A Wet Eucalyptus Forest Is A Happy Eucalyptus Forest - Girraween National Park

Left: Balancing Rock, Girraween National Park


Checked out of the motel and talked to the manager of the motel about how VOIP and other Internet technologies will change telecommunications in Australia. Right now, he wants to rip out his land line phones - they cost him an arm and a leg.

Drove back over the border, to Queensland's Girraween National Park. Nice place, with rounded granitic boulders. The place has a fine eucalyptus forest, with some rare species of eucalyptus, and it reminded me of similarly pleasant places in the States - the back sides of the Sandia and Manzano Mts. in NM, or Mt. Lemmon near Tucson, AZ.

Climbed the Pyramid at Girraween, a small pyramidal peak, as the cicadas in the newly-wet forest thundered across the granitic hills. The granite wasn't rotten in any place - fine friction climbing everywhere.

Upon return, I found six kangaroos near the Visitor's Center. The big kangaroo (five feet tall, about 150 lbs.) was wary, but the rest seemed people-friendly. I'm sure I'm not the only one ever to make the observation, but kangaroo seem to fill the same ecological niche that deer do in the Northern Hemisphere. They even look like deer (well, from the neck up).