Hiking with the Hillbillies

After doing the airport shuffle early on Monday, Kevin and Adam were dead set on making it to the Great Barrier Reef before they had to leave on the 12th. Seeing as my family farm is basically on the way I agreed to ride north with them, crash at the farm and take a train back to Sydney. I start the 6 hour drive north and the longhairs start baby heading and drooling on themselves. We make the drive in good time stopping once for some Australian truck stop food, which was pretty decent. Who would have thought that a chicken sandwich would taste good with beets on it??

We pull up to my Aunt Marnies farm for some extra blankets and a hot meal of some superb chicken curry, vegetable curry and some rice. She drives us over the the farm and explains how the door lock works, and shuffles off to bed as it is rather late at this point. After chasing off some wallabies we settle in for the night. Still a bit jet lagged we wake up early and head into town to grab some food for the day. A $100 later and we are stocked with 3 squares and tons of snacks. We crush some fresh muffins on the way back to the farm, then make sandwiches to take with us on our hike up waterfall gully.

Basically this hike is up through 5/6 waterfalls with a massive set of falls at the top. Seeing as it is winter the water was a bit too cold to wade through, so we have to make the climb trying to stay dry which drastically increases the danger factor. We have put up a series of fixed lines which make a dry approach possible.


After some serious vertical hiking, as well as a couple of flintstone feet on the slippery spots we make it to the final waterfall. We hang out for a bit, crush our sandwiches and some water and turn around for the scramble back down.



We make it down without too many incidents and hustle back to the farm just as a huge rainstorm starts to break over the mountains. Thick fog creeps through the peaks and gullys, and the rain pours down. We destroy some easy mac as an appetizer and start prepping our massive dinner; teriyaki beef and veggie shishkabobs with peppers, tomatoes and onion, and some grilled potatoes. After stuffing our faces we slowly start to slip into a food coma. As we cue up some Chappelle show and the space heater starts whirring, we slowly drop off to sleep. Woken up by Aunt Marnie some 2 hours later we realize that we had all fallen asleep around 6 pm. 2 days of tournament paintball, nights out drinking and some 7 hours of driving and I guess we all hit the wall. Luckily the hillbillies woke up at 5:45 the next morning as they continue on their way north headed for the Reef. I got a text from them saying they made it to WhitSunday island and they got to dive a bit on the reef so hopefully they took a bunch of pics. I will post them as soon as I get them.