At last. After four months of lokdown, you can move freely around NSW. Further than 100 km from Sydney. I mean, you musn't do even that without a good excuse, but we went to the Blue Mountains once just to change the sourrandings (shhh..no one will know). How long can you drive around this city over and over?! Sydney is beautiful, but as soon as the weekend came the question was "So where are we going ?!". Here and there we'he already been. Hence the police rout us out a week ago. You can only run or surf on the beach. Weekends were getting colder from week to week and it was raining more and more so we had been rotting at home for the last month. Which wasn't the best for our moods. And when I was planning to spend the next weekend in bed without sticking my nose out from under the blanket, the honorable prime minister announced that "Okay, you can drive around the state. And we open campsites for you, although with restrictions, but still. "
I immediately started planning a trip. The more that the first weekend of easing the restrictions was a long weekend. On Monday, the state of NSW celebrated the Queen's birthday. Of course about the prelonged weekend I found out at the last minute, i.e. on Friday. I haven't learned when're these days off here yet, although there are really not many of them. Only maybe three times a year.
I started packing us and getting everything ready. The first thing, of course two sleeping bags per head. At night, the temperature could dropp to 6 degrees, so we were getting ready for an extreme trip. I also prepared warming dishes and a thermos with hot coffee. And moonshine.😊Then I sat down at my computer to come up with a plan for where to stay. It turned out that, however with these "open campsites" is not so simple. I have already mentioned that after cricket and rugby, camping is the third national sport in this country. So after a four-month break Aussies were hungry to drag their big trailers into the forest somewhere. It quickly turned out that probably all the places on paid and free campsites have already been taken. Since month. A website was created where you could check the availability of campsites (rule said up to 50 people per camp) and even for free campsites you had to pay a administration 6$ fee to be able to book a place. It didn't bode well. But Marcin found out that there are also state forests where you can sleep for free, there are no restrictions, firewood can be collected at will. There are only quite a few of them near Sydney and information about places are not very exposed on the Internet. Where there's a will there's a way. I buried myself in the Internet and developed our trip plan.
To be sure, we chose 6 campgrounds. All in the vicinity of small mountains west of Macquarie Port, 350 to 400 km from Sydney. And so on Saturday (of course we overslept)we set off on our long-awaited trip! Moods were good. Old, Polish punk was playing in the speakers, warm coffee in belly and after less than an hour ... we were standing in a giant traffic jam on the highway from Sydney! OMG what a traffic jam!!! People, where are you all going?! After all, there is a pandemic!!! You should stay at home!!!
Ugh, well that was to be expected. The traffic jam took us about an hour. We knew from the beginning that we would not reach our destination in the daytime, but now we were sure that we will be setting camp into the dark. Nothing new for us. However, we did not foresee one thing. After some 150 km we turned west from A1 to the county roads meandering between hills and valleys… and we completely lost our connection with the world. Zero phone range and Internet. Marcin had a map loaded on his phone only once, so we were sure that we would get to the destination set on the map (waht if the phone suddenly turned off or something happened to it). I downloaded the offline maps the day before, but I did not check if they were working. Of course they didn't. On the other hand, paper map was not detailed enough to lead us through the center of these forests. Admittedly, while driving along the asphalt meandring road, we saw a lot of firespits on huge campsites located mostly down the hill, we saw Ausssie motorhomes but it was so dark, we couldn't find way through to these campsites. Entire valleys along the rivers were lit only by bonfires. Sometimes you could see whole families of locals sitting in small villages, on private plots and farms, lighting huge fires. I felt like in Autumn in Poland. It is a pity that we did not have good camera that could show you this very magical mood.
Meanwhile, the night was starting to turn pitch black. Even though the moon was just rising in the strawberry full moon, the forest was already so dense that we couldn't see even the slightest reflection of the light. Not only that, after another 100 km of local roads, the street in front of us also ended and we started to climb up either gravel or stony dirt road. Holes in the road were getting bigger and bigger. Sometimes we passed fallen trees. But we continued bravely in our van without four-wheel drive. Only the occasional big 4x4 cars with huge off-road wheels, tents on the roofs, huge logs of wood intended for all-night bonfires gave us some hope that we were going in the right direction . Although I am almost sure that the drivers of these off-road vehicles when they passed us probably knocked on the head saying: "Look what idiots. They went on this route by van! "
But we are stubborn and our van is nicknamed Yakuza for a reason!
After another 50 km on a dark night we arrived at the first of the planned campsites. While in the pictures it looked really nice - a wild forest by the river - now we didn't see nothing. There were just a few off-road cars strewn with mud in the thick bushes and maybe three firespits. Virtually no man or infrastructure in sight. I didn't expect a lot in the middle of the forest somehow but at least a small camp spots or compost toilet. But nothing like that appeared in our sight. It was more like a tiny U-turn road inn with cars randomly lined up where they could fit.
That's why we decided to drive further. And after another 10 km we saw a really large campsite - Henry's Bridge Manning River Campground.
There were about 15 camp, each at such distance that nobody disturbed each other. We quickly parked Yakuza and walked around to see what was going on. And there was a table by the river and a free hearth for a bonfire, as if only for us waiting for us! Perfect! Later we found out why there was little interest in this specyfic spot. It turned out that from a nearby mountain stream it was so cold at night that we could hardly warm ourselves by the fire.
It was really late night. We had to act to avoid freezing to death. First we went for wood. After all these months when the only people in this forest were probably the rangers on duty there was a lot of dry wood laying down. You only had to bend down to take a nice bunch of firewood. So we did a few trips and when Marcin was starting fire I took care of the food.
Although we had a lot of fun, the full moon was great and illuminated the whole campsite, the river next to it was rustling and from the next campground you could hear young people singing "Country Roaaads, Country Roads, West Virginia, Country maaaamaaaaa, taaake me homeeee" really loud, but it was fucking cold. Even for Poles. We ran for wood a few more times and we were practically sitting in the middle of flames (swear to God, if we could wanted to stand in the middle of bonfire). I drank two big teapots of tea and even spicy tomato soup and moonshine did not help. Around midnight we ran to the car to put on all the clothes we had, turn on the heating to the maximum, bury ourselves under two sleeping bags and quickly fall asleep. Surprisingly, it slept very well.
In the morning we were awakened by crowds of people. From about five in the morning each time I woke up for a moment there were more and more cars around us. Some parked for a while, others to eat breakfast, another to sing birthday song to someone. And others were crossing river back and forth with their big 4x4s. Crowd. So we quickly organized small brekki and decided to go back to the nearest town. We had to refill fuel, firewood and water, get Internet and look for another campground.
The road which prevoius night had seemed difficult and unfriendly, during the day turned out to be a beautiful route through an incredibly dense and green forest with wonderful views of the extensively valleys. The grounds in this area are really phenomenal.
We rode slowly, feasting our eyes on these landscapes and stopping at the viewpoints. The road led us and we relaxed admiring the beauty of nature and absorbing the warmth of the sun warming us through the car windows. Finally we got to a small, incredibly atmospheric town - Gloucester. A settlement from 1855 founded by gold prospectors, now inhabited by about 2,500 inhabitants. Two small gas stations, one larger hypermarket, one large liquor store 😊, lots of "cowboys", big trucks, a few local pubs and shops and very nice people. We quickly bought what we had to replenish and sterted looking for another campground. It turned out that there are a lot of them here. And since it was quite late afternoon, we did not want to go back 80 km up the river again, so we managed to find a huge, free camping site literally on the same river, just downstream - Bretti Reserve.
This campground is actually a huge, picturesquely situated grassland in the river valley. There was a lot of space. Here we also found a fireplace for ourselves, we parked van, set chairs, table and awning. We had neighbors - one older couple. We set a fire, prepared dinner, opened the wine and soaked up the silence around us. The night came quickly, fortunately not as cold as the previous one. After dark, just beyond the hills we were saw some lightning and distant thunders. But after a two-hour spectacle of lightning, storm suddenly dissapeard. A group from the nearby camp fired fireworks to celebrate a holiday (maybe for the Queen's birthday?!), and densely dotted, beautiful stars appeared in the sky.
We were resting. Full relaxation, empty head. It was wonderful to break away from all the bad things that have been happening lately. To stop thinking about the situation in which the whole world has found itself - our families, our friends, us. Take a break from the Internet, news, virus, politics, haters, bad people, the city, noise and crowds. It was wonderful to talk quietly about ordinary things, about further plans. Our only concern was to make sure the fire that the fire would burn. We enjoyed these magical moments.
The night passed quickly and quietly. It was not raining. We were not cold. We ate breakfast, packed up and headed back enjoying our last moments amidst these beautiful views.
When we jumped onto the highway we immediately ran into a gigantic traffic jam. We were relaxed so it did not bother us too much. We stopped for a moment for a short break to stretch our legs. Our phones began beeping and buzzing reconnecting with the world again. Marcin looked at his phone for a moment, quickly looked at social media and stated that nothing had changed. Still most people are idiots.
We headed home.
Shower, bed, sleep.