Undara Field Trip

The field trip this weekend was a lot of fun and we got to see some environments very different from those around Cairns. We left at 6:45am on Saturday and our first stop was at Yungaburra where we waited at a platypus-viewing platform. Unfortunately, we didn't see much though. After that we went up to the Atherton tablelands to Lake Eacham, which is a freshwater crater lake. There we worked on our field trip report assignment and had a talk about freshwater fauna. We had a variety of other stops along the way to places such as Malanda and Mt Hypipamee (which had beautiful waterfalls and a big crater) and by the time we reached Undara we had been in the bus for nearly 5 hours. The landscape was beautiful and very different from the tropical rainforest I'm used to. The sand is very red and the habitat is mostly classified as savannah but Undara is also known as Queensland's "accessible outback." That night we were given head lanterns and went on a night bush walk in hopes of seeing some animals but we only saw a lot of spiders...including the red-back, which is one of the most venomous spiders here in Australia. Earlier that evening we had seen some wild kangaroos though....including one with a joey in her pouch! The next morning I went on a bush-hike to Atkinson's lookout which was only about 1.5 hours round trip, but the view from the lookout was amazing because you could see half a dozen dormant volcanoes.