Protestors Falls

We've spent time in a couple rainforests here - it's hard not to really - any park you go to is a rainforest. Australia only has 40% of it's original rainforests left. Logging has destroyed much of the beautiful trees - many times loggers take trees that are over 200 years old! The rich wood sells for about $3,000 a square meter! People buy the wood for cabinets, etc. But sometimes the wood is just made into paper. But this is destroying the rainforests - once a rainforest is torn apart it doesn't regenerate itself or re-grow.

Today we went to Protestors Falls in Nightcap National Forest near Lismore. Learn more about it here. There was a large protest - a month long - in the 70s over logging that was being done that would ruin the forest. The protestors camped out - kids and everyone - for a month to save the trees. Many of these trees were over 200 years old! The protestors won with non violence!

There as a huge waterfall there - and most everyone went to climb behind it - but I was too scared. But then I decided to - which is crazy for me! I was scared out of my mind the whole time! It's just huge rocks - slippery ones too - and it was so scarey - but I actually did it (a huge feat for me). We couldn't jump into the water though because of the engangered species - all of our perfumes/shampoos/sunblocks/bug spray would contaminate the water. Most of the time we walked barefoot through the forest - boy do I have soft feet, the rocks hurt! - and I had to pull 3 leeches off! While we were doing this my friend Shay and I were laughing about how "Our moms would never let us do this!"

See more photos from the Nightcap Rainforest here.