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Published: January 17th 2010
Leaving Sydney
what frightful weather we had! Stunning though.So after spending new year's with Kellie & James in Sydney we set off in our "Jucy Crib" for a mini tour of New South Wales, north of Syndey...
Proper blurb to follow but enjoy photos for now!
Our route: > Sydney
> Hunter Valley
> Tamworth
> Warrabah National Park
> Copeton Lake/State Forest
> Inverell
> Tenterfield
> Lismore
> Byron Bay & Lennox Head
> Ballina
> Dorrigo
> Crowdy Bay National Park
> Bulahdelha & Seal Rocks
> Nelson Bay
> Sydney Bondi Beach
Ok, time to blurb.. We are SO slack. Sorry!
So.. we really liked NSW but it absolutely slaughtered our budget - especially as we´d not budgetted to spend any time in Aus on our travels. Just the car hire doubled our average daily budget for the year. So... we kept it simple and got back to nature a bit.
We had a brilliant 2 weeks though, mainly spending the nights in campsites or national parks. Highlights, as sad as they may seem, included:
NOT having to pack/unpack our bags for 2 whole weeks
Shopping for and making our own food. We were in heaven eating home made
ham & cheese rolls at the beach & cooking up pasta on our camp stove or in the camp site kitchen.
Having our own transport
Cheese
Hunter Valley Drove for about 2-3 hours north of Sydney through some crazy, crazy weather until we reached the Hunter Valley, home to 100s (possibly 1000s) of vineyards. Got into Cessnock late so ended up parking in a youth hostel carpark and sleeping there overnight (paid to use their facilities though).
Got up bright and early the next day to visit some of the local sights. First stop was the Poole´s Rock vineyard (chosen because of the Poole connection) where we spent half and hour "at the cellar door" (aka. trying their wines for free) before purchasing a couple of bottles of our favourites.
Then headed to a smelly cheese shop to pick up some lunch. Found a quiet spot in the countryside and sat in our Jucy chairs, overlooking the valley as we ate.
Headed to the Blue Tongue brewary to try their beer in the afternoon and then hit the road to.......
Tamworth .....the home of Australian country and western music (it´s a big, big deal
here). We expected Tamworth to be a lot more lively than it actually was. Decided to eat out the evening we arrived but only found one place that was a. open, b. serving food, c. had other customers. Good food though, and we stuffed ourselves, massacring the daily budget in the process.
The campsite that we were staying in had a singer playing in the BBQ area until 11pm ish, so went to sleep to the sounds of Aussie C&W covers (I assume they were covers as his captive audience were singing along to nearly every word).
Went to the C&W music museum the next day, visited Tamworth´s iconic big golden guitar and then hit the road again.
Warrabah National Park We weren´t allowed to take our Jucy campervan offroad as is wasn´t 4WD. Warrabah National Park is only accessible via 20km of pot-holed, undulating and very off-road dirt track. Given that Jucy have asked to use some of our pictures and may well be reading this I should probably stress that in no way did we take the Jucy down this trail in order to get to the park. That would´ve been really dumb, highly irresponsible
and would´ve taken hours to drive at snail-esque speed (probably approx at the max).
No, we hitched there - honestly!
The park was very peaceful when we got there - a woodland totally in the middle of nowhere. "Camped" beside the river, cooked up some food and drank a bottle of wine purchased from Poole´s Rock. Then it started raining and thundering very, very heavily. Thought we might get bogged in the next day but everything turned out ok.
Copeton Lake/State Forest Another national park. This one had less forest and more wide open green space, with lakes (as the name suggests) and accompanying views.
Managed to snag ourselves an amazing parking spot on a hill between two lakes, with amazing sunset views on one side and sunrise views on the other (see photos).
On the downside, there were a LOT of mosquitos. And we kept hearing strange wildlife darting around the van in the middle of the night.
Also, saw our first kangaroos in this park. Took advantage of the free outdoors gas BBQs (available in all parks across NSW it seems) and had the ultimate BBQ experience - burgers overlooking the
countryside with accompanying ´roos and emus. Nice!
Inverell We had to try fossicking, the process of panning for gold or precious stones. Headed to a site just outside of Inverell where we spent the day fossicking for gems (see pics). We encountered a lot of flies but didn´t really find anything of any worth. Was good to have the experience - made you appreciate the hard work that the Aussie goldrushers had to put in to make their fortunes.
Tenterfield Stopped at Tenterfield, a crossroads town, in order to break up the journey. Stayed in a caravan park next to the main road that was run by the garage next door. It wasn´t great.
Decided to treat ourselves and eat out. Went for Chinese. It wasn´t great either.
We were glad to see the back of Tenterfield when we left the next morning. We swore we´d never return. About 10 mins drive down the road we realised we´d taken the wrong road out of town and had to turn around. Thus, we found ourselves back in Tenterfield sooner than expected........
Lismore Lismore is a bit of a culture magnet - lots of artists, actors etc
Tamworth: Capital of Country Music, NSW
Photo by the "Big Golden Guitar" - some bloke ran in front & did a little dance, how sweet! etc hang out here. It was nice enough - went to a photo exhibition documenting Japanese counter-culture fashion in the local library and visited the koala rescue centre (another antipodean animal successfully ticked off the "to see" list). Other than that just hung around town doing not much in particular.
Looked out of the van window in the evening to see that a travelling farm, complete with animals, had parked up next to us for the evening. Watched in amazement as the farmer washed his dung covered trailer out onto his camping area! In fairness, we couldn´t smell anything but we felt sorry for the next person to camp there.
Byron Bay & Lennox Head Byron Bay is very beautiful but very busy. We were there on a Saturday as well (I think) so the place was heaving. Spent the day there, had a ham roll on the beach, took in the views, had an ice cream and then moved on - just too busy & too expensive to spend the night!
Ballina Can´t remember what we did in Ballina, must´ve been something though. If and when I remember, I´ll write it here.
Post script
- I remember now. We found a (nice & cheap) caravan park and did nothing for 2 days. It was brilliant!
Dorrigo National Park & The Waterfall Way Rain forest! On the way we had our first negative experience of small town tourist offices (see Bulahdelha for detail) in Bellingen. Many would say Bellingen was a cute little town but we decided to carry on through to Dorrigo N.P. We had a fit of indecision about where to stay for the night as we wanted to go into the park but we didn´t fancy staying in the town nearby and thought the campsite near the park was a little pricey so after stopping off to see a waterfall we headed on for about 15km before turning back and ending up in said campsite. It was a pretty tense hour or so in the new Levere marriage I can tell you! But we bounced back once we got ourselves parked up & got plenty of change for the pay per 5min hot water shower and cooked up a decent feed on our little stove.
So the next morning we packed up and headed into the park for a
bit of rainforest trekking. It was ever so civilised. To protect the natural habitat they´ve put paths through with signage letting you know where you are and giving a few pointers about the surrounding trees & plant life. They also have a short forest canopy walkway where you can stand looking out over the rainforest & views beyond.
So we had a good 2 1/2 hour hike that day, seeing a few lizzards, couple of waterfalls & learning a bit about rainforest plants.
Crowdy Bay National Park Saw a very cool goanna here (yes, goanna Graham & any other doubters, not iguana!). Very bumpy road in that seemed to last forever... Arrived late in the day, chose it as a cheaper alternative to a caravan park along the coast but found out it was pretty expensive - especially since it had only bush toilet & cold showers - a little more back to nature than we expected for our $15 each! It was also rife with kids riding bikes among back to back tent/caravans in the main bit near the beach so we drove on (along more bumpy road) to the next site to spend the night. This
is where, in the morning, we saw the goanna wandering very casually through our neighbours site.
Bulahdelha & Seal Rocks Again, we took our time during the day stopping off to see some magnificant sea views and found ourselves approaching dusk without a proper plan on where to stay so we drove inland a little to the nothing town of Bulahdelha with the aim of catching their tourist office before closing to get a list of camp sites in the area (as promised by lonely planet). It was closed. This was one of the few anoying things about NSW - the apparant tendancy for tourist offices to have unscheduled days off with not even a sign on the door to apologise for the obvious inconvenience to suckers like us that have driven out of our way to get there! It happened twice in 4 days to us.
Anyway, luckily the local library was open so we popped in, used their internet FOR FREE!!!! and got a recommendation for a cheap caravan site just up the road - where the junior assistant was currently abiding.
The next day we drove out to Seal Rocks which we´d been
told was amazing by a fellow Jucy traveller that we´d stopped off to switch DVD´s with the afternoon before (she hailed us down in the road to ask if we´d watched our 2 dvd´s and wanted to do a swap). It was indeed very lovely. We drove all the way to the end of the headland there & walked up to the lighthouse looking over the bay.
Nelson Bay Basically went here to eat pie as we´d read about a couple of amazing pie shops in the area. We weren´t disappointed. Pies were readily available as promised, despite us getting the address wrong & discovering that 2 of the 3 pie shops we´d expected to find there were in different towns. One, we stopped off at on the way though so only missed one of the 3 in the end.
Sydney Bondi Beach & Watson Bay Had fish & chips at the legendary Doyles in Watsons bay as recommended by Pat.
Our one night of (almost) careless abandon sleeping in the van parked up in a street. I say almost as we´d parked nearby a YHA to use their loo, internet before they locked
the doors at 11pm. It was such a huge hostel that they didn´t know guests from randoms off the street like us.
Woke up early (before the YHA was open) so drove back up to Watson´s bay to use the public loo with free parking combo to pull ourselves together a little bit & pack up our rucksacks before driving back to the Jucy rentals place to say goodbye to our temporary home, which by this time we were very ready to part with. Jucy - we loved you but enough is enough is enough and we were glad to go back to dorm life.
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Lucy from JUCY Rentals
non-member comment
Love your pics!
Hey Guys Looks like you had an amazing time and enjoyed your time in your JUCY Campa! The pics are awesome! I was wondering if you mind if we re-post your photos on our facebook page and blog? Enjoy the rest of your travells! Love Lucy xx