Cedar Creek Falls

Recent half-day tours to Tamborine Mountain

Araucaria Ecotours has recently joined with Living Social and the Starlight Foundation (an Australia-wide organisation dedicated to helping seriously-ill children and their families) to offer discounted half-day tours from Brisbane to Tamborine Mountain (offer now closed). Read more on this in a Tamborine Daily Star article

The waterfalls have been pounding down very nicely after all the rain we’ve had recently. Mostly on this half-day tour we just visit Curtis Falls, but we took a little extra time on our most recent tour to also visit the Cedar Creek Falls, which we haven’t seen so often this year because the road was closed for a while due to flooding.

While there we were visited by a hopeful lace monitor (goanna) while having tea and biscuits under the gum-trees. We don’t feed the wildlife on our tours, but the goannas have learned that some picnickers still do, or at least leave a few scraps behind, so they lumber through the area in with their prehistoric-looking walking style, flicking their forked tongues to determine the direction of whatever scent they find most interesting

Goanna searching the picnic grounds

“Now where is that scent coming from?”

Another bit of wildlife action was a female golden orb-weaver spider catching a small dragonfly in her web, and vigorously wrapping it up for later.

Golde orb-weaver preparing to wrap dragonfly

The Curtis Falls in the Joalah section of Tamborine Mountain National Park have been putting on a good show – they’re small but in a very pretty setting

Approaching Curtis Falls

Not quite as vigorous as last month but still good to see

A special feature of this tour is visiting the glow worm caves on Cedar Creek Estate, which were constructed to take the pressure of wild populations of glow worms

Into the glow worm cave

No photos are allowed of the actual glow worms in the cave because it causes them to turn off their lights and stop feeding, so the following photo is from a post card:

glow worms glowing

And finally, everyone gets to taste half a dozen local wines, some from Cedar Creek Estate itself and some from elsewhere in southeast Queensland

Tasting local wines

Half-day tours are still running throughout winter, and full-day Tamborine Mountain tours throughout the year (including all the above plus the Skywalk through the rainforest canopy and a gourmet picnic lunch). We also visit the glow worms on our Wildlife and Forests Day-tour