First up though was a night with friends of the Rohens' - Sandy and Doug. They very kindly put us up at their place in North Sydney and provided an excellent barbeque the night before Good Friday. On Good Friday we did a long drive up towards Singleton and then west towards Merriwa before heading south to Rylstone and in to camp on the western edge of Wollomi National Park, at the ominously named "Dunn's Swamp". It was actually a great spot, but extremely busy. We managed to find a spot to camp ... just.
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Here's the swamp:
On the Saturday we attempted to do a walk to the summit of Mount Coricudgy - not a particularly difficult or daunting walk, but it wasn't exactly marked and we wandered through the forest trails in the mist for a fair few hours but never quite found it!
On Sunday we made a move to find some more walks and some quieter camping. We drove down to a place called Mountain Lagoon (see the map below)
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We packed our rucksacks for an overnight trip, walking into a campsite on one of the bends on the Colo River near-ish to Upper Colo. This turned out to be quite a challenging walk, but it was really worth the effort. First of all we saw a Koala ... only the second one I've ever seen in the wild, and probably the most regal looking animal I've ever seen. "Hello down there ground dweller".
Then we marched up a 4wd track onto a ridge and through fantastic forest with all kinds of different Eucalypts.
The views of the river from the ridge were excellent as you can see.
But when we eventually got down to the river we had the entire place to ourselves, and ended up camping on he beach right next to the river... absolutely idyllic!
If we'd known it was going to be as nice as this then we probably would have brought more food and spent a day lounging by the river. Instead we stayed as late as we could, putting off the steep climb back out. Unfortunately this meant it was hot by the time we left making the climb out a bit harder...
But we took it slow enough to smell the flowers at least, and there were lots of beautiful native plants to admire.
We were pretty much puffed out by the time we got back to the car, but we had to head off and find somewhere else to spend the night. There's an interesting system of ferries to cross many of the larger rivers and a place at the confluence of several rivers called Wiseman's Ferry ... this is the mother of the Hawkesbury ferries area. We stopped here for dinner at the pub before heading north across the river through St Albans.
It was dark by the time we got to St Albans, which looked really nice, but we had to get through to our campsite at Mogo Creek.
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The drive up was all dirt road, great fun to drive and only one kangaroo that we had to brake for! The Mogo Creek area is an interesting spot from a historical perspective, as the Old Great North Road was built through here ... 'Old' because it never really got used. Settlements developed elsewhere and alternative routes were taken to head north out of Sydney. There were some old bridge structures that we had a little look at on a walk the next day.
We spent a couple of nights at Mogo Creek ... another quieter spot, and managed to keep dry-ish despite the storms we had both nights.
On our final day we drove east out to the coast through more National Parks, then back down the highway to Sydney. It was a lovely warm 28 degrees in Sydney ... but when we got off the plane in Hobart a couple of hours later it was just 10 degrees - Brrrr!
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