Last time I was in Australia I did some little bushwalking, loved it a lot, but it was nothing like I did this time. Now I can say I truly enjoyed an Australian bushwalk! :-) Ok, wasn’t going far in the unknown outback, where no man has gone before, we just stayed in a Nature Reserve and National Park, but still, amazing bushwalking!

The bush is beautiful. Just gorgeous. Quiet as can be. So quiet it’s hard to imagine, coming from such a densely populated country as Holland, it can really be that quiet! Well, it can! It’s an amazing feeling. Just stop walking for a second, stand still and listen. Nothing. Maybe some birds, the wind through the trees… but besides that: nothing.

First real bushwalking we did was in Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve. Home of Lucky the Koala, who was the only Koala to survive the devastation at Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve during the 2003 bushfires. I guess that’s lucky… but when all your Koala relatives, Koala friends, Koala children (??) and Koala neighbours die, can you call that lucky? Either way, Lucky is famous, but we didn’t go see Lucky. She was on the initial plan, but first we went for a walk up to the Gibraltar rocks.

Gibraltar rocks is a large rock formation on the top of a hill with a great view on the surroundings. Turned out to be a great, but hard and steep, walk up and even harder (due to the steepness) walk down. Took us 2 and a half hours, but it was more then worth it! Lot’s of kangaroo’s, extraordinary vegetation, huge boulders and amazing views!

After the walk we decided to skip Lucky, we didn’t wanne push her luck! ;-), and go see the platypussy’s. Well, they are not on display, in the wild and unbelievable shy, so we didn’t see any… A bit disappointing, but the big black swans we came across and were followed by a couple of little ones made up for a lot!

Second big bushwalking adventure was done close to Canberra as well. In the Orroral valley in Namadgi National Park. Sally had a book full of bushwalking trails in that Park. The book was written by an old handicapped man with a great love for rocks, who drove the tracks in his early version Jeep Grand Cherokee, somewhere in the 1950ies. What I am trying to say, things had changed quite dramatically ever since he wrote the book. The first half of the trail we chose was on a dirt road with no view to the left, nor to the right. A lot of trees along the dirt road had been chopped down, there was a lot of young 2 or 3 meter high vegetation, probably all results from the bushfires in 2003, but it didn’t make the first half to the trial as enjoyable as promised in the book…

But! The second part lived up to all expectations!!! The way back was through the Orroral valley and was just an amazing walk! Hundreds and hundreds of kangaroo’s all over the place!! Great views on the endless grassland in the valley and hills surrounding them. We stopped many times on the walk back just to enjoy the view, kangaroo’s and the silence. Did lost the track a couple of times though… even had to struggle through a swamp and when we finally reached the other side of the swamp we had to smile when we saw we completely missed the boardwalk along the swamp! :-)

We couldn’t have been more happy when we finally reached the car after a good 4 and a half hours of walking… Tired, hungry, sore muscles and feet but all that with a big smile on our face! :-)

This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 19:39 and is filed under Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.