Jeremy in Australia: Rainforest/Wallaman Falls

View of the falls from the top

View of the falls from the bottom

So two weeks ago I was able to do one of my goal trips, which was to hike around Wallaman Falls. Wallaman Falls is the tallest waterfall in Australia (over 1000 feet including about a 900 foot free fall) so I was pretty excited to do this. I signed up for a weekend trip in a group of 8 people and we headed out Saturday morning.

During the day Saturday we spent most of our time exploring the rainforest and learning about the area. The Wet Tropics of Queensland are a world heritage area because they are the oldest rainforest on earth and a critical ecosystem for this area of the world. Queensland is the only place in the world with two World Heritage Areas (Wet Tropics and Great Barrier Reef). Our guide Ross was really knowledgeable about the rainforest so it was cool how much he taught us about it. We did a couple of different hikes through the rainforest, and also got to stop at some waterfalls to swim. Cool stuff. The highlight of the day was in the evening when we went down to a river to look for platypus. Platypus are extremely rare and only like 15% of Australian's or something like that have ever seen one. We were in one of the few areas of the country where you can see them on a regular basis. We ended up spending about an hour watching them and got to see a bunch. I was really surprised at how small they are-only about a foot long. For some reason I had an image of them being like 3 feet long and the size of a beaver or something. Still, it was really cool. Later that night we also did a night hike and saw bats, gliders, possums, and a ton of what they call "kangaroo rats" which are basically tiny wallabies. It was pretty neat.

Platypus! This was the best picture I could get, but we did see them consistently for about an hour

Diving through a waterfall

Sunday was the big day we got to go to Wallaman Falls, which was the highlight of the trip for me. There was viewing observations across the gorge of the falls which provided great pictures, and then we did a 2 km hike down to the base of the falls. It was really amazing as I've never seen anything near that big. We were there during the dry season, so I can't even imagine how powerful the falls must be during the rainy season. Crazy stuff. It was an awesome trip and great weekend, not only did we see some cool stuff but we also learned a lot about the area as well.