A walk in the woods

Despite her declared view that a walk is down to the shops, Judi and I went for an excellent bushwalk yesterday, along the Great North Walk. We drove to the trail head - the white building at the corner of Elouera on this map - and walked from there. The trail runs down to the GNW itself and you can go north or south. North takes you pass Westleigh, the Fishponds, through Berowra Regional Park, across the Hawkesbury and eventually to Newcastle (about 250km). South takes you through some beautiful bush to come out in Thornleigh, you can then cross into Lane Cove park and thence down to Sydney (about 40km).

I've walked along part of this trail many times now, mostly now to Galston Gorge and Crosslands. Walking fast you can go about 4km an hour at most. The path goes up and down the sides of the valley - when this occurs, the climb is usually very steep and it helps to have a walking stick. On yesterday's walk there's only really one hard place - a climb up of about 200m (in length). Apart from that it's pretty easy and mostly level walking. The bottom of the valley here is lush and green - lots of eucalyptus and causarina trees, strange Australian bushes, and ferns. After rain, it can be very humid and you almost expect to see dinosaurs poking around in the treetops and pterodactyls swooping overhead. Instead, there are birds - like the ubiquitous and very noisy kookaburras - and lizards - small ones, water dragons, and the occasional big old goanna.

On yesterday's walk, we went down the valley, through the "Jungo" and nearly down to de Saxe Close, and then back. It took about 2 hours in all. I've done a few walks close to three hours but two is a comfortable time to be out and about. Probably as it gets cooler in the fall, we'll take some longer ones, perhaps up north towards the Hawkesbury river.

The most amazing and wonderful thing, of course, is that you can bushwalk for hours in this big metropolitan area, Sydney, and not see any sign of the city. This is a great triumph of rational planning and one of the things that makes Sydney such a great place to live.

Tim