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Published: July 23rd 2008
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It’s been raining all day here on the “Sunshine Coast” - a good time to do some catching up. So, to continue with our travels through inland NSW - left Coonabarabran on June 25th and drove through pleasant countryside to Tamworth, which was a bit of a surprise really. It was a much bigger place than we expected, I think the population is over 50,000, but it had a nice country town feel about it, as well as being the home of country music in Australia. We visited the “Walk a Country Mile” exhibition at the Information Centre which was really good - it took you through the decades of country music using lots of photos, videos and audio clips. We were pleased to see that NZ was well represented amongst the artists - didn’t know Tex Morton came from Wellington!
We then drove up through a series of hills to Armidale, which is about 1000m above sea level - which is why it was minus 4 overnight! Nice sunny days, but about 3pm the temperature starts to drop pretty quickly. We braved a second frosty night there so that we could take the free heritage tour run by the
The old GPO, Tamworth
a very stately building, unfortunately not the PO nowdays visitors centre - we thought it would be a walking tour, but they took us around in a mini-bus for 2.5 hours with our local driver cum tour guide Noel who was a gem! Noel was very passionate about Armidale and we were treated to a great free sightseeing tour of the city, the university and the local history. Armidale is a very pretty town in the heart of “New England” and full of fine old and well preserved buildings.
The next day we headed down the Waterfall Way to Coffs Harbour, stopping overnight at Dorrigo on the way. “Down” is a good way to describe the trip -you start off by climbing up to about 1500 metres to Point Lookout, then it’s pretty much downhill all the way to sea level - so quite a challenge for our vehicle with a fully loaded caravan in tow, but we made it OK. The Waterfall Way is very scenic, crossing the Great Dividing Range and passing through 3 National Parks and numerous waterfalls en route to the coast, with some pretty spectacular lookout points across deep gorges and mountains. A highlight for us was seeing a male lyrebird displaying his
lyre-shaped tail feathers at New England National Park.
Dorrigo is a small village set among lush green rolling hills, and has not yet been discovered by tourism, unlike Bellingen further down the Way. There’s yet another National Park there, with a great treetop walk out over the rainforest, and lots of birdlife, which was easy to hear but very hard to spot! The final descent to the coast was very steep and we were pleased not to be traveling up the hill with our van. We called into Bellingen - a pretty town set in beautiful countryside, but heading towards being the next Byron Bay we thought - full of “trendy” people and cute shops - so we moved on.
We arrived at Coffs intending to have our sammies and travel further up the coast, but liked it so much we ended up staying 3 nights there! Straight away we noticed the change in climate - pleasantly warm, sunny and lots of tropical vegetation. We were in jeans and sweatshirts and everyone else was in shorts and T’s - quite a change from the hinterland. Coffs is the home of the “Big Banana” and the hills are covered
in banana plantations. We read somewhere that it was voted best place to live in Oz or something and we could see why. Apart from the tropical plants and flowers, there is also a really nice harbour and several good ocean beaches. From the marina and boat harbour area you can walk to Muttonbird Island, which is more like a headland, and a great place for spotting sea-birds and the humpback whales which pass quite close to the coast on their way up north. We got hooked on this new whale-spotting pastime and went up to Muttonbird for a couple of hours each day with our binoculars - apparently there are 10,000 humpbacks migrating up the coast this year and we were lucky to spot several every day except the last day when we only saw one.
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Barbara Lee
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Fantastic Reading
Dear Kath and Blu, The account of your travels is fascinating - and wonderful photographs. You must get it all published when your odyssey ends. Take care. Love Barbara