I Went To Australia’s Waterfalls To Chase Adventure. I Left Understanding Why I Felt Dead.
I Went To Australia’s Waterfalls To Chase Adventure. I Left Understanding Why I Felt Dead.
I’ve chased waterfalls all over the world. The harder they are to reach, the more I want to go. It’s one of the things I know I love because of how fulfilled I feel.
So when I got to the first one and felt nothing, I didn’t know what to make of it.
This is the Waterfall Circuit in the Atherton Tablelands, Northern Queensland, Australia. Three waterfalls — Millaa Millaa, Zillie, and Ellinjaa — all close enough to hit in one day. It’s a popular visit, except for today. It’s foggy, raining, and storming. The kind of day most people would stay home.
That’s never bothered me. I would do the same things, just wet.
The first waterfall — Millaa Millaa — is right off the parking lot. No hike to speak of. Classic, stunning. I had planned to stick around for a while, maybe swim.
But I walked down, took some photos, and checked it off my list. Already thinking about the next one before I’d finished being at this one.
I’d gotten exactly what I came for. Something I supposedly love. And it just felt… flat. Not bad. Not wrong. Just not what I set out for.
I didn’t know why. I just showed up, looked, and left.
The rain was still ebbing and flowing. This next one — Zillie Falls — could also be seen with just a short walk to a nearby viewing platform. This is an immense waterfall. The kind that thunders and makes you yell just so the person next to you can hear you.
Beautiful to be sure. But that view didn’t suffice if I could get closer, and fortunately there’s another much longer trail I can follow.
The hike doesn’t seem too bad. Alltrails describes it as “a bit of a scramble involving climbing rocky and at times slippery steps before reaching the waterfall.” Although the continuing rain made me more cautious than usual.
The trail gave me time to slow down. I started noticing things — the smell of the forest, the ferns, the mushrooms I don’t have at home. Somewhere on that walk I stopped thinking about what I was headed toward and started paying attention to what I was in. I didn’t realize it yet, but that shift changed the rest of my day.
As I near the base of the falls, I reach a point that is about as far as I can go without making a decision.
There’s a gap between two large boulders with water flowing between them. On the best of days I could pass it with a short jump, but that may not be in the cards today. My heavy camera backpack and the rain all day made it a risk I wasn’t willing to take. No one was around. If I hurt myself I’d be in real trouble.
But the waterfall was just ahead. I hadn’t been able to get a good view the entire trail, and with it this close, I couldn’t leave like this.
I had to find another way.
Nearby I notice a crevice between the rocks. It’s small, but I can fit. Deeper inside it and about seven feet up there’s an opening big enough to crawl through — and maybe see what I came to see.
I toss my bag through the opening and start shimmying up the crevice walls. I end up scratched, scraped and bleeding, but after a few minutes of pushing I make it through.
It’s a perfect view of the falls. Exactly what I wanted. And I felt such a rush after wondering if I wouldn’t be able to see it at all, plus showcasing my newly found shimmy skills.
For the first time all day, I was fully here. I felt alive.
At the time I didn’t know how to explain the difference between this and the first waterfall. It wasn’t just that the view was better. Something about being here felt different in my whole body. Like I wasn’t just looking at it — I was in it. The trail, the doubt, the scrapes on my hands, the decision that could have gone either way — all of it was in the moment with me.
I stayed for another hour. Not because I needed to. Because I didn’t want to be anywhere else.
But I still had one more waterfall to go.
The path to Ellinjaa Falls is just as long as the last but far less sketchy. Still, the rain was coming down harder now than it had all day. I was starting to get nervous about lightning.
When I arrived I saw that the falls were by far the smallest of the three.
And I was having the time of my life.
I was soaked. Tired. My feet kept slipping off the wet stones and into the water. The kind of day that would make most people miserable had me standing there, taking it in, and I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I wasn’t thinking about the next thing or the thing after that. I was just here — in the rain, in front of a small waterfall, at the end of a day I had every reason to skip.
It was a perfect day. Inside a completely imperfect one.
Yet there was still the difference between the first waterfall and the others. I was here to seek enjoyment and fulfillment. But why did I start out feeling so flat instead, despite seeing exactly what I intended?
It would be easy to think the difference was the difficulty. That I just needed a harder hike to appreciate the reward. But the last waterfall was an easy-breezy trek, plus the smallest of the three. And yet I was having the time of my life.
The difference was that nothing at the first waterfall asked me to choose. I showed up, I looked, I left. I was on autopilot and I didn’t even notice. A frictionless path to something I wanted — and frictionless meant I could sleepwalk the whole way there.
Everything after that had friction. The rain, the gap I couldn’t cross, the wet stones I kept slipping on. None of it was extreme, but all of it interrupted the autopilot. All of it forced a decision — keep going or take the easy out.
But friction alone wasn’t what changed the day. If I’d been rushing through the trail, frustrated by the rain, on my phone, powering through to get to the view — that friction would have just been a bad time. What changed was that somewhere on that second trail, I started paying attention. I stopped chasing the destination and noticed what was around me. And once I was actually present, every obstacle became something I was choosing rather than something I was enduring.
That’s the part that unsettles me. Not the waterfalls — what they revealed. How many times I’ve taken the frictionless path to something I wanted and arrived feeling flat. And how many times I’ve hit friction and just resented it, because I was too focused on getting there to notice where I was.
Every time I thought if I just get there, I’ll feel better — if I just get the job, the relationship, the thing I’ve been chasing — I ended up standing in front of it on autopilot. I got there. But I didn’t have the feeling I really wanted out of it.
The destination is the same either way. But getting there in a way that feels earned — choosing to stay in it, and paying attention while you do — that’s what determines whether you feel anything when you arrive.
I think about what would change if I stopped waiting for the right moment to pursue something that matters to me. If I stopped looking for the frictionless version of the path. Because that path gets me there. But it doesn’t get me there alive.
And I love that I get to make that choice today.