Australia is full of famous icons everyone already knows — the Reef, Uluru, the Twelve Apostles.
Australia is full of famous icons everyone already knows — the Reef, Uluru, the Twelve Apostles. But scattered across the country are far stranger sights that most people, even Australians, have never heard of: a mountain covered in giant hot-pink slugs, a forest that glows in the dark, waterfalls that run sideways, and a lake that's naturally the colour of bubblegum. All of these are real, all are backed by scientists and park authorities, and all of them are things you could actually go and see. Counting down, here are 10 of the strangest.
Picture a slug the length of your hand — up to 20 centimetres long — but instead of the usual brown or grey, it's a shockingly bright, fluorescent pink. That's the Mount Kaputar pink slug, and it doesn't live anywhere else on Earth. It's found only on one mountain, in the cool, misty eucalypt forest near the summit, which is actually the core of a long-extinct volcano. Scientists believe the slugs survived up there because the mountaintop stayed cool and moist while the land around it dried out over millions of years, cutting this little population off from the rest of the world. They come out at night or after rain, so the best chance of spotting one is an early-morning walk following overnight rain.
How to get there: Drive to the town of Narrabri in northern NSW, then head south on Old Gunnedah Road before turning onto Kaputar Road for the roughly 27km climb up the mountain. The upper section is steep, winding, and partly unsealed, so it's best in a normal car in good weather — caravans and large motorhomes aren't allowed past the park entrance.
Scattered across a wide, grassy floodplain are thousands of tall termite mounds, some of which do something genuinely odd: every single one lines up in the same direction, like a field of tiny grey tombstones all facing north-south. These are called "magnetic" termite mounds, and their thin edge always points north-south while their broad face points east-west. It's not actually about magnetism — it's the termites' own air-conditioning trick, angling the mound so it only catches the gentle morning and evening sun and avoids being cooked by the harsh midday heat. Some of these mounds are up to two metres tall and can be around 100 years old. Right next to them are the very different "cathedral" mounds, tall spiky towers built by a different termite species.
How to get there: From Darwin, drive south into Litchfield National Park and follow signs to the Magnetic Termite Mounds, just off Litchfield Park Road, where a boardwalk lets you walk right up among them. You'll need an NT Parks Pass to enter the park.
In the middle of a flat, red desert sits a giant bowl almost a kilometre wide and 50 metres deep, with walls rising up around it like a bathtub dropped into the outback. It's the second-largest crater on Earth where you can still find fragments of the meteorite that made it. About 300,000 years ago, a huge lump of space rock slammed into the ground here at roughly 15 kilometres per second — fast enough to cross the entire country in about five minutes — blasting out a hole that has barely eroded since, because the desert around it is so dry and stable.
How to get there: The crater is roughly 140km south of the town of Halls Creek along the Tanami Road, on mostly unsealed track. It's only reliably accessible by conventional vehicle in the dry season (May to October); check road conditions before you go, and bring your own water, since none is available on site.
In 1994, a park ranger abseiling into a remote, hard-to-reach canyon west of Sydney stumbled onto a small stand of strange trees with waxy, fern-like leaves and oddly bubbly bark — trees nobody had ever recorded alive before. It turned out they belonged to a tree family scientists knew only from 90-million-year-old fossils, and had assumed had died out along with the dinosaurs. Finding one alive has been compared to finding a living dinosaur. Only around 100 wild trees exist today, and to protect them from disease and fire, the exact location of the canyon has been kept a closely guarded secret ever since — even most park rangers don't know exactly where it is.
How to get there: You can't visit the wild grove — it's deliberately unmarked and off-limits to protect it. Instead, you can see and touch cultivated Wollemi Pines at the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden at Mount Tomah (around 2 hours' drive from Sydney) or the Royal Botanic Garden in central Sydney, both of which grow the species from cuttings taken to save it from extinction.
Once a year, usually around October or November when the first big wet-season rains arrive, the rainforest floor of this tiny island starts to move. Somewhere around 40 to 100 million bright red land crabs leave their forest burrows all at once and march, in their millions, straight down to the ocean to breed — crossing roads, gardens, and even golf courses along the way, in numbers so large that some roads are closed and special crab bridges and underpasses have been built just for them. It's considered one of the largest animal migrations on the planet, and it only happens on this one island.
How to get there: Christmas Island is remote — roughly a 4-hour flight from Perth, Western Australia (there are no scheduled flights from anywhere else). The exact start date of the migration depends on rainfall, so operators and the national park post updates in the lead-up to the wet season each year.
For most of the year, this large volcanic crater lake looks like an ordinary, slightly dull grey-blue lake. Then, like clockwork every November, it flips almost overnight into an intense, vivid turquoise blue, and stays that way all summer before fading back to grey again around March. Scientists have worked out that it's caused by tiny calcium carbonate crystals forming in the water as it warms up, which scatter sunlight in a way that makes the water look far more vividly blue — but predicting the exact day it will "switch" each year still isn't an exact science.
How to get there: Blue Lake sits right on the edge of the town of Mount Gambier, about a 45-minute drive from South Australia's border with Victoria, or roughly a 5-hour drive from Adelaide. There's a lookout and walking/cycling track right around the crater rim, plus seasonal tours down to the water's edge.
Every winter, hundreds of thousands of giant Australian cuttlefish — some as long as your arm — converge on one small, shallow stretch of rocky coastline to breed, flashing and pulsing through rainbow colours as males compete for mates right in front of snorkellers. Nowhere else on Earth do cuttlefish gather in numbers like this in one place, which makes it a genuine one-of-a-kind wildlife event — and for a worrying stretch of recent years, the numbers crashed so low that scientists feared the gathering might disappear for good, before it recovered.
How to get there: The gathering happens each year from around June to August, in the shallows between Point Lowly and Black Point, about 20km from the city of Whyalla on South Australia's Eyre Peninsula. The water is only 1–4 metres deep, so it's an easy snorkel from the shore at Stony Point — no boat or scuba gear required.
After good rain, a mushroom called the ghost fungus starts popping up on old tree stumps and fallen logs — and once night falls and your eyes adjust to the dark, it gives off an eerie, pale green glow, bright enough to photograph. It's one of the very few glow-in-the-dark living things found in Australian forests, and even scientists aren't fully sure why the fungus evolved to glow at all — leading theories are that it attracts insects to help spread its spores, but that's still not settled. It only appears for a short window each year, mainly after autumn or spring rain, and only in certain damp, pine or eucalypt forests, which makes actually finding a glowing patch part of the fun.
How to get there: "Ghost Mushroom Lane" near Glencoe, about 20 minutes from Mount Gambier in South Australia's south-east, is a well-known and easy roadside spot. Sightings also pop up seasonally in Victoria (such as the Mornington Peninsula) and on the NSW South Coast — local Facebook groups like "Bioluminescence Australia" track exactly where and when they're glowing each year.
Most waterfalls fall down. These ones run sideways. Twice a day, huge tides — among the biggest in the world — try to force their way through two narrow rock gaps in Talbot Bay. Because the gaps are too narrow for that much water to pass through smoothly, the sea level literally piles up higher on one side than the other, sometimes by several metres, and the water surges sideways through the gap like a fast-flowing horizontal rapid, reversing direction every six hours as the tide turns.
How to get there: There's no road in — Talbot Bay can only be reached by seaplane, helicopter, or boat tour, almost all of which depart from Broome (with some also leaving from Derby or Cygnet Bay). Most visitors book a half-day or full-day scenic flight and boat package rather than trying to arrange transport independently.
On a small, uninhabited island off the coast of Western Australia sits a lake that looks like it's been filled with strawberry milk. Lake Hillier is a solid, opaque bubblegum pink — all year round, in every season, no matter the light or the weather — and the colour doesn't fade even if you scoop the water into a bottle and take it home. For nearly 200 years it was one of Australia's great unsolved riddles. Scientists have now worked out the cause: the lake is so salty that ordinary algae can't survive there, so it's instead packed with trillions of salt-loving microbes and a specific type of algae that produce reddish-pink pigments to shield themselves from the harsh sun, the same trick some other pink lakes around the world use. What makes Lake Hillier special is how permanent and vivid the colour is compared to almost anywhere else.
How to get there: Lake Hillier sits on Middle Island, part of the Recherche Archipelago, inside a nature reserve with no public boat landings or foot access. Almost everyone sees it the same way: on a scenic flight or helicopter tour departing from the nearby coastal town of Esperance, which typically also passes over Cape Le Grand National Park and Lucky Bay along the way.
Number 10: Giant Fluorescent Pink Slugs
Number 9: Magnetic Termite Mounds
Number 8: Wolfe Creek Crater
Number 7: The Wollemi Pine
Number 6: Christmas Island's Red Crab Migration
Number 5: Blue Lake
Number 4: Giant Cuttlefish Gathering
Number 3: Ghost Mushrooms
Number 2: The Horizontal Falls
Number 1: Lake Hillier
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