The Joy of Spontaneity

4 min readJan 27, 2022

What do you do when you can’t really do any through-hikes? Or when summer is coming in too fast, and spring is an all too brief a moment?

And you realise that it is October and you haven’t hiked or travelled for a whole year.

No point crying — what I did was pack up family and head into a nearly mountain that hid an underground waterfall — and all we had in hand was bottles of drinking water and a couple of “nutritional needs” for the six year old. For me, of the long planning, and preparedness, this was a revolutionary step. Changing up your routine and way of doing things is a great way to jerk you out of the winter of your discontent.

And so, this is a short post about a purely family picnic, a long drive, an underground hike, followed by splashing about in a river untrammelled by railings, rules and rear view mirrors.

Sometimes going outside takes you inside yourself, and this walk was as much about an internal journey that reminded me of what is really precious in this world, waterfalls, water and wind in the trees in a forest. Yes, that too, but really, it was family, fear (the conquering of) and the joy of faraway places that are quite near you.

The walk to the waterfall

The waterfall is in a steep and narrow valley hidden in a pocket of rainforest nestling in the border ranges between Queensland and New South Wales. Yes, the borders are still closed, but the river flows untrammelled. The walk down is a circuit, with steep stairs and a bit of a scramble, or a gently graded longer path meandering along the sides of rainforest loud with birds and the sound of rushing wind…but wait, a snake.

Yes there was a serpent in paradise. at the last stretch of the path, between towering trees, a green and yellow snake languidly lounged across the path, stopping foot traffic on both sides, as we watched it ooze into the forest, and curl itself under a sunny moss covered rock in an endless curl of shivering coils.