O' Reilly's Treetop Walk & Glow Worms

May 8, 2010

In the beautiful Lamington National park is O' Reilly's Rainforest. In the Rainforest there is an amazing treetop walk, i.e. there is a bridge built so you can walk through the top of the trees.

After you walk across one of the bridges you can then climb up a ladder to see the view from above all the trees. I didn't take my little prego self up there but Ryan, my Dad and Andrew went up and said it was amazing.
Here is what they saw....

Ezra had a blast!

The Strangler Fig starts as a tiny seed in the canopy. The roots grow down to the forest floor where they take root and begin to take nutrients from the soil. Gradually the roots wrap around the host tree, slowly forming a lattice-work that surrounds the host's trunk. The fig's crown grows foliage which soon overshadows the tree. Eventually, the host tree dies leaving the fig with a hallow trunk.

The pictures are from the view if you climb inside and look up. See the hole in the top? They are really amazing!

The middle photo is Andrew inside one of the stranger figs. Now look very closely to the center of the other two photos and you will see a tiny caterpillar! These caterpillars were hanging by a threads. We saw four of them. Some were climbing or sliding (I don't know what else to call it) up and some down. I sat and watched one "climb" all the way to the ground, then it broke the string and crawled into the stranger fig. Pretty cool!

On our drive on the way to our next stop we saw a couple of cool thing we did not get pictures of but I think they should be mentioned.

First we saw a bunch of cows crossing the road. I was really crazy to see in the middle of the a winding road. The other cool thing was that we saw a wild wallaby with a baby in her pouch also standing beside that same winding road.

Now our last stop was something I personally was really excited about......

GLOW WORMS!!!

Did you know they were real? I sure didn't. I thought it was just a cute toy Fisher Price made up.

Here is the beautiful waterfall an the way to the cave.

The view from inside the cave.

Here is a picture of the glow worms. It does NOT do it justice what so ever!!!

We sat in the cave waiting for it to get dark and all of a sudden you would see one little light pop up, then another and another until the cave looked like thousand of stars in the sky. The younger the glow worm is the darker it needs to be for their light to shine. The reason they glow is to attract their prey.
What an amazing sight!