Australia – Page 3 – Kieran Campbell

26 April 2010

Chasing the Dream

Finally, the day was here: I was leaving Melbourne and heading back to the alpine region, to Bright, where I’d finally realise what I’d been dreaming about doing for the last 12 months. Travelling anywhere new, or at least less visited, almost always excites me, usually resulting in me being ready for the journey way earlier than I need to be. Up at 6, I was a bit early for the free breakfast that the International Hostel on Elizabeth Street puts on, but the guy looking after the reception was nice enough to drag the breakfast set out early for me so I didn’t have to endure a few hours of my stomach screaming at me. The train wasn’t due to leave till 8.15 but, partly due to my airport-conditioning to always be early, and partly due to getting to use the trams for free as part of my train ticket, I was in the station not long after 7.30 and so begun my day of unnecessary waiting.

About 30 minutes on the train, I was getting settled in as the train slowed down – presumably for the first station – thinking that $27 was pretty good for the distance I was going compared to the prices back home, especially since it covered trams in the Melbourne as well as a train and a bus to get to Bright. A minute later, the train was now clearly not slowing down but just coasting to a stand-still, although the engines were still running. Two hours later, still sitting on the train that the driver and a few engineers now admitted wasn’t just blocking most trains north-bound from Melbourne, but was also completely broken down, we finally got to jump off and switch to a bus that would complete the leg of the journey that the train so miserably failed to over. 4 hours and a comically expensive taxi fare later (comical, as it cost more than what all the people on it would have paid V-Line for their tickets), I was in Bright.

Bigger than I expected, Bright, with its clock-tower and war memorial dominating the town square, was the closest thing to a British village I’d yet seen in Australia. Being set in rolling forested hills that also could have been somewhere in the UK, it felt like the kind of place I could happily settle down in for a while. Walking into the Bright Hikers hostel, I was met with a closed reception and the quietest accommodation I’ve ever set foot in. Luckily Davide, who turned out to have just finished last month’s paragliding licence course, and his girlfriend, Aiste, were kicking about and were fairly sure what dorm I’d be sleeping in so I got settled in and, in the healthiest form of lazy comfort eating I could think of in Bright, I headed to Subway.

In the evening, as people came back from flying and working, I met a few of the more long-term residents of the hostel, namely Steve, who was also finishing off his paragliding licence course, and Steve, who was working for the local fire service. Next day I cycled to the landing paddocks with Davide and met Ted, owner of Alpine Paragliding, before we drove to the top of Mystic – a hill overlooking Bright which offers consistently good thermalling, and the place where most flights take place on – to watch Davide launching into the air. The view from the launch at Mystic’s peak is stunning, and watching Davide pulling the wing into the air, then so fluently stepping off the hill and floating into the vista was awe-inspiring, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t for a second doubt that I could pull off such a stunt in two days.

Friday was spent wandering round town, which really was quite beautiful, even before the autumn colours came on and turned it into what it looked like in all the postcards. There are so many parks and, in keeping with one of my favourite Australian traditions, each one had numerous bbqs as well as plenty space to chill out and contemplate, in ever increasing excitement, that tomorrow, I was going to learn to fly.

25 April 2010

Tasmania Day 3: Ben Lomond

Waking up in Beechworth felt like waking up in a small coastal village in the Scottish Highlands: the weather and landscape fitted almost perfectly. We headed back – this time along the main road instead of hammering along a dirt track again – to Georgetown for food, a look around, and to stage a photo. Georgetown was settled by the British to fend off the French from staking a claim on the north coast so it seemed almost a crime – as a British guy travelling with a French guy – not to pay homage to the history of the town. In the end, we went to the supermarket and got distracted by ‘Aussie burgers’ (they’re cut in the shape of Australia; we were a bit disappointed they didn’t chuck in a lump of mince off the south coast to represent Tassie) and forgot all about the photo. We did fit in a look at the light-house at Low Head, and found it odd that the number of performers on the street (I almost forgot, there was a festival on in town) embarrassingly outnumbered the visitors.

Back in free-shower-locating-mode, we headed towards Lilydale, stopping on the way at Hollybank Forest Reserve to eat our Aussie burgers, play some shithead, and drink some bubbly with a rather nice local who passed through while we were there. The showers at Lilydale weren’t free, and there was a wedding being held, so we looked a little out of place. We checked out the Lilydale falls but, in the dry season, they weren’t up to much, then headed on to an area of the island with a special interest to me. In the north-east of Tasmania there is a hill of the same height and name as Ben Nevis in Scotland so naturally I thought it would be cool to climb it, especially since I’ve never conquered the Scottish peak. Driving out of Launceston into Ben Lomond National Park, the scenery started to gain height and turn more like that of the drive towards Aviemore from Dufftown and the dull day had cleared up into something that lit up the landscape brilliantly. We had the not so helpful combination of a map that marked the peak of Ben Nevis, but not the roads around it, and Google Maps on my phone, which marked tracks way beyond the capability of our vehicle but didn’t say exactly where Ben Nevis was, so we never did find the peak, but my gps was playing that afternoon so when I checked the log later it showed we were circling the right hill.

After another few hours of driving some fun forest tracks in the middle of nowhere and never quite knowing where we were, we hit the out fringe of civilisation at the Mathinna campground. By this time the sun was setting and we were past the point of caring about getting a shower today, and were more glad that we knew where we were again. For being so far from anything, we were amazed to find possibly the most organised 21st birthday weekend ever cranking up: about 20 people had turned up with maybe a dozen cars, a few trail bikes, a generator, floodlights, a massive tarp hung from a few trees, full size cooking stoves, and a chain-saw create the fuel for the respectable bonfire that sucked everyone in as the temperature dropped. We didn’t expect to meet many people in Tassie, least not out here, so it was nice to kick back with a few beers for an evening under the stars with a few locals.

25 April 2010

Tasmania Day 2: Tamar Valley

Waking up to the sun shining the tent and warming up the stunning landscape, that we’d not fully appreciated in the fading light of the drive in, was awesome, made only better by how similar to Scotland it was. Trying to keep planning minimal we settled on a rough clockwise circle of the island and started it by heading east from the campground, past Sheffield – with the view of Mt Roland dominating the view to the south for a while – and through the rolling cropland that led to the West Tamar valley. As soon as I started running my GPS logger off the car’s power inverter, it started playing up so, annoyingly, I don’t have a good record of exactly where we drove on the island and, more annoyingly, I’ve got to try to remember where I took most of the 1300 photos I have from the state. Based on that, I think we hit the Tamar valley at Exeter then headed up the coast to Green’s Beach.

Still high from our day of body-boarding at Torquay we had to try out the Tassie waters, which turned out be not nearly as cold as expected. There was no surf, but it was still a nice spot to chill out in and wade out in the waters that only reached head-height a few hundred metres away from the shore. Tassie was defined by a few recurring experiences, starting with washing in public places for want of anywhere better. Green’s Beach has a beach shower across the main street from the shop, so we brushed shame aside, got out the shower cream and lathered up, and damn it felt good to be clean, if not slightly cold for a minutes.

Doubling back down the valley coast and across the Batman bridge, we hit Georgetown – the 3rd oldest settlement in Australia – but it was a bit short on free camping and an abundance of locals who liked to stare at people who weren’t from around these parts so we moved along and checked out a beach on the north coast a few km away. That didn’t work but, after what almost turned into an hour of bush-bashing on unmarked tracks in the hope of an ok wild-camping spot, we ended up in Beechford, a quaint village which, for being tucked away at the end of a coastal road, surprised us with a fairly decent camping area sheltered by the dunes. We got a decent bonfire going to keep us warm in the cold, damp wind for a while before the weather got the better of the fire, and us.

24 April 2010

21 Days of Tasmania: Day 1

Two days after our snap-decision to spend a few weeks in Tasmania, Kevin and I were on The Spirit of Tasmania I, backing away from Melbourne pier, watching in awe at the hundreds of big jelly fish being thrown about in the swell of the ship’s bow thrusters. Even up to this point this journey had been a bit more hard work than planned: the night before we’d taken ourselves, and a bottle of Jagermeister, to Ekin’s place, ultimately leading to us getting home about 2 hours before I wanted to be up and getting ready to drive to the port. Even with an abundance of alcohol and a chronic lack of sleep I stayed up to finish packing and making food for the sailing, passing on the joy of navigating Melbourne to Kevin when I eventually got him awake again. The night before was really part of a masterplan to make us so tired for the sailing that we’d sleep right through the 9 hours, avoiding any boredom, and it worked pretty well: most of my memories of the trip are waking up in the cinema to find it was a different film or, at the end, someone giving a presentation about Tasmanian Devils.

As Lonely Planet had hinted, Devenport somewhat lacked interest to us so I scoped out the nearest interesting – and crucially, free – campground and, after stockpiling enough Mi Goreng noodles to last us through a nuclear winter, we headed off into the Tasmanian countryside. In the fading evening light I had the perfect introduction to Tasmania: beautiful rolling hills and farmland much like Scotland was bliss to drive through after the monotony of the Hume highway.

Kentish Park campground, tucked into the side of a valley overlooking Lake Barrington, 30 minutes south-west of Devenport, turned out to be one of the best uneducated guesses for place to sleep we had on the island. The campground was huge, and divided by hedges and trees into what were still large fields: we found one of the higher fields which someone how managed to tick all the boxes – flat(ish), quiet, sheltered and had a great view – and got the tent set up. Once darkness fell, all I could do was gawk at a night sky clearer than any I’d seen since I was in the Northern Territory and it didn’t take long to get tempted into trying a long exposure.

It also didn’t take long to get close to some of the island’s wildlife – there were so many noises coming from the patch of forest that we were tucked into a corner of and sometimes when we’d shine a torch in the direction of the noise we’d see a pair of beady and distinctly creepy looking eyes shining back.

23 April 2010

Snowy Mountains, and the demise of planning

With 2 weeks festive rest behind me I was back on the road, this time heading south with a much clearer idea of where I was going. In just over a week the next paragliding licence course would be starting in Bright and there was nowhere I’d rather be then, but for now I had a few days to enjoy the trip down and explore what promised to be some awesome landscape.

My first target was Australia’s highest mountain – Mt Kusciosko – and I was so intent on getting to it that I drove pretty much straight from Sydney, completely bypassing Canberra (I know some people wouldn’t blame me, but surely the capital must be worth a visit), although I almost ended up in the Capital anyway after taking a wrong turn out of Queanbeyan. Before Queanbeyan, I’d had the interesting drive along the edge of Lake George, spending 15 miles of driving looking out across a 5 mile wide plain filled with farmland, looking down at the map at where there clearly was marked a fairly big lake. Turns out it’s pretty rare for it to ever hold any water. Through Cooma, I was soon in Jindabyne, the eastern gateway to the Snowy Mountains, turning onto the Charlotte Pass road for Mt Kusciosko. The drive to Charlotte Pass was a pretty unrelenting ascent towards the clouds, so much so that for a while I seriously hoped the road might ascend in and maybe even through the clouds that shrouded the lofty peaks. That didn’t quite happen though, and when I reached the end of the road at Charlotte Pass at the slightly late-in-the-day-for-a-long-walk-time of 4pm, I embarked on a slightly optimistic 18km return hike to the summit anyway. 5Km and many more photos later, I reached Seaman’s Hut – a bothy built in memory of an American guy who lost his life on the hill – and took a welcome breather from the cool weather. With its slightly buttressed walls and double entrance doors, the bothy felt as though it could withstand a nuclear winter – I chose to use it to shelter from much more mundane conditions for half an hour while I read some of the guest book entries then, resigned to the fact that if I walked any further I’d be doing the return trip in the dark, headed back to the car-park.

Charlotte’s Pass lays claim to having recorded the lowest temperature in mainland Australia, at something around -20C, and true to that title my night in the car did push the limits of warmth of my duvet. Next morning I headed back through the densest fog I’ve ever tried to drive through to Jindabyne and headed west on the Snowy Mountains Road, stopping in the picturesque mountain village of Thredbo for some photos of the mist burning off the higher slopes. After Thredbo, I had an awesome drive along 40 miles of unrelentingly winding road through the heart of the Alpine National Park to ????, stopping on the way at some viewpoints looking back across the ranges that I tried to conquer yesterday as well as part of the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme – supplying apparently 11% of Australia’s electricity.

Out of the mountains and into Victoria for the first time, I headed to Tallangatta, a town that literally moved to avoid drowning under the rising waters of Lake Hume, and checked my car in for a road-worthy test the next day. I wasn’t far from Albury-Wodonga so headed round the lake towards the border-town and found a rest area near the lake that seemed like it would be good for the sleeping in that night. The rest area is beside a spit of land that extends for a mile or so out into the lake – a popular spot with fishers and folks who want to go for a swim. Driving along the shore of the spit I learned a few important lessons: the soil is a tad damp and slippy, demonstrated expertly by my car slowly crabbing towards the water; and my car is rear-wheel-drive, demonstrated by my accelerating only making the back of the car edge even closer to the water. For a moment, I thought I was going to have to get someone to drag my car out of the water but I lucked out and decided to keep the car back up in rest area after that.

The next morning I was back in Tallangatta, via a quick run up to the lookout, to get my car through the road-worthy test. And in one cursory glance, the mechanic threw all my plans for January out the window and told me to save the money on the road-worthy test and get rid of the car: it was that bad. 5 minutes of pondering the fact that all my worries about the condition of the car I bought were true gave way to agreeing that the mechanic was right and that the only thing left to do was get rid of it. Figuring that the market for second-hand-not-so-road-worthy cars in Bright wouldn’t be overly buoyant, I put the town – and my dream of flying – on hold for at least a month by heading back to the Hume Highway and dropping Kevin a line to say that later that day, I’d be parking up beside his house in Melbourne.

22 April 2010

Back in Sydney

My week of sleeping in the boot of my car was over – I was back to a nice bed, regular shower, and good food in the comfort of my auntie and uncle’s house in Sydney. Since I arrived in Perth in August I aimed to be in Sydney for Christmas and, even though I had to skip the east to make it happen, I’d made it and was really happy to be somewhere where I could spend the time with family, and hopefully spend New Year with some of the people I’d met along the way here.

The fortnight surrounding Christmas was pretty laid back: quite a few mornings I’d get up and head to Bondi Beach for a swim before it got too busy then spend the day checking out the city or covering some more of the coastal walks with my auntie. My favourite stretch of the coast was on a walk to the north of Bondi, trecking through quite secluded sections of woodland between alcove beaches, looking out across the bright green waters of the harbour to the CBD. If I had a canoe I’d have happily spent hours out on the water there, and then probably suffered the inevitable dose of sunburn in the evening.

Being in Sydney gave me a chance to meet quite a few members of my family for the first time, in particular one my cousins who has never been back in Scotland since I was born, as well as some more distant relations who all originally hail from Scotland. Originally, some of them were going to be round for Christmas but we ended up having a quiet Christmas, instead having them round for New Year’s Eve. Carrying on a routine I started at uni, after a family Christmas, I caught up with a couple of friends I’d made on the west coast. Jorrel, a Swiss guy I’d met in Kununurra had spent Christmas in the Blue Mountains and was taking the train back into Sydney just in time for New Year so I cut my family dinner a bit short to catch up with him before we caught up with Henrikka at Circular Quay.

I was a bit late getting away from Bondi though, as a few days earlier I’d ordered a copy of The Art of Paragliding – the recommended reading for novice paragliding pilots – and it arrived literally as I was about to leave. I’d been dreaming of taking up this form of free-flight for months now and receiving the book started to hammer home the fact that I was going to learn to fly soon, very soon..

I didn’t make many plans for New Year, partly as there were far less people around Sydney who I knew than I expected and mainly as I didn’t know enough about what was going on. The botanic gardens, with their panoramic views of the harbour, Opera House, bridge and CBD seemed like the place to be for the night so we headed there fairly quickly as Henrikka heard that the number of people through the gates had hit about 75% of the limit. The queues were long but fast-moving, so by 6 we were sitting on a grassy hill in the middle of the gardens watching the flying foxes flapping around as the sun dipped behind the skyscrapers of the city centre, casting a beautiful warm glow over the park.

At 9 there was a fairly big fireworks display so parents didn’t have to stay till late for their kids, then on each hour, and on the quarters of the last hour before midnight, each of the batteries of fireworks would send up a single burst of firepower, leaving everyone listening in awe to the rumbles of explosions from up and down the river, rumbling like thunder all round the city. Even then, the crowds were so dense that we couldn’t get within about 20m of any of the decent vantage points, so I improvised and climbed what was nearer to a sapling than a tree, that was within a few minutes precariously supporting 3 girls and me. The improvisation didn’t work that well though, as by removing all the people from my view, I’d added a few dozen branches, which were just about as hard to peer through as the people, and not quite as comfortable to hang on to.

As midnight approached, we tried to get a better vantage point for the main salvo and found a strangely quiet spot near Mrs Macquarie’s chair. That said, we were still about a minute too late to bag a spot right up at fence, but we were still close enough to look in awe at the harbour, packed with hundreds of boats, many with people on them enjoying the evening from their own unique bobbing vantage point. The show was obviously great, but, having been to Edinburgh for Hogmanay the year before, didn’t find them truly spectacular, but then I’ve probably seen enough firework displays now that I’d only be really impressed if I ended up with sore ears after the show.

It was great that the city’s public transport network was running so it only took about an hour to get back to Bondi, where the gig on the beach was still going in what looked like a fairly epic fashion – if I’m in Sydney for another New Year then I think I’ll go there instead.

New Year’s day was spent getting packed and ready to head south towards Bright, as well as pouring over The Art of Paragliding, getting ever-more excited at the thought of what I could be learning to do in a week. And so my time in Sydney was up – I still didn’t feel like I saw that much of the city so it’ll probably be worth a revisit some other time, but for now I had bigger plans..

22 April 2010

Finishing the Blue Mountains

Now that I’d spent a few days charting the less travelled corners of the Blue Mountains, it was time to hit the main drag and see the big ticket attractions, not that I was really sure what they were. I’d came to rely on the CAMPS road atlas as, not only a great source of sleeping spots but also, having a not bad bunch of tourist attractions and beauty spots marked on it, so I made Katoomba and the Three Sisters my next stop.

Katoomba, although a quaint town, didn’t spark much interest from me on the way through – I probably could have spent a bit more time exploring it but wasn’t really in the mood at the time, and I the main reason I hate driving as a means of seeing an area is just because it’s conducive to that ‘ah, I’ll just keep driving’ attitude – and after seeing the slightly steep parking prices, any interest in seeing the Three Sisters was lost. After all that unmotivated driving, I headed round to Leura and spent a while at the quiet but quite impressive lookout at Sublime Point.

I took a drive through Mt Victoria, on the Bell Line Of Road, doubling back at Bell towards Lithgow to try to get a view of the Zig-Zag railway, but the road never seemed to open up any views of the line that I’d seen and heard a bit about. I checked out the station at Clarence then got distracted by yet more dirt road that promised some caves and camp grounds, but after maybe half an hour and a few not very well signed junctions in what felt like never-ending forest I doubled back just in case I got lost or ran out of fuel, or both.
Back on the main road, I headed east, now fairly intent on making this my last full day of driving – I think the consistently hot days, lack of showers, banter and good food combined to make getting a hot shower and a good bed to sleep in at my family’s house the next night seem like a very attractive option.

There was quiet rest area tucked just off the road at Bilpin so I had yet more 3 minute noodles there for lunch then kept going towards Richmond. I saw a lookout marked on the map on a road SW of Kurrajorong Heights but the road got a bit rough, and private, so that joined the growing list of missed or avoided attractions for the day. On the main road there was a lookout to the SE which gave an impressive view of the sprawling flatlands of the Hawkesbury Plain hundreds of metres below, as well as large bushfire and the massive plume of smoke rising from it.

Descending into the plain to Richmond, I dipped below 1000m above the sea for maybe the second time in 4 days, and the heat was borderline unbearable. After getting some supplies from Coles I closed my curtains, opened all the windows, and had a very sticky late afternoon nap in the carpark, not that I felt any better for it afterwards, or indeed for the rest of the day. Somehow I ended up deciding to drive to Hawkesbury Heights and ended up at the lookout there, which also looks down over the plain from the edge of the Blue Mountains Tablelands, to find that the bushfire I’d seen hours early was still raging but now, in the fading light flashes of fire crews’ vehicles and helicopters’ strobes could be seen everywhere around Londonderry.

If I was unsure of the severity of the fire, the dozens of other people at the lookout watching the fire, as well as fire fighting personnel confirmed that it was a bit serious. Just as the fires seemed to be getting reigned in, a big storm rolled in from the west, looking set to deal the final blow to the fires, but instead it missed the fires and even brought some previously subdued fires back to life with its draughts. As night fell, everything was eventually brought under control as I watched the brilliant lightening show head towards the distant glow of Sydney.

Now that it was dark, and I wasn’t feeling great either, the car park had to make do as my sleeping area for the night. Annoyingly the whole car park is sloped, making sleeping in the boot pretty uncomfortable, and that’s before the added humidity because of the rain all night necessitating the windows being shut. It turned out that the lookout was a popular spot with the local hoons so I had to put up with engines of varying calibres being revved outside my window for the first few hours of the night.

I wasn’t looking forward to trying to find my way back to the Bondi, in the Eastern suburbs, from the west of the city so I cut my, already short, sleep short at 4am so I could hit Sydney before Friday’s rush hour kicked in. After my sunny escape from the city on Sunday, this rainy drive in the dark before sunrise seemed like a bit of a depressing end to the trip, which only got worse when I bashed the left wing of my car into the side of a pickup truck. Half asleep, driving a car which I didn’t yet legally own and without my driving licence on me, this was not an ideal situation to be in at 6.30 in the morning, but to my disbelief the truck didn’t stop, so I kept going with the lane-change that had me in the debacle in the first place before the other driver had time to reconsider that bump he’d just felt, and that was that. The rest of the drive through the city was thankfully a lot less eventful, although I still needed to stop a few times to check where in the ridiculously big city I was before I found myself on the familiar stretch of road from Bondi Junction to the beach.

21 April 2010

Megalong Valley

After the lack-lustre dawn at Kanangra Walls I headed back through the Jenolan caves and onto Rydal where there was a campsite which offered a much needed shower. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have bothered paying the day-entry rate of $4 and just ran to the showers while I used the free 15 minute parking bays. Once I had paid to get into the site, I figured I may as well get some of my money’s worth and hung around to take some shots of the very low reservoir and to talk to a German guy who was having a slow day at the campsite and taking the time to write some Christmas postcards – I doubt at that time any of them would have arrived on time.

I headed through Lithgow for fuel and some food supplies including a massive stir-fry (4 days of noodles and cereal is a pretty good way to build up an appetite for a meaty meal) then on to Blackheath and the Megalong Valley. It was a hot day and the heat seemed to be taking its toll on my car: even the slightest hill was causing the engine temperature to nudge over the point that kicked the fan in to full throttle and drain half the power of the engine, so I wasn’t too happy that the amount of descending into the valley I was doing meant that I was almost certainly going to have to do a very slow crawl back out of shortly after. The valley was beautiful, with a few interesting photo spots, but there didn’t seem to be a lot to do so I made it back out and decided to take a chance on driving to Hargraves lookout

The lookout is on the end of a spur-plateau that juts out between the Megalong Valley and some other valley, giving near 360 degree views of both. There’s a stone-walled shelter at the lookout which made cooking in the exposed shot a lot easier, and so I ate my stir fry overlooking the valleys far below, and then watching the sun go down. I couldn’t pass off on the chance of an amazing view of the sunrise over the valleys the next morning so slept in the car at the lookout. I think the night was one of the first that had been clear enough to see the stars so I tried a few long exposures (including my longest to date – 3550 seconds) but the longest exposure showed some bizarre noise/sensor artefacts so that was a bit of a flop. The sunrise was nice, but unlike Kanangra-Boyd National Park there was no mist to burn off so it wasn’t as compelling as hoped.

27 March 2010

Blue Mountains Roadtrip

Even though I’d been given a driven tour of the route I should take out of Sydney the night before, I still – as expected – somewhere near the CBD didn’t find my way onto Broadway, starting 15 minutes of stopping, reading the map, heading off for a few minutes and repeating until I found myself on the road out to Paramatta. It probably didn’t help that I hadn’t slept a huge amount the night before, combined with a late night packing and getting up at 5.30 so I could slip out of the CBD before it got busy. As with most of my excursions, prior planning was minimal. The idea was to head in the direction of Penrith and on to Katoomba but once I got as far as Penrith – and finally had a rough idea where in the world I was again after taking a fairly obscure route to avoid the freeway tolls – I started getting distracted by signs for tourist attractions to the South that I hadn’t heard of and so I ended up at the Lake Burragorong Dam.

The dam at Warragamba was, well, a dam, with not a huge amount of water in it – although the info on how it was built was quite interesting – so I headed on fairly quickly and ended up at a lookout a little to the south at Nattai. Now this was more like it: a deep torquoise lake stretching out for miles in 3 directions, mirrored by a clear blue sky and flanked by rocky plateau on all sides. At the Yerranderie end of the lake there were unbelievably intense green patches of either marsh or some sort of algae that looked like a lush paradise at the end of an already beautiful lake hiding under the fairly barren landscape above. By this point I’d run out of distractions to the south of Penrith but had caught my eye on a road which appeared to wind round the southern edge of the Blue Mountains and I felt compelled to check it out even though it was over an hour’s drive in completely the opposite direction to my original ‘plan’ and might not even be that suitable for a normal car (especially one I’d just bought and hadn’t driven enough to trust taking on a fairly remote road).

Soon I was in Mittagong trying to work out where to get on to the Wombeyan Caves Road as – in what is fairly usual for my driving experience in Australia – the sign I required seemed to be non-existent. From the map, it looked like I had about 60km of driving along the road till I got to some possible camping areas. It looked a bit winding so I figured 2 hours would be fine, and after the first 20km of sealed and not overly interesting road that was looking like an OK target. Then the road turned to dust and started cutting round the side of steep hills, with nothing but a sheer face on one side and a precarious looking drop on the other. Hardly a kilometre in and I spotted two cars through the trees, lying at various angles, wrecked and abandoned and once again wondered about how smart it was to be on this road. But on I went, way slower as I couldn’t see what was round any of the tight corners and didn’t want to test my brakes on the rough and loose road. Apart from the slight fear of throwing the car off any one of the hundreds of treacherous and un-fenced corners, the drive along the Wombeyan Caves road turned into one of my favourites in Australia so far. As the road climbed up the sides of the hills, each corner opened up an even more spectacular and unique view of the edge of the Blue Mountains and, as the drive was now taking considerably longer than first expected, the sinking sun added yet more beauty to the landscape. Countless stops on countless corners, peaks, lookouts and a tunnel later and I’d arrived at the Wombeyan Caves campground, with just enough time to make some supper and get settled down for my first night sleep in a car. Arriving late did mean there was nobody around to charge me for using the campsite, or the hot shower, and so my week of avoiding paying for the priviledge of sleeping started.