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This morning it’s cold out here. Temperatures below 20 degrees. It’s more or less dry now after the heavy showers of last night. But the result is a grey and not so pleasant feeling. So no walking along the beach this morning. I do it the American way: by car, open window, take picture and move on…

Last night I decided that I will be driving inland today. I have seen enough beaches for now and there seems to be a nice road called the Waterfall Highway that should present me with some nice views. And then there the proof of the pudding:

It’s a beautiful road to drive. It’s winding, it goes up and down and the views are great. But the same problem as before: there’s no way you can stop to take a picture and this road will not allow me to take pictures while driving. Well not without getting a lot of discussions with the guys from Thrifty to explain the new striping on the side of the car…

Baron Travel (the travel agent that helped me plan and organize this holiday) included a book in the package describing the country and the interesting places. One of them is coming up now: Dorrigo National Park. Here you can walk through a rainforest and there is a skywalk with amazing views. Well, according to the sign the views should be amazing. But today this is what I got:

Time to move on. It was raining here and I don’t want to walk in this drizzle to see more or less nothing due to the low cloud base. Next stop: Dangar Falls; a more serious waterfall.

The next stop was Griffiths Lookout. This was not a planned stop, I just found a sign “lookout”, so the tourist in me said: go see. And again there’s a nice board that describes the view. And then there is the reality of today. Bummer…

Moving on to the town of Dorrigo. On my way I met some of the locals. They weren’t very talkative though.

When driving on the Waterfall Highway, you expect waterfalls. And you know what? I found another one: Ebor Falls. By the time I got here, the weather was improving. Time to go for a stroll and to make sure that everything is nicely digitized. This one is far more impressive than the other two I got to today. Ebor Falls has two waterfalls. Why do I tell you this? Just look at the pictures.

Did my stunt driving again.

And guess what I found along the road? Yes you are right: another waterfall… Wollomombi Falls to be precise. This is a big gap in a massive rock formation… The waterfall itself is not that impressive, but the scenery is fantastic.

Getting closer to the town where I want to stay the night: Armidale. There are less hills now and the road is a long straight line again. The farmers have a bit of cleaning up to do here: there are a lot of “stones” in their fields.

When I got to Armidale I was surprised by the size of this town. It’s quite big. On to the visitor information centre again. They told me that there are about 25.000 people living here and their biggest employer is the local university. Well the lady at the centre booked me a nice room in a motel and gave me some advice on tonight’s dinner: the local pub!

By the time I got to the pub it was already filling up nicely. I ordered my meal and found my chair for this evening when two blokes came in and joined me. They were from Newcastle and were here for some electrical work. It turned out to become a very pleasant evening with the boys. The pub organized a game for tonight. They would ask a question and you needed to write your answer on a piece of paper. By the end of the evening the table with the most points would get a nice surprise. Well it wasn’t about the points for us; it was just good fun and the beers helped in the process.

After too many beers I waggled back to my motel… It’s going to be a tough day tomorrow…

The track of today:

Tuesday 7 April 2009

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