Danger Mt Warning

The weekends here are a blur of work, play, sun, and sleep. I can no longer distinguish when one day ends and another begins. This can probably be blamed on the fact that I work all night and have to spend a good part of the day sleeping. Since I don’t want to miss beach time or surfing, I usually get home from work around 4am, sleep until 9:30am, then go surfing or for a lay on the beach, eat lunch, nap for three hours, have dinner and then drink and hang out with friends. Not too shabby. But it’s hardly a routine and I end up tired most days as a result. Monday-Wednesday is for sleeping.

This weekend was no different. The best weekend ever. Friday night was the monthly Full Moon party (oh, Byron), and I happened to have work off. Having worked Thursday night, I was a bit tired, so I powered through a three hour nap before dinner. There’s an awesome girl staying in our room from Hamburg, absolutely adore her. We got dressed in our “UV appropriate” clothes and headed out to the club. All the girls get painted at these parties because they have black lights everywhere. It’s a vision. LCD screens with the full moon projected on them. Anyone ever think about having this party outside on the beach? I’m constantly frustrated that there are no beach parties. 

Our sweet ride

I had my alarm set for 1:30am when I needed to head back to the hostel. A few friends and myself had rented a car that night for a sunrise hike up Mt Warning, near Brisbane. A local Aussie we met at a barbie the previous week told us about this treasured activity. As it’s a one-hour drive, followed by a two hour hike, we had to leave Aquarius at 2am to catch the sunrise at 5:45am. Poor Chris is still recovering from an accident the other week when a riley Irishman thought he’d have a piggy-back ride from Chris. Chris, having not expected this, collapsed under his weight and turned his ankle. The Irishman didn’t come out unscathed by any means, but Chris has been out of surfing, out of hiking, out of commission for a few weeks because of it.

At 2am I was changed and ready to hike. The decision to stay up all night seems like a good one, as the kids who elected to sleep for two hours look totally wiped. Amazingly, I have energy and excitement. The only car left in Byron for rental at the last minute on the weekend was a landscaping truck. So, all five of us hoped in and were on our way to Mt Warning. Thirty seconds later, we got pulled over by the cops at the second roundabout. It’s just occurring to us now that the bars are letting out and the cops are out in full force performing random breathalyzer tests. We all shut up and let Austria deal with the officer. After a clean breath test, we’re released and Austria gets to keep the device as a souvenir.

Halfway to Brisbane, it starts pouring buckets of rain. Half of us have packed raincoats, the other half will clearly be getting very wet. But having paid the equivalent of half a week’s worth of groceries to rent this vehicle, we’re committed to our hike. We take a scenic tour to Brisbane, turn around and take a country bumpkin one-lane winding road over creek beds and past snakes, frogs and some kind of wombat with a bushy tail until we finally reach the trailhead for Mt. Warning. It’s clear by now that we are in the rainforest, which I hadn’t expected. An awesome surprise, but equally frightening. Bugs, snakes and spiders, oh my.

It’s pitch black and pouring rain. We open the car door and are hit by a wall of humidity and the screeching of a thousand insects. I strap on my headlight and find a spot to pee before our hike. I am already terrified on seeing night-crawly snakes and things. I am serenaded by what I think must be goats behind me. But once we start our hike, there are more goats and we conclude that it’s actually some sort of bug that sounds like a goat. We can only see the person in front of us and maybe three feet of light stretches ahead. Nothing in our peripheral, but that’s probably for the best. The one time I swung my light out to the side to get some kind of bearing as to where we were, there was a cool rainforest tree, the kind with the huge roots and a strangler fig working it’s way up, but then, a masterfully huge and most likely poisonous spider with eyes gleaming in my headlamp. Won’t be doing that again, I would rather not know what’s out there.

Everyone has their eyes on the ground so we won’t step on any poisonous snakes. There are bugs jumping in every direction, and a few times we come across a crazy unidentifiable critter the size of a dollar bill with wings, which we dub the “frogroach.” Eeeew. Steam is rising everywhere from the rain and heat. It’s about a quarter way up the trail, just after we spot the first Emergency Helicopter Landing Pad and just before we encounter the foot-long zebra worm that I start to think maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to go for a night hike up a mountain in a foreign country where none of us have been hiking before. Oh well, too late now. Fear propels us up the trail in silence for most of the way.

First light to hit Australia

After Emergency Helicopter Landing Pad Number Four, we have only 0.4km to go. The sky is just starting to lighten, so we know we must be very close. The next part of the trail is someone’s idea of a sick joke. We are literally rock climbing with hands and feet both up a steep craggy mountain with only the support of a rust chain drilled into the rock face. Still in the dark. I expect the way back down will be worse, because there’s probably a mile long drop to one side of us. This goes on for quite a ways. Finally, by a thousand miracles we reach the top, where there is already a group of ambitious people waiting to see Australia’s first light. This is the reason we came. Here, at the Eastern-most part of Australia, at the top of Mt Warning, sunrise is the first light to hit all of Australia.

The rain has finally stopped. And there is just enough clear sky to see the sun come up. Most of the clouds are low-laying so you feel like you’re in a cloud yourself. Once the clouds clear out you can see gorgeous valleys, great expanses of green, and sharp, steep little hills affectionately called “mountains.” You can see the ocean, the lighthouse at Cape Byron, Tweed River and all the valleys in between.

Several people in multiple groups have bleeding knees and ankles which, upon inquiry, turn out to be leech bites. We’re all surprised our group made it out of that situation unscathed until we check our ankles and I did, in fact, have a leech bite. Fortunately the bugger was gone or I would have screamed bloody hell. The way back down we’re watching not for snakes (we only saw one on the way up) but for leeches and work on avoiding the puddles. The hike down takes almost as long as the hike up because it’s so steep and it’s an entirely different view. We can see walls of green, hanging vines, massive trees with larger roots, and all the bugs have disappeared. This is a nice hike. The rainforest seemed more alive at night than during the day, oddly enough.

 

Arrived back at the hostel at 9am and promptly went to bed. Woke up a few hours later, made some tacos, went to work from 10pm-4am. Not sure what day it is. But loving life.