Day 11

Here is a photo of Millstream Falls

Today was our last day in Queensland, and it started out with a great breakfast of bacon and eggs provided by the amazing staff at the Bedrock Village. After breakfast, we began making our way back to Cairns, but we made a few stops along the way. The first stop was at Millstream Falls National Park. Here we were able to walk down to a viewing platform where we got to take pictures and view the gorgeous waterfall. On the way back to the bus, we noticed a sign that talked about how Millstream Falls was an area where many Australian soldiers were camped out at during WWII. There was also a WWII Memorial trail that we did not have the chance to hike due to time limitations. Then we left Millstream Falls, and we continued driving through a region of Australia called the Atherton Tablelands, which is an elevated “Cool Tropical” region. This area is full of beautiful scenery, trees, and windy roads.

Scenery at Millstream Falls

Our second nature stop was the Mt. Hypipamee National Park. The national park is within the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, which contains a wide variety of plant and animal species. In the center of the park is a unique, hidden treasure: a large crater. This crater was formed by a gaseous explosion thousands of years ago, and is the only one in Northern Queensland. The crater is 58 meters down with sheer granite sides and holds a crater lake. The conditions of the national park closely match the subtropical rainforest of South Queensland and New South Wales. The forest floor is full of butterfly roots which are perfect for small animals to shelter in. The large trees support many arboreal animals and tree-dwelling animals, including four different types of possums that forage on fruits and leaves.

Picture of the sheer granite wall of the Mt. Hypipamee crater

This is the explanation of how the curtain fig tree was formed over many years.

Our third stop of the day was at Curtain Fig National Park. We took a short walk to see a very large, amazing curtain fig tree. The process that the tree took to becoming a curtain fig tree is really interesting. It began as a regular tree which had a seed deposited onto it and it began to grow. That seed was a strangling fig seed, and as it grew it developed aerial roots and eventually circled and strangled the host tree. This ended up causing the original tree to fall over into another tree and become angled. Then, more vertical roots formed off of the strangling fig tree. This caused it to have the curtain-like appearance, and the original tree began rotting away. Today was a great day for visiting all three national parks as we had beautiful weather for wandering around the Australian wilderness.

An amazing view of the entire curtain fig tree

Grace, Tammy, and Ellys