Elad’s blog

Here is a nice story about Captain James Cook, the great explorer of the southern seas, and the one who discovered Australia.

He first landed on Botany Bay, where Sydney’s airport is now located. He saw nothing there, and continued sailing along the coast, heading north. He went pass the easternmost point of Australia, which is now called Byron Bay after his grandson (Cook is generally admired here) and then he reached a point where the water was full of rocks. To prevent others from crushing into this rock he marked it on his map, and clearly stated: “Warning! Point Dangerous!”.

As it happened, the word “Warning” was written just by the location of the highest mountain in New South Wales. Thus, the one who followed Cook understood that this was the name of the mountain, and until this very day the highest mountain in New South Wales is named“Mount Warning”. Needless to mention, the rocks at the sea are called, of course, “Point Dangerous”.

Today We left Byron Bay and headed to Queensland. First, we climbed to the lighthouse at Byron, and saw a huge herd of dolpihns swimming in the bay beyond us. Once we were done watching the dolphins, we headed to Surfers-Paradise (yes, it is actually a name of a place!).
After reading the above story at my lonely planet, we decided not to go directly to Surfers but to make a small detour and visit this mountain. We didn’t arrive directly to it, because it turned out to be too far away, but we did enter the mountain area (some dozens of kilometres off the seashore) and had a lovely scenic drive through the mountains.

We also stopped for a nice hiking there, just following a small river to a waterfall that went through a stone arch and formed a small pool. After the hike we prepared some tea and had a lovely afternoon. This mountain area is very different then the Blue Mountains. The main flora is at parts dominated by pines and oaks, and at parts is the remaining of a small rainforest - with huge trees and jungle-like atmosphere. Between the mountains are green fields, with many cows and some horses at the small villages.

At the evening we arrived at Surfers-Paradise. It is quite different than what I expected - doesn’t seem like a small, lazy, beachtown, but much more touristic and commercialized - with big hotels, store arcades, and all this stuff. Tomorrow I will probably try a bit surfing, to see if the town’s name is actually justified.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 29th, 2005 at 14:18 and is filed under Travels, Australia East Coast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.