Queensland Road Trip

As part of my last weekend in Brisbane, Chalky and I decided to do a little road-trip. With no plan at all we chucked a few things in the back of his car and headed off on Good Friday.

We headed down the Cunningham Highway out west towards Warwick. Our first stop was Aratula - just East of the Great Dividing Ranges and the Main Range National Park. Aratula was a tiny little place but did a very nice Chicken sandwich. We only stopped here for about half an hour before heading on.

The road took us through the Great Dividing Ranges and some spectacular views before we met the New England highway and headed south into Warwick.

Warwick is a fairly large town - at least for one not on the coast. It was however, absolutely dead on the account of it being a public holiday. Not one single shop was open not even a newsagent. The town itself was very pretty and green. We wandered to the park and saw the War Memorial (like most other memorials in Australia - it says 1914 - 1919 - I have yet to work out who the Australians were fighting in 1919. Maybe no-one told them the war was over) and then down the main street. They have a fairly impressive town hall and post office with some wonderful architecture.

Next stop, further south down the highway, was Stanthorpe. Very similar to Warwick, although with slightly more of an industrial feel to it and probably only half the size. It still had the same features though: park, town hall, post office, two churches and a chartered accountants! We stopped here for lunch after we found a place that was actually open.

Just north off the border with New South Wales was our next stop: a national park called Giraween National Park. We drove to the information centre and found a couple of good walks. It was about 4pm by this point so we decided on one that the information board said would take approximately 2 hours which we figured we could do in an hour (we had a rugby game to catch at 6). It involved climbing a peak called 'The Pyramid'.

Before we had even left the camp-ground we saw a Kangaroo happily munching away on grass. Unfortunately, he wasn't happy for long as the people behind us decided to chase it. Shame there are idiots everywhere.

We set off through some open forest, crossed a creek, and very shortly we got our first sight of the peak. It was a granite dome and looked very steep from where we were standing. We set-off up the peak at a fairly steady pace and soon reached the foot of the dome where we realised that it was even steeper than we first thought. The angle was probably about 30 degrees and the rock itself was quite slippy so we were taking fairly small steps. There were white dots painted on the slope which allowed us the follow a route up - it wasn't a straight route as it meandered to the left and found less steep areas. The view at the top was well worth it though with a 360 degree view of the national park all around us.

The walk back down was a lot quicker and we got back to the car within an hour of setting off and headed back through the park to the New England Highway. It wasn't long before we had crossed the border into New South Wales and were at our destination for the night off Tenterfield, allegedly the birthplace of the Australian nation although we weren't able to find out why. We found ourselves a motel room just in time to catch the opening Super 14 match of the weekend, before grabbing a Chinese and then watching the opening NRL match of the weekend.

The following morning, we had a good breakfast of bacon and eggs before heading east towards Casino and Lisemore along the Bruxner Highway. It was quite a windy road for the first 50 km or so and there were very few towns - just small villages: Drake, Tabulam and Mummulgum before arriving in Casino. Casino is quite a large place but we couldn't find a casino so no idea why it's called that.

From there we headed north towards Kyogle and the Border Ranges National Park. We didn't bother stopping in Kyogle but headed into the Border Ranges. On a hunch, we took a route signposted "Scenic Drive" but did say Brisbane. This was a private road funded and maintained by the local Lions group. They even provided the funds to build it, in order to maintain a better route between Queensland and New South Wales. It proved to be a great choice, not only because it was actually quicker (it cut a corner for us), but the scenery was spectacular as it winded it's way through the Border Ranges and into Queensland. It pretty much followed the route of the train line - built to bring out timber from when they used to log the forests here. We stopped once, at a lookout point and then continued into Queensland. Once in Queensland, the terrain was a lot more open and grassy and we crossed several creeks over tiny wooden bridges. We did get stuck behind a slow moving campervan at this point but lost him just before we turned off the Lions road and onto the Mount Lindesay Highway heading north to Beaudesert and Brisbane.

We stopped in Beaudesert for a late lunch after passing the Boystown site and pointing out a few of the cottages and the gym that we could see from the road to Chalky. We didn't hang around though and headed towards Mt Tamborine National Park where we enjoyed a leisurely drive up into the park, through North Tamborine and Eagle Heights before meeting the Pacific Highway and on back to Brisbane.