A Bushwalk at Mt Buffalo

The family visited Mt Buffalo Nat'l Park in NE Victoria shortly after Christmas. This was the place where we had gone in August to take the girls toboganning(sledding), but now things had warmed up. Phillip had the opportunity to visit the park in early Dec. with the Army to do what the Aussies call Adventure Training where he ab-seiled or rappeled down a rock cliff and then did a little rock climbing to get out. About 20 meters from where he went down the cliff was the platform that hang gliders took off from so that gives you an idea about where we were and how high we were.

When we got to the top of the mountain which is about a half hour drive along a very twisty road we found a man preparing to take a group rappelling. The girls had all kinds of questions for him, the primary of which was, "is it safe?" He just laughed and made a joke about women being more dangerous than rappelling, which the girls didn't get at all.

We started our bushwalk planning on heading towards an overlook and an underground river formed many years ago when some of the mountain shifted or collapsed or something and buried it. It was a nice walk on a well maintained trail. Most parts had steps built into the downslopes. We paused often and enjoyed the scenery and gave the girls a chance to make some sketches in their nature journals. This was actually a field trip for homeschool and they had an assignment to complete.

We made it about a kilometer down the trail when we got worried about the time and Katherine got a little tired and Rebecca started getting a blister on her heel, not to mention the fact that Phillip had just had the wires removed from his foot about a week prior, so we turned around and headed back out. After a water and potty break at the top we watched a child rappel off one of the shorter dropoffs which sparked some interest among our girls. Some said they thought it was cool and they'd like to try and others who said, "you'd never catch me doing that!"

Phillip had one last thing to show the girls before they left. Something he had been shown when they visited the park in early Dec. He had brought bird seed along and none of the girls could figure out why. He stood outside the car under the trees with his arms outstretched and all of a sudden a bright red parrot flew down and landed on his arm to eat the seed. The girls got out of the car and fed the parrot too. Phillip said that when they were up there before that there had been about 4 of these parrots, called Roselas.

We're definately going back and trying that again and hopefully getting a little longer walk in next time. We bought the season pass and it's only a little over an hour to get there from our house, so we have no excuse not to ...right?