Rock On(!) Tamborine Mountain?

The rock which is painted to look like
 a piano ready to fall on your car

On Friday the 22nd of September, 2017 I took a drive up to Tamborine Mountain, which is just outside the Logan City limits.
Haven't heard of Logan City?

It's just outside the Brisbane City limits.

I always think of Bob Dylan singing 'Mr. Tambourine Man' in the video of the Newport Folk Festival from 1964 (which was the year I was born) with the piano behind him on stage.

I always thought that Mount Tamborine must have been named after a lame musical instrument like the Hippies would bang around me as I was growing up in the 60s, but the name is of Aboriginal origin and has nothing to do with the musical instrument.

Bob singing Mt.Tamborine ...
 I mean Mr. Tambourine man.  Rock on Bob!

I also think of another famous Bob Dylan song when driving up or down the mountain.

"Yes, and how many years can a mountain exist
Before it's washed to the sea?
Yes, and how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is..."

Baffling Brisbane and the Mt Tamborine piano mystery

"It's part of local folklore, but the mystery is, how did it get to be this way?

It's been there for at least 50 years, but looks to be as fresh as if it had been painted just yesterday. What's going on?"

Why don't they sell rock piano souvenirs on the mountain?-) 

I hadn't been up to Tamborine Mountain for probably a good twenty years, or more.
I only made the effort to drive up there after meeting a Canadian tourist on a whale watching tour who told me she was heading up there to visit the glow worm caves.

The Canadian Lady who inspired my
trip to Mt. Tamborine in September

Successful Whale Watching Thought Experiment ... or Just a Big Coincidence?
My new Canadian friend asked me if the caves the glow worms were in up on Mt. Tamborine were real caves or man-made, and I had no idea, as I had never been near them, or knew much about them.

The entrance to the man-made glow
 worm caves at Mt.Tamborine

I told my Canadian friend that a scarecrow festival just finished up there the weekend before and that there are probably still scarecrows to be seen up there which were made for the festival.

Why don't they sell toy scarecrows up there?

Sponge Bob Dylan?!

I had never been to the Mt. Tamborine Scarecrow Festival before and I missed it again this year, too.

Life is a Journey, Not a Destination

But I did see some scarecrows which were still up on the mountain the Friday I went up there.

I'm not such a fan of scarecrows though to tell the truth, as I consider my shamanic totem animal to be the crow and these scarecrows were supposed to scare off my totem animal ... in theory anyway.
On the Road with Corvids

Guest of honour was the SHADOW
Tourism Minster?!
Stone the crows!!

Scarecrows and Byrds?!

Although thinking back on my trip up the mountain that day I don't recall seeing one single crow, so maybe there is something to the theory after-all?

What I saw while waiting to go on my glow
worm tour at Cedar Creek winery 

There are scarier things than scarecrows up on the mountain though, especially if one of those things should run up your leg.

I guess I should have known a beast like this would be wandering around Cedar Creek Estate when I saw on my glow worms cave tour ticket that their phone number ended in 666;-)

All jokes aside though, the Cedar Creek Estate grounds are more like heaven than hell.

And while I would have loved to take some photos to show you of the glow worms, photography was prohibited in the cave.
So, you will have to go to their website to see pictures of inside the cave.

I did think it was funny that while in the cave the tour-guide said that if you can't see the glow worms fading in and out and they just look static to your eyes then you must have alien eyes.
They just looked static to my eyes no matter how close to the glow worms I got, but then again I do have green eyes -
Green Eyes, a Marker of Alien Hybridity?!

My eye

As much as I liked the winery, it was the Tamborine Mountain Distillery that I was keen to visit.

 The gates to the Tamborine Mountain Distillery

It was obviously still the 'Year of the Rooster'
in the distillery grounds I noticed;-)

And you had to watch where you were
 stepping while walking around;-)

I ended up buying a bottle of 'Moulin Rooz' absinthe, a test tube of 'Turkish Delight' liquor and some apple schnapps.

I noticed the 'Moulin Rooz' bottle was the equivalent to 23.67 standard drinks.
23 is my birthdate and '67 is the year my favourite football team entered the National Rugby League competition in Australia. 

Which turned out to be a good selling point to my mind when I bought the absinthe.

My empty apple schnapps bottle looks too good
to throw into the recycling bin, I think

It was too bad that I only ended up catching the tail end of the scarecrow festivities on the mountain and while I had planned a walk in the botanic gardens on this spring Friday, a vicious storm was brewing on the horizon and the radio announcers were saying Brisbane was going to be smashed by the storm, which I saw as a good and bad sign, as the Brisbane Broncos were playing the Melbourne Storm in the NRL knockout finals that night and that sounded like the kind of result I was hoping for that night in that game, as I can't stand the Broncos (the Storm won that game BTW), but at the same time if a real storm was going to hit Brisbane and with possible hail, then I had to start heading home for my car's sake.

The real storm never really eventuated, but the Melbourne Storm did smash Brisbane that night, which made a nice birthday present for me for the next day:-)

I would come back a few weeks later though and spend more time .... and money up there, as I wrote in this post recently -
Who? The Angel of Death?

Released Friday October 13th, 2017

And in this post -

Go Take Another Hike Hemsworth!-)

And I did eventually get to walk through the botanical gardens of Mt. Tamborine also.

But that is for another post, and we'll have to cross those bridges when we come to them sometime in the future ... hopefully.
Update

It's Not Just a Jungle Up There

UPDATE: Friday October 13th, 2023

"A man has died when he fell down a slope in the Gold Coast hinterland where a “Yes” mural had recently been painted."

Sad news indeed, and for me to hear about it on Friday the 13th is kind of eerie, even though it happened yesterday.