file along it.

The sides of the bridge have railings up almost to my shoulders. Rods between the railings and the floor are placed close enough together that even the thinnest of humans couldn’t fall through. In fact, it would be difficult for anything larger than a small rodent to fall through.

I’m not sure how they anchor the bridge, but it didn’t sway.

Despite the height, this solid construction kept my acrophobia completely in check.

After the bridge, the route continued on a mostly gravel path.

This path led to a piece of bridge of a similar construction to the earlier one except for a couple of things. It goes out over the canyon and stops. Rather than being firmly anchored like the previous, much longer bridge, it is held up from only end by suspension cables. The other end is a dead-end lookout that just hangs there. As a result of this construction, it sways somewhat as people walk on it.

“Oh, hello there, acrophobia. I didn’t see you sneaking up on me.”

It was a spectacular view, as was most of the walk. But I was eager and anxious to get off the hanging, swaying observation point.

The path then led back to the entry. Once everyone in the group completed the walk, we drove off.

Last Stops

There were just a couple more minor stops before we got back to Brisbane. One was a small farm with a couple of alpacas, one adult goat, a couple of smaller ones, and some donkeys. We could feed the goats grass through the fence between them and us. The alpacas stayed back and didn’t approach us.

The donkeys were in an adjacent enclosure. A sign said not to feed them because they have a different diet. I think they keep glatt kosher. But I could be wrong about that.

The final stop was by a small field where Tania, the driver/guide said there are usually some wild kangaroos hanging around. When we stopped, she said she spotted some lying down in the distance. A couple of other people in the group said they saw them too. But no matter how hard I looked in the direction they pointed, I didn’t see them.

And so ended my day’s adventure.