Glasshouse Mountains Getaway Climb every mountain.....well, one, anyway!
photos and text by Bianca Arnold
Even though I’d just been on a couple of weekends away, I’m always up for a trip. Donald wanted to go to the Glass House Mountains and stay in accommodations with a fireplace, so I found a place. We booked and headed up there on Monday morning.
We hadn’t had breakfast before leaving, so we stopped at the Lookout Cafe for some. The food was nothing to write home about, but the view was very nice:
After brekky, we drove up the road a kilometer or two to the actual lookout. It was quite overgrown with trees, so not that fantastic. I shot a panorama though:
We dropped in to check out our accommodations and dump our stuff. The fire was lit, so the place was nice and warm. It’s called Crookneck Retreat and our ‘room’ was surrounded by macadamia trees.
We realised that although we’d brought coffee and sugar and wine, we had forgotten to bring the coffee plunger. Oops. We headed into town (Beerwah) to have a look in some second-hand stores. We scored a good sized plunger and took it back to our place so we could have a nice coffee.
Since the sun was shining, and the weather forecast was for overcast and rain, we thought we’d go check out the walk at Mt Ngungun. This turned out to be a brilliant idea! It was getting towards late afternoon so the sun was low, but there were a lot of people going up the mountain. Most of them appeared to be locals getting some exercise!
There was a bit of a view about half way up, as well as some caves and we saw people abseiling there. It was a long way up:
Nearly there!
But it was definitely worth it for the view at the top!
Here’s a view of Mt Ngungun – you can see the little peak that we climbed to the top of:
After our exercise, we headed back to our accommodation and freshened up for dinner. We’d been told the pub was good, but we must’ve gone to the wrong pub, because it didn’t look appealing at all! We had seen an Indian restaurant on the other side of the tracks, so we headed there. They had a $21 banquet special on, so we had that. It was very nice and well worth the price, I thought.
We made good use of the spa at our place and then just relaxed by the fire and read books until bedtime.
Tuesday morning started out nice on one side the sky. Here’s Mt Coonowrin, seen from the road:
Unfortunately, it was dreary and overcast not long after that, once we arrived in Maleny. We stopped at the Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve. First order of the day was a nice breakfast at the cafe there.
After this, we went for a walk through the rainforest there. It requires a gold coin donation, but it’s worth it. It was raining, unfortunately, but it is a rainforest after all!
These trees are thought to be about 500 years old:
There was a lot of colourful and pretty fungus growing:
They had a little exhibition in the hut. It included a snake’s shed skin:
After this exercise and walk in the rain, we went for a little drive around to explore the area some more. This was off a little dirt track which I didn’t want to go down very far, since we were in my little car and not a 4WD! All the little puffs of cloud everywhere – I had assumed they were chimney smoke, but Donald thinks they’re just clouds.
We stopped in Maleny to get lunch…and cheeses as it turned out! We stopped at Colin James because it had good reviews on Tripadvisor. Their lunches didn’t appeal, but their little fromagerie did! We bought a few cheeses to go with our water bikkies in the evening. Yum!
We checked out a few other places, but ended up having lunch at the top (or bottom, not sure!) of town at the Organic Cafe. It looks like a produce shed. I had a great lentil soup, and Donald had some sort of quiche. They had quite a few vegetarian options.
I would recommend the place for lunch or just a coffee and browse.
This old shed and tree is just one street away from the main street of Maleny (and where we’d parked). I thought it was cute.
We stopped a couple of times on the way back to Glass House Mountains, to capture the views:
We were quite worn out after all this, so headed to our accommodations and had a nice coffee and relax by the fire. I dragged out the cheeses and we gorged on those so much that we didn’t want dinner. So we had another nice spa and then read in the cosy bed for a while.
Our last day dawned, so after coffee, packing up our gear and paying for the room, we headed down to the coast.
We stopped for breakfast at Caloundra. I finally got my eggs benedict! It was quite nice too, and the view from the cafe was great too – right on the water.
After brekky, we went for a walk along the path bordering the shore. It went on quite some way, but we only walked probably 1.5km along it before stopping and turning around. It’s beautiful, but very similar to Stradbroke, Gold Coast and northern NSW beaches.
And that was the end of our Glass House Mountain Escape.
Thanks for reading!
Bianca.