A day in the clouds

Yesterday the Friends group from the Botanic Gardens visited Eungella National Park for a guided walk and barbecue.  Eungella (pronounced young-ala, with the accent on the first syllable) is nearly 700 metres above seal level and has a huge diversity of plants and birdlife.   It is the northernmost location for plants growing to the south and the southernmost location for plants growing to the north - this really excites botanists!
We had a lot of fun, despite the weather not being as kind as it might have been.  We had glorious sunshine all week, then clouds and a few showers yesterday - back to sunshine again today!

 We had our barbecue outside this wonderful old hall.  It started life as a school in 1943, but was closed in 1960 and was used for a community hall for many years, but is really only a base for the camp site now.

 The rainforest runs along the rim, with cleared country behind it.  There used to be about thirty dairy farms up here, producing lovely milk but the big conglomerates came in, bought out the factory in Mackay, then closed it down.  Now the milk has to be transported nearly 400 km to Rockhampton to be processed and consequently there are only three farmers left - and they are struggling.  All very sad.

 This was looking over the escarpment towards Mackay.
I hope I have some more photos taken on the actual walk tomorrow.  Another friend took them and downloaded them onto a memory stick for me, but we can't read them, so I shall have to visit her at work tomorrow and retrieve them from another computer - I think she had a Mac laptop, hopelessly incompatible with our Microsoft software.............technology is a bore sometimes.