It was a really long drive from Coonabarabran to Bellingen almost all the way back to the coast. Bellingen is a really small town, but there’s a great hostel next to the river and a handful of cool restaurants to eat at so it’s the perfect base to explore the Waterfall Way. This town completely shuts down at 7pm every night though. If you haven’t eaten, bought your groceries, or done whatever else you have to do by then, you’re…
I flew to Tasmania from Sydney and from Tasmania straight back to Sydney to pick up where I left off. I immediately rented another car and drove north to my next planned stop, Port Macquarie. As I was leaving Sydney it started raining, then it started raining harder, and harder, the whole four hour drive. The weather in Port Macquarie was like a typhoon, crazy high winds and pouring rain and it wasn’t predicted to stop for about another week….
This bonus post is a little hodge podge of really short stops I made before and after Cradle Mountain. When I left Port Arthur I had an extra day. In retrospect, I could’ve spent that extra day in Cradle Mountain and had plenty to do, but I didn’t know that at the time. Instead, I drove up the east coast and spent one night in Bicheno. I arrived around sunset, so I just made a quick stop to the Bicheno…
On this stop, I’ll be hiking around a few different national parks, some state reserves, and several random sites. And I’m not really based in a city, I’m staying in a camp/hostel similar to my place in Port Arthur, but the main attraction in these parts is definitely Cradle Mountain National Park and that’s how everyone refers to the whole area, Cradle Mountain. I figured I’d start there. There are several trails around that can be combined into however long…
From Sydney I hopped on the train for a short ride to the airport and then jumped on a plane headed for Australia’s southernmost state, Tasmania. I’ll be starting this part of my adventure in Tasmania’s capital, Hobart. Hobart seems like a fairly quiet seaside town. If you like to eat seafood (yes I most certainly do) then this is the place. Yummmm! After getting a new rental car and checking in at the hostel I had just enough time…
My drive from Wollongong was smooth right up until I turned on the road that heads up into the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. It turns out I’m driving on Anzac Day, a pretty major holiday here in Australia, so the traffic was just ridiculous! I still made it to Faulconbridge, the hike I had planned to do along the way, just later than expected. Faulconbridge was about a nine mile round trip hike. It was pretty flat and uninteresting…
My next stop on this Australian adventure is Wollongong, which is really just the convenient town I decided to stay in. It has a convenient hostel and lots of nearby restaurants. On the way in from Canberra I made a stop to check out a couple of waterfalls, Fitzroy and Twin Falls. There’s a short trail between the two. Unfortunately, it had been pouring rain all day and the visibility due to fog was really low, but I put on…
I now find myself out in western Victoria in Grampians National Park. Grampians got hit really hard by bush fires this past year and as a result a huge swath of the park is closed. Several of the trails I wanted to do are off limits due to the fire damage. Luckily, enough of the park is still open to make it worthwhile. Driving here from the coast I saw a lot of these signs. I have a good feeling…
I made it out of Melbourne and made my way southwest to my next official stop, Great Otway National Park. I took the long way here by making a huge loop around to the northwest so I could go visit Trentham Falls, but it turned out to just be a trickle, about a one on the gusher scale, and not really worth the effort. Oh well! From there it was due south for the rest of the day. My route…
Greetings from my latest adventure Down Under! That’s right, not only am I visiting the next country on my list, Australia (just in case you didn’t figure that out), but I’m also adding another continent to my tally. So let’s dive right in, since that’s pretty much what I had to do. After flying twentyish hours across the Pacific, my flight arrived into Melbourne at 8am. Which meant I had to try and stay awake all day so I could…