Carnarvon Gorge

This is a brief snapshot of the Carnarvon Gorge Section of Carnarvon National Park. Hope it tastes great. Carnarvon Gorge is a roughly 15km-long gorge, cut from the towering Carnarvon plateau which soars above the surrounding plains, harder to miss than a Myanmar plane carrying 104 souls - but then, I suppose, so many things are! It is the centrepiece to Central Queensland's portion of the Great Dividing Range. It sits inland from Rockhampton and Gladstone, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn, so skin capricorn constitutes one of the area's leading causes of death. Unfortunately, unlike Rockhampton, there's no statue of a cow welcoming you at its entrance, even though that's literally the best thing about the region. My favourite thing about Rockhampton is when it floods, and you see the cow statue surrounded by floodwaters - just a bit of fun and those photos are off the chain.

As good as immobile bovines are, Carnarvon Gorge runs a very close second. The serpentine gorge is imprisoned by sheer white sandstone precipices up to 200m tall - at sunrise when the valley floor is still ostensibly black, it makes for a morbid metaphor that most happy nature seekers aren't really totally sure they want to know about at the time. Tall, open eucalyptus forest and a grassy understory fill the gorge floor, and are home to a great variety of wildlife, including birds and mammals of both the trees and the ground. Wet microclimates are hidden in the countless side-gorges that have been carved from the sandstone over millennia of waterways trickling from the plateau high above.

So dramatic and self-justifying are the side-gorges of Carnarvon, that many of them have been named - much like the children of large families. In total opposition to that analogy, however, it is the side-gorges and canyons further down the line that get the least attention. Where earlier side gorges such as the Moss Garden (the entry to which is pictured below, between the two crags) are visited regularly due to the relatively short walk that it takes to access them, fewer people are willing to make the 15km or so return journey to the further attractions deeper in the gorge, such as Ward's Canyon (below). Ward's Canyon is a major refuge for the rare King's Fern - the largest fern in the world. Incidentally, bush rangers used to used it to dry out possum pelts a century or so ago, so whether you like plants so big they collapse in anything dryer than a moist fissure (just remember, "moist fissure") or murderous, 19th-century participants in the lucrative wildlife trade, Ward's Canyon has you covered. If you don't like anything that fits into that spectrum - frankly I'm still a bit unclear what sits between those two spectral extremes but maybe you'll know - I'm sure one of the many other side gorges will be more exactly to your tastes.

Finally, one of Carnarvon's great advantages is its catering to both scenic and wildlife criteria - many of Australia's most emblematic species, including kangaroos, wallabies, monotremes, emus and eagles all be found in relative abundance. And though this is wonderful, it's the Aussie Nibbles to the Infinite Jest that are the rarer, less well known species that Carnarvon is home to. One of the most enchanting of these is the Yellow-bellied Glider (pictured below - photographed elsewhere), which are social animals, calling their Listerine-gurgling cries that echo through the bush as they venture out from their hollows at sundown, and again as they return before sunrise. Similarly to how you can scream out a window in Sweden at night and get a bunch of other people screaming sweet hopefully nothings (I say hopefully because otherwise there's one guy who's just flatly not getting his wallet or innocence back), Yellow-bellied Gliders will respond to one another's Wilhelm Screaming so reliably that you can play recordings of these calls and track the real gliders using their replies. Climbing the gorge-side for sunrise (see top photo) normally lets you walk through the dark forest as the sky slowly grows lighter, surrounded by this wonderful, pretty unexpected tribute to the land of the chick from 27 Dresses (except not Katherine Heigl - after all, she'd be the chick from Life As We Know It) and disconcerting captor-captive dynamics.

Carnarvon Gorge is Australia's 'green canyon', a barranca (meaning 'a narrow, winding river gorge' - I learnt that word for this blog. You're welcome) home to a dazzling variety of natural landforms, flora and fauna. It's like Dream World for nature - filled with attractions jutting off here and there from the main drag, except that kid's don't rule - they're moreso just annoyingly loud and universally despised.