Things to do in Tamborine Mountain, Gold Coast hinterland
Tamborine Mountain is part of the Gold Coast hinterland’s Scenic Rim. Things to do in Tamborine Mountain include luxury accommodation, shopping and art on Gallery Walk, plus the Tamborine Rainforest Skywalk.
It doesn’t take long driving up the Tamborine-Oxenford road from the Gold Coast to notice an abrupt change in personality. The official road signs warn of steep gradients. The unofficial ones promote garden centres, artists’ stores selling Buddha carvings and fresh organic avocados for sale.
The Gold Coast hinterland is defiantly green rather than glittering, offering arts rather than adrenalin rushes. It’s a place to float over on a Gold Coast hot air balloon tour or sip wines at a Gold Coast winery. There are also some splendid national parks – the Purling Brook Falls Circuit in the Springbrook National Park is a worthwhile detour for waterfall lovers.
Best day trips from the Gold Coast – 7 ways to improve your stay
The Gold Coast is a destination in its own right, but there are several excellent day trips you can do while using it as a base.
- Deluxe Tamborine Mountain winery tour – with gourmet lunch.
- Full day Springbrook National Park tour – with waterfalls and bush tucker tasting.
- Snorkelling with turtles at Cook Island.
- Evening glowworm-viewing experience – with guided stargazing.
- Lady Elliot Island day trip – with glass bottom boat & guided Great Barrier Reef snorkelling tour.
- Hopping between microbreweries – with lunch included.
- Northern Rivers fruit & distillery tour – with Tropical Fruit World and Husk Distillers.
Things to do in Tamborine Mountain, Queensland
This is most apparent in Tamborine Mountain, the northern rim of an ancient, extinct volcanic caldera. Collected in Tamborine Mountain are plenty of luxurious holiday retreats and little villages that have unabashed cutesy appeal.
This is most apparent at the Gallery Walk, a street that could have been designed for tour buses to pull up outside. Every building along it has something appealing to sell. That might be Aboriginal art, it might be fudge in every conceivable flavour, and it might be hippy style clothing. You can hop from psychic readings to sampling chocolate chilli bombs. You can browse unique glass art, then feast on gelato. Or you can design your own fragrance then go wine tasting at a handily positioned vineyard cellar door. The Witches Falls Winery offers great variety.
It’s an amiable taste of the good life, but what the Scenic Rim – just inland from the Gold Coast around Beaudesert – is really about is the rainforest.
Things to do in Tamborine Mountain: Tamborine Rainforest Skywalk
The Tamborine Rainforest Skywalk is an attempt to show off a landscape that has virtually been wiped out since Europeans arrived in Australia. Before land was cleared for agriculture, the traditional natural battle in Australia was between the eucalypt forests found mainly in the south and the rainforests found mainly in the north.
Both have evolved incredible weapons to fight each other with. The strangler figs of the rainforest would grow around and eventually choke the eucalypts to death. So the eucalypts developed avoidance techniques. The flooded gum tree, for example, sheds its bark every year, removing any young figs that have latched on.
There’s also the flammable eucalyptus oil, which encourages bushfires. These fires give the soils the exposure to the sun saplings need.
Rainforest around Tamborine Mountain, Queensland
But the rainforest plants prefer moist sandy soils, and have developed flame retardant leaves to survive the bushfires. This is an arms race that has created an equilibrium for millennia – yet since white men have arrived in Australia, 99.7% of the continent’s rainforest has been destroyed.
The Skywalk allows visitors to walk through one of the remaining patches at canopy height – specially created metal walkways save climbing the trees. But it’s a tragedy that being able to see such rainforest feels special.
For a higher octane way of seeing the forest, you can take on the Canyon Swing at Thunderbird Park. This zipline course passes high over Cedar Creek Gorge. Thunderbird Park is also close to top wild swimming spot Cedar Creek Falls. Curtis Falls is further south on Cedar Creek.
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