I think I failed to mention in the last post that we got certified on the last day of 2009. If you had told me at the start of the year that we would be living in Australia by new years I would have thought you were crazy. In the words of Ferris Bueller "Life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while you could miss it." Never has this been more clear to me than it is now. 2009 was the first time since I was fourteen that I didn't have a job at any point. Now we live on the other side of the world from home and I have a job. It's kinda trippy when you think about it.
When we got our certificates it was about 4pm. We had decided to get out of Byron and head back to Mt. Warning and take another shot at getting to the top. The weather looked promising for the next few days and Leah had her heart set on it.
It was a strange feeling when we left town. We both fell in love with Byron Bay. We like Brisbane, but a city is a city. Byron was the first place we had gone on an adventure and it was hard to leave. On the way out of town all we cold talk about was how much fun we had scuba diving. I think we're both addicted to it. I'll be putting scuba gear on my Christmas wish list.
As we started up the coast Leah got a little headache. She took some advil and drank a big bottle of water. Now there are a lot of benefits to having a parent who is a doctor, but there are some negatives too, namely a penchant for being a bit of a hypochondriac. Leah was convinced she was getting "the bends". I had to talk her off the ledge a bit. All of the diving we did was well within the limits of us not getting "the bends" but she got a little paranoid. It was funny.
We grabbed a sandwich (did I mention that subway doesn't have mustard here? They also charge $2 for a soda refill) and hit the road. It isn't far from Byron back to Mt. Warning but we kind of took our time. We stopped in town and picked up some items for dinner. Back at Mt. Warning Holiday Park we found another camp site. It started to rain again and we cooked our dinner (mac and chee with tuna and peas) under our umbrellas.
We chatted it up with our camping neighbors. The wife was aborigine and had some really amazing stories about her Grandma and family. If you've seen Rabbitt Proof Fence, she said that her Grandma experienced that exact situation since she was light skinned, a "half-blood." She was chatting Leah's ear off. The husband was Australian. They have a daughter who is married to an American. They live in Sacramento. The daughter/American husband are moving back to Australia to start having children. The daughter is really freaked about raising kids in America. She thinks that police are extremely scary with their guns and she once saw an officer tackle an elderly woman for "no reason." It was really interesting and fun to chat with this couple.
In order to make the top of the mountain by sunrise (5:45am) we figured that we'd have to get up about 3:30am. The campsite had some fun New Years Eve festivities going on and it was packed with kiddos. We were so exhausted from scuba-ing that we could barely keep our eyes open. We fell asleep at 9pm. First NYE that we didn't make it until midnight in a LOOOONG time. However, I'm not sure why but we both woke up right at midnight, told each other happy new year and fell right back to sleep.
At 3:30 our alarm went off and we poked our heads out of the tent and saw stars. We figured that we had a good shot at seeing sunrise so we got up and drove to the trail head. We didn't even make coffee.
The sign at the bottom of the mountain said to allow two hours to hike to the top. Usually we can hike a lot faster than those kinds of estimates, but as we started out we realized that we only had one head-lamp between the two of us. This was going to slow us down. The rain forest that we were hiking through was pretty dense and it was 4 am. It was pitch black and the trail was rocky and muddy. We started out pretty slow, but found our stride quick enough. We hadn't been walking long when we noticed what looked like small lights in the woods. Turns out there are mushrooms that glow in the dark. No, we weren't/aren't on drugs. There really were glowing mushrooms in the forest. Australia is weird.
We had hiked for almost an hour and a half and we were getting near the top. Mt. Warning is an extinct volcano and what remains is just the plug. The whole area is now a national park. The mountain was named by Captain Cook but was called Wollumbin by the Aborigines. Wollumbin means fighting cheif of the mountains. Whatever you call it, it's awesome.
The final stretch of the climb is a nearly vertical scramble up bare rocks aided by a chain. The clouds had moved back in and nearly the entire climb we were actually in the clouds, the humidity was 100%. We were both sweating and tired by the time we made the top. And of course when we got there you couldn't see a damn thing. I took this picture of a sign up there because all we could see was cloud.
We asked someone to take our picture and it looked almost exactly like the one at the top of the blog right now only there was no scenery in the background. There were quite a few people on top and we had passed and been passed by quite a few on the way up. We rested a bit and in a few minutes lots of the people had started to head back down the hill. And then all of a sudden the cloud was gone. Literally it took 1 second and you could see most of the valley below. We had another picture snapped and took a few for other people. And again the cloud was back and you couldn't see more than ten feet. It was really strange. As we stood around talking on top the clouds came and went about ten times. It was so windy you could see the clouds race across the valley and sweep up the mountain. In between clouds we tried to get as many good pictures as we could.
Though we were hot and sweaty while we were hiking, we got cold quickly on top, the wind was howling. An hour was all we wanted to stay at the top. Hiking back down the very top stretch was a little tricky.
The hike down took about half the time as the hike up (1:45 btw) and it was really cool seeing all the scenery that we had missed. All we really knew hiking up in the dark was that the track was rocky and muddy. What we didn't know was just how impressive the rain forest was. Here are a few pictures.
When we got back down the hill we packed up our camp and it was time to head home. And that was that, full week of awesomeness.
Some observations for today:
-The letter H is pronounced HAITCH
-Hyundai is pronounced Hee-yun-die
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