The Really Cool Undara Lava Tubes 29 - 30 July

We are really in the outback now!

Did you know that in the lava tube world Australia, well rocks!  We have an amazing collection of the biggest and best lava tubes in the world.  If you were a lava tube expert you would be hanging out to see our tubes. But wait, do I hear you ask, just what is a lava tube?

To have a lava tube experience you need to travel about 4 hours from Cairns to the Undara National Park.  There are 164 remnant volcano cones and vents in the park.  You can stay just outside the park, however we opted to stay in the park near the lava tubes at the Undara Experience.  The national park falls within a cattle property belonging to the Collins family.  When the national park was declared they retained a business lease to run tours showing people this amazing natural phenomenon.

The Tubes

But I still haven’t answered your question, what is a lava tube.  Well they look like this.

And then you step inside.

 Lava tubes are formed when large flows of lava ran through valleys and the outside of the lava crust cooled it creating a tunnel for which the rest of the hot lava continues to flow through.  These tubes were created over 190,000 years ago and in that time some of the roof sections have collapsed.  This revealed the tubes and created the caves and access ways to the tunnel.  The walls and ceilings of the tubes have these cool patterns, cracks formed in the cooling lava.

The only way to see one is to firstly drive a very long way and then you need to do one of the tours.  Lava tubes are amazingly old and in many ways fragile so there are no guide yourself options.  The Undara Experience offers two tours, the Archway Explorer and the Active Explorer.  We opted for the latter.  Both tours are 2 hours long, the difference being that for the Active Explorer you do need to do a bit of clambering up and down.  

In our second lava tube on this tour you also end up in complete darkness (our photos from that section didn’t work so well) with light only at the beginning and end – you do need to take a torch for this tour and if you have kids like ours they loved it (although they did want to turn their torches on from the beginning).  The tubes are also the home for many microbats as well.

The rest of our Undara Experience

Accommodation at the Undara Experience ranges from tents, through caravans to railway carriages.  Yep, the Collins family have brought out a series of old style railway carriages and converted them into sleeping accommodation.  We of course, stayed in our friend Cool George and to reduce costs cooked our own food.  The boys did have a good swim in the pool (this time I stayed on the edge and read my book).

There are a series of walks around the campground and we opted for the Bluff Walk.  We went in the late afternoon and the views and light were beautiful. 

 

Walking outback style!

 

It seemed somewhat surreal to David and I that we had started out our journey to Undara from the lush, green Millaa Millaa falls, travelled through rain and fog to emerge at this red, dusty, dry quintessential Australian outback experience. And to have changed our experiences from rainforest and reef to outback and rocks.  But we had more outback and more amazing rocks coming our way.