The previous day, when we booked in, we scheduled our tour of the lava tubes for 1:00pm in the afternoon. This meant that the morning was our own and noticing that the pool was somewhat lonely we took advantage of the space and ventured in for another swim.

The rest of the morning was fairly laid back until lunchtime before heading to the tour meeting area. Amazingly there were more tourists than I expected for this time of the year – enough to fill a small mini-bus, including our horde.

Then we set off into the Undara Volcanic National Park, a restricted access park that requires entry with a permit or via tour guide only. The reason for its restriction is due to the many lava tubes and caves that pit the area and the danger associated with someone falling down one. Plus, some of the caves have build ups of carbon monoxide within them, from time to time, and if not checked before entering can be fatal.

With all this knowledge imparted to ensure our close proximity to the guide we ventured into the first tube. These were created by a volcanic eruption that fed lava through fault-lines in the earth extending west of the Great Dividing Range.

It was quite an incredible experience to view this monolithic tube and imagine how a river of 1200° C lava could have formed its cavity. As we walked through the dark crevice, large enough to house an A380, the life-forms that took up residence in this habitat were varied extremely interesting; microwing bats, strangler fig roots (that extended more than a kilometre from the tree); plus wallabies and other marsupials that frequented the cave.

We visited two lava tubes on opposite sides of the park and while limited to the public access paths that park rangers had allowed we were suitably amazed at the experience. The trip back took us pass enclaves of wallaroos – macropods that are sized in between wallabies and kangaroos but aren’t the love-children of either. While most were happy to sit and watch our passing by some of the mothers with joeys in their pouch were a tad skittish and wouldn’t sit still for close-up photos.

Once the tour ended we headed back to the pool and spent the rest of the afternoon annoying other tourists by playing Marco-Polo. We would have invited them to join us but we weren’t sure what Marco-Polo was in German, French and Czechoslovakian.

We sat and enjoyed a BBQ for dinner before sheepishly heading off to the evening activity. Alas, it was the same tour as the previous night so we opted instead to have supper in the train station bistro. The kids were happy and we even considered hiding in the bush and scaring the unsuspecting bush-walkers on their return tour. In the end we decided that the German couple probably wouldn’t have enjoyed our humour as much as we did and thought better of it – another time, perhaps!

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