Perfect Place To Start

So we were on a voyage of discovery. What better place to base ourselves than at the "Discovery Centre" at Ubobo. We'd been there before for a couple of functions that were well catered, so we decided to camp again for a couple of nights while we spent a day exploring the valley. The amenities are excellent and there's heaps of room. Especially this weekend as we had the place to ourselves. We arrived on a Friday arve, picked a nice spot under a couple of trees and set up the tent. The sign on the office basically said to make yourself at home and someone would catch up sometime later. True to their word, it wasn't long before a lady arrived, opened the office, and popped over for a chat and to collect the $10/night fee. She also answered our questions about the area and provided a map and directions to where we wanted to go. The Boyne Valley is surrounded by national parks and state forests. We were going to check out Kalpowar State Forrest with their old rail tunnels and try to find the Glassford copper mine. We settled in for the first night with a couple of cold ones and watched the resident kangaroos come out of the bush for a feed of the green grass around the local houses. The next morning we left early and headed for Kalpowar. We followed one of the back roads suggested to us that follows the Kolan River and eventually we arrived at the Kalpowar camp ground. We drove on and found the spot explained to us fairly easily and parked the car. We had to walk from here. Make sure you wear good shoes and take water as it's a good walk of a couple of kilometres over sleepers and ballast/rocks to the first tunnel. We walked another couple of kilometres as well, exploring 4 tunnels in all. There's more  apparently, but we'd had enough. There's some nice country here as the rail passes through and around the hills. We spotted a heap of bats in one of the tunnels. We returned to the car, had a quick bite of lunch and forged on. We popped out onto the Gladstone/Monto Rd at the Kalpowar township and headed back towards Ubobo. After about 20k's we turned off on Childs road and followed it for only 10k's or so along a rutted, washed out track, to where the town of Glassford used to be and the site of the old copper mine and smelter. This was slow going and takes about 45 minutes of continuous driving to get there. We had a brief look around before turning around and heading back. (See the Glassford adventure for more information) It was getting late and we still had just over an hour of driving to get back to Ubobo. We stopped off at the Hotel in Manypeaks for a chat and a beer before making our way on to the Ubobo general store for a cold ice cream. It'd been a fairly warm day. Again we sat and watched the kangaroos come out for a feed over a couple of cold ones and settled down for the evening in front of a little fire. Hear that? Nothing but the crickets and the crackle of the fire.