In the Crater

I really liked the Hostel in Murwillumbah, and was surprised as I have heard not too many good things about hostels in Australia. It is true, it was expensive, there was no free wifi and no bar or pool as in some (much cheaper) places in Asia, but the location, the old style of building and the owner more than made up for it. Especially since this Hostel is part of the YHA group that manage most of the hostels in Australia, I thought that they would put on more sort of franchise guidelines to the hostels, but this one was as individual as it could be. I think it may have been my favourite hostel on this trip.

Good that we booked another night in it and had the whole day to explore the surroundings of Murwillumbah.

As in nearly every town where there is anything to see in Australia this one also had a Tourist Information. It was just across the river from the hostel and when we went over there after a short walk through the village we were greeted by Bernd, an emigrated German who gave us a good idea of things to do and drives to take.

It was already to late to drive over to Mt. Warning and climb on top of the nearly 1156 m mountain, but the Tourist information had a room which had a panoramic view hand painted on it's four walls that showed the scenery from the top of Mt Warning. This shall be enough for us today.

We then jumped in the car and took a drive to the rim of the crater of the largest Shield Volcano in the southern hemisphere.

On the way there we would pass through very fertile valleys and then on the way up to the ridge we drove through the dense Gondwana rain forest and also into Queensland.

Just a couple of km after the state border we found our destination for the day. The Natural Arch National Park.

A water stream eroded a cave with a hole in the ceiling through which now the water comes down as a waterfall. It was not a very big park and a short walk through the rainforest after a short walk we reached the cave.

This was not enough for us and we decided we wanted to have a good look from the edge of the crater.

There were plenty of lookouts on the map that we got from the tourist information and we chose "Best of all lookouts" for the obvious reasons.

It was quite a bit of a drive away although it was only 4 km to the east of us as we had to go down a valley and up another one until we drove along the ridge, with a view to both sides into two different valleys.

It was a really nice drive.

After nearly an hour we got to the lookout from where we could see over the entire Volcano Valley and Mt Warning.

Back at the hostel we had some of the leftovers from the night before.