Day trip to Koombooloomba

We've been invited by friends to go camping to Koombooloomba Lake. Having heard about this dam from a few people but didn't know where it was exactly, we decided to investigate it on a day trip before we committed ourselves to accept the invitation.

It is situated about 60km south of Yungaburra, near Ravenshoe which incidentally is the highest town in Queensland at 930m elevation. Of course it has the highest pub in Queensland and the highest railway.

It took us close to 1hour 30m to get there. We went past the Windy Hill Wind farm. Combined with the Koombooloomba dam hydro electric dams, it generates enough electricity to power several towns.

We were somewhat disappointed with the Koombooloomba lake. Even though the water looks more attractive than Tinaroo lake (being blue in colour) it is surrounded by rocks and dirt, not much grass and the vegetation looks totally different (dry, dusty  and unattractive). The wildlife? I don't know, we didn't see any around apart from the March flies...

The camping sites are very rough and uncomfortable, no place to really enjoy the view, that is if there was a view worth watching… I guess we've been spoilt with Tinaroo lake which is close to tropical and pine forests.

We then went to Tully Falls Gorge, not far from there, 700m elevation with a 293m drop. Unfortunately  there hasn't been any rain lately and the water wasn't flowing down. We thought we could have lunch there, but after being attacked by hundreds of March flies, we decided to push on. The idea of having to swat ourselves continuously to stop these nasty, vicious creatures from biting us when trying to enjoy our food, somehow didn't appeal to us!

So we came back to Ravenshoe and stopped in a small park. Ravenshoe has 12 different species of possums, hence this sculpture (which Sven thought looked more like a pig!...)

All in all it was a nice day but we came to the conclusion that it is not worth for us to go camping there when we have this beautiful spot right here on our doorstep! Did I mention we're spoilt???