|
In Australia they have an expression, "pissed as a parrot", and if
you visit Cedar Creek winery on Tamborine Mountain in Queensland,
you will
find out why.
Thousands of parrots live there, and many, mostly rainbow lorikeets and king
parrots, like to feed on grapes. Some of the fruit ferments on the vine and
it goes straight to their heads. "They quite often start fighting each
other," says Bridget on the winery's front desk. "That can go on
for a while. They squawk and carry on. Crazy behaviour. Then they fall off
the vines and go to sleep on the ground." A typical evening out up
northern Australia, then? Bridget doesn't comment.
The winery doesn't mind, though, and lets the parrots feed. Generous, but then
they're like that. They like nature. They've also tried to help out the
local glow-worms. Not to be confused with fireflies, which are beetles,
glow-worms are the larvae of gnats, and are found only in Australia and New
Zealand. Tourists love them, and have been visiting Mount Tamborine's
national park to see them in such vast numbers that the insects got stressed
and their colonies shrank. So in 2004 Cedar Creek built a glow-worm cave to
divert the tourists. It started with just 100 glow-worms and now has 4,000,
making it the largest colony anywhere in the world.
I'm at Cedar Creek courtesy of Araucaria Ecotours, an award-winning Brisbane
firm run by Ronda Green, a zoologist, supported by her amiable son Damian,
who drives the van. It runs day trips out of Brisbane, plus longer journeys,
including a six-day venture into the heart of the outback. The aim is always
to keep ecological impact at a minimum. If you've flown to Australia, that's
a lot of carbon footprint, so this represents a nice way to keep it down
while you're there. The Rainforests, Glow-worms and Wine tour is one of its
day trips. We took in the rainforest first with a visit to the Skywalk, a
fragile-looking elevated steel walkway that threads through a kilometre of
forest canopy on Tamborine Mountain.
On the hour-long walk, Ronda, who is friendly and chatty, proves herself an
expert on all things nature-related. "There's no wind in the
rainforest, so the trees rely on birds to disperse seeds," she says.
And then points out a huge strangler fig, so-called because it grows in a
predatory way around and out of the carcass of another tree. The fig sweeps
up in such primeval curves it looks as if it were sculpted. So does an
artistic wiggly pattern carved in the bark of a tree, which turns out to be
the work of a large slug – the red triangle slug, to be precise. Our path is
thronged with geckos, dragonflies, butterflies and lacewings. And then is
some native ginger. "You can use the roots just like normal ginger,"
says Ronda. (I begin to feel Ronda could survive quite successfully in the
wild.)
But the headliners of the trip are the glow-worms. Inside their cave it's
dark, damp, quiet and eerie. You look up as if at the night sky, studded
with thousands of fiery stars, only the stars are insects. They live along
the cave walls, close enough to see that each glow-worm reclines behind a
curtain of elegant threads, as if it were in a minuscule boudoir. The
threads have a purpose: they're sticky and catch prey, insects attracted by
the glow-worm's shining rear. The glow has inspired the winery to wax
lyrical with a poem: "I wish I was a glow-worm. A glow-worm's never
glum 'cos how can you be grumpy when the sun shines out your bum."
Well, indeed.
Emerging blinking from the cave, our next stop is the winery restaurant, next
to a small lake, where we enjoy food, wine and yet more wildlife:
slow-moving eastern water dragons sunbathing on the lawn to our left, and
flamboyant rainbow lorikeets at the bird-feeders to our right. The
lorikeets, which are loud and raucous, are very common in Australia, but no
less dazzling for that, their upper bellies a block of flaming orange, their
heads and lower bellies sapphire blue, their wings brilliant green, their
beaks post-box red. If birds are your thing, this is a good part of
Australia to visit: roughly half of all its species have been spotted in
south-east Queensland.
And birds are not the only flying creatures about. We visit a fruit bat
colony, hanging in their hundreds like flaccid balloons in trees by the side
of the road, croaking grumpily, with their leathery wings wrapped round
themselves. We also make a quick visit to Cedar Creek Falls, a small, rough
waterfall, where Ronda chats about the rich red volcanic soils and I rest
for a while by the rock pools, listening to the water. As I settle back into
the van en route back to Brisbane, I reflect on its lucky residents who have
so much within reach of their city. Tamborine Mountain seems a fine place.
No wonder the parrots are celebrating.
Compact Facts
How to get there
Austravel (0800 988 4676; austravel.com) offers seven nights' fly-drive in
Southern Queensland from £1,549 per person, including four-star
accommodation, car hire and return flights from London, Heathrow to
Brisbane. Araucaria Ecotours (0061 7 55441283 araucariaecotours.com.au).
Rainforests, Glowworms and Wine day-trip from Brisbane costs $143 (£80)
including lunch, refreshments, wine-tasting, all entries and sales tax.
Cedar Creek Estate (0061 7 5545 1666; cedarcreekestate.com.au). Skywalk
(0061 7 5545 2222; rainforestsky walk.com.au).
Compare Travel Insurance - 5 day Euro cover from £4.33 and Annual worldwide policies from just £43.08
Source: The Independent(www.independent.co.uk) |
