Around Dorrigo, NSW.

1st – 2nd October, 2012.

Doug and Robyn were going to Muswellbrook, NSW, to pick up some Land Rover parts, and asked if I’d like to go with them, as they know I like going anywhere.

Our first night was in Dorrigo, in the northern NSW rain forest.

 

We stayed in the beautiful Dorrigo Heritage Hotel, established in 1925.

 

The wardrobes and dressing tables were made in 1925 from Queensland maple.

 

The door beside my bed led onto the verandah.

 

Robyn with dessert in the hotel bistro.

 

I so love the verandahs on these old hotels, with their romantic wrought iron railings.  I think that one of the nicest things a person can do is to sit on one of these beautiful verandahs and watch the world go by (and take pictures of it).

 

Dorrigo in the (very) early morning, from the verandah.  No, that’s not the sunrise, it’s a street light.

 

This is the sunrise.

 

The “other hotel” in Dorrigo, basking in the morning sunlight, and taken from the verandah, of course.

 

You can look down on the canopy from the stunning Skywalk boardwalk, 70 metres in the air, above the Dorrigo National Park. 

 

From the skywalk, we could see ribbons of mist floating gently between the mountains.

 

The bird life around Dorrigo includes bowerbirds, pittas and lyrebirds.  I think we saw a bower bird, but I couldn’t be sure.

 

The road that links Dorrigo to the coast is picturesquely named Waterfall Way, so of course there were waterfalls.  Ebor Falls are located on the Guy Fawkes River, near, believe it or not, Ebor.

 

Wollomombi Falls are located in the Oxley Wild Rivers National Park, 40 km east of Armidale.  The Wollomombi  Gorge was created several hundred million years ago, as rivers cut through the sedimentary rocks.  The volume of water over the falls may vary between a torrent and a trickle, depending on the amount of rain in the catchment area.  It looks as though we caught it in its trickle phase.

 

We stopped for a cup of tea at Bendemeer, on the banks of the very pretty MacDonald River.

 

St Anne’s Catholic Church Wallabadah, built in 1910.  60 km south of Tamworth, Wallabadah is an attractive little village with tree-lined streets on the upper reaches of Quirindi Creek, beneath the mountains of the Peel Range and on the eastern rim of the Liverpool Plains.