Nerang State Forest Walk, Gold Coast, Queensland

Night Walk
Saturday 15 November 2008 (1 day)

By Crikey! What an adventure. I was out for a night walk with the Gold Coast Bushies to commemorate Steve Irwin Day
Fifteen of us plus dog met at 3pm to enter the gum forest - a remnant forest important for its rare flora and fauna species only 10km west of Surfers Paradise.

Half-an-hour in we got to the Coombabah Creek. How like a Waitakere stream it was as some plunged in to cool off and others skirted around the edges. Rather overgrown with weed in places, the creek opened out into better-looking rain forest with tall straight hoop-pines and plenty of regeneration. Someone spotted a staghorn here and another, an orchid hanging daintily in a tree.

Poor Scruffy, the pint-sized dog, was running back and forth working out how not to get his feet wet.

In high humidity and with the sound of a loud chorus of cicadas we forged upstream as far as daylight permitted.

Darkness falls quickly in the tropics and, regrettably, by 5pm we had to turn back in time for ‘supper’ cooked on a campfire. Jackie (a previous outback tour cook) had stayed to tend to the coals. She produced damper for us to cook wound around sticks held over the fire and this was consumed with golden syrup and billy tea made especially nice with eucalypt leaves. How crazy we thought, standing over a hot fire on a 25-degree day. Scruffy had to be ministered to, having seven ticks taken off him, so he was not allowed to walk out but was carried.

After destroying the fireplace we turned on our headlights for the walk out. Until now I had been disappointed with the lack of wildlife, not having seen the expected roos and goannas. But there were cane toads aplenty for the leader to boot out of the way (cringe!). Then we found a young bird nestled on the track neatly camouflaged. I thought it an owl but it was reckoned to be a nightjar - fairly common. Further on a small snake slithered out in front of us. Now Aussies rarely see snakes so I didn't quite believe their ID of a tiger snake (possibly Stephens Banded Snake). But it rounded off our walk nicely, as five minutes later we were out at the cars and consuming cold orange juice and home-made fruit cake laid on for us. Bewdy mate!