Hidden Valley Tour!

 A group of friends and I went through the Sharkies travel agency on campus and booked a weekend trip called the hidden valley tour. There were two vans of us going on this trip, about 8 people in each, so it was a fairly small group. We started our journey at 9am on Saturday morning, first heading to Crystal Creek. Crystal Creek is only about 45 minutes away from Townsville and it is freshwater rock pools that you can swim in. It was rather cloudy that day but it was still beautiful there. The water was very cold butt that did not stop us from going in of course. If you were to go to crystal creek, a common thing you would see is people jumping off of the huge boulders into the creek. It looked terrifying but I figured while I was there I hate to try it. It was really fun, quite the rush for sure, but still scary. It looks much higher when you are standing on the edge of this giant rock cliff compared to when you’re hanging out in the water at the bottom of it. Once I hit the water, the strong current pulled me under and it took me a few seconds to get out, but I did haha. J

After crystal creek we then made our way up to the Paluma rainforest where we went on a rainforest walk and had lunch. Then we stopped at a pottery place where a guy runs his own pottery place in Paluma. Once we were done there we continued working our way up the mountains toward Hidden Valley. It took quite a while to get up there and the roads were pretty rocky and windy. The Hidden Valley Cabins are where we were staying for the night, and it was pretty cool there. It was basically in the middle of nowhere, but the resort was running completely on solar power, which is something you don’t come across very often. Megan, Julie, and I got our own cabin with 3 beds in it which was surprisingly pretty nice. We then got a couple hours of free time until it was dinner time, which actually kind of sucked. We were supposed to go down to the river to go on a platypus spotting tour, but unfortunately the river was too flooded so we could not do that, which had been one of the things I was looking forward to doing on that trip. The couple of hours till dinner dragged on because there was not much to do, and we were not expecting to have this free time so we had not brought things to occupy our time. So we ended up going on a walk to just explore around till it got dark. Dinner was really good, they actually barbequed steaks for us and made homemade bread and such, followed by cake and ice cream which is always a plus haha. Of course by now it is dark out and so we head our on our night spotting tour. I was pretty excited and expecting to see some crazy animal life but we did not end up seeing anything to special. Saw a lot of possums mainly as well as a couple small random things. One part of this night walk that I absolutely loved however was the sky. The stars were phenomenal; they were so clear and close looking, and you could even see the Milky Way. 

The next morning we got up, had breakfast then loaded up the vans to start the second day of our trip. This day however, consisted of a lot of driving time, which was kind of a bummer. But, what we were driving to see was worth it. We went to Wallaman Falls, the largest single drop waterfall in Australia. We had a picnic lunch at the falls then got back into the vans for the long drive back to Townsville. Along the way we made a couple more stops yet. We were supposed to go check out another set of waterfalls but due to flooding on the road we could not get to them. We stopped at Frosty Mango, which is an ice cream shop where they grow all of their own fruit and hand make all these exotic kinds of ice cream. I of course went for the fresh pineapple ice cream which was very good but awfully sweet. Since our last stop we were going to did not work out for us, we were then going to stop at a swimming hole not to far away. It was very pretty there and the water was bright blue and pretty clear. Again, it was a cloudy day and the water was freezing so we decided not go in, but it was nice to relax there and be out of the vans for a while. This was our last stop of the trip so once everyone was ready to go, we packed up and headed to the uni. We got back on Sunday around 5pm. 

So there were some down sides of the trip such as the weather and not being able to see a platypus but overall it was a good trip and I got to see a lot!