Waterfall hike on a neglected trail in Northern NSW

Humbled by Nature
No matter how experienced you think you are nature always has a way to humble you in more ways then you can imagine. I have completed many off track hikes in the past few years which I'd considered quite difficult, through those experience I've made many mistakes and has been taught many lesson by nature to the point where I've become quite confident in my hiking ability. Yesterday hike just reminded me that there is still so much to learn.
The planned route was a 7km graded trail to find a waterfall, based on my research this would be an "easy hike" with an estimated hike time of 4 hours, considered as a half day hike we decided to leave a little later than normal and set out for the 2.5 hours drive. Arriving at 10am we encountered our first obstacle, a closed gate restricting vehicle access to the trail, undeterred we parked the car and set out on foot uphill for the next 6km until we reached the start of the trail. At first glance we knew we are in for a fight as the forest has reclaimed the trail. It was full of raspberry plant with those annoying little prickly things scratching you as you are making your way through them. We encountered 5 carpet python in the space of 600m and almost stepped on 2 of them as they were difficult to see through the dense bush.
We made the decision to scrap the main trail and take our chances in the forest, we both have strong navigation skills and was confident enough to find our way down to the creek, we were elated with our decision as it was an easy stress free hike down to the creek, we popped out 300m upstream from the waterfall and slowly made our way to the top of the falls.
Our day was going well but little did we know it was all about to change starting with our descent down the base of the waterfall. We climbed up the side of the cliff and started to proceed carefully along until we can see a break in the cliff face and proceeded to descend, the first of our problems arrived soon after as we were looking down sheer 20-30m drop on either side of us pondering, how do we get down from here? rather then back tracking to find an alternate route we pushed forward using tree vines and questionable leap of faith (4-5m) jump and slide to continue our descent. Some how we managed to survive and reached the bottom of the falls.
The exit was one of the steepest terrain I had to navigate dealing with gradients of 35-40 degrees on soft soil and lose rocks, using every ounce of energy I had in my tired legs I grabbed anything I could to aid me up, only to be confronted with endless lananta as far as the eye can see, by far one of the most intense bush bashing I have came across, after what felt like an eternity (just an hour) my mind went into a dark place hoping for a bush fire 😉, just giving up and pulling out my PLB and wait for help! Hope appeared soon after as we finally made it out of lananta ville and reached open forest again similar to our descent, with a little bit of fortune we found an old graded track along the spur and made our way back up to the main trail (the one that has been swollen by the raspberry plants and are full of snakes).
At this stage we are almost 6.5 hours into our hike and know we only have a few hours of daylight left, we both agree regardless of the trail condition we will forge forward as it can't be worst then the lananta. It was definitely a shit fight with those raspberry plants but after an hour or so we found ourselves on the closed road and knew it's all downhill from here, all 6km of it 😊.
In summary our humble 7km easy hike turned out to be a 24km mission. 😊.