We'd driven southwest to the part of New South Wales known as New England. We were there, primarily, to do two new parkruns over the New Year's Day long weekend. And while we did those, we like to pick travel destinations that we think would be interesting enough even if they didn't have our beloved 5km running events to attend.
The plan was simple: Drive on Friday; run one parkrun on Saturday morning, hike somewhere beautiful on Saturday afternoon; run another parkrun on Sunday morning, hike somewhere else beautiful on Sunday afternoon; drive home on Monday.
Things didn't go totally according to our plan, mostly because it turned out there were so many awesome things to do in and around the New England region!
So this is a post about what we did after parkrun on Saturday but before our "afternoon" hike =)
On Saturday morning we had driven from Armidale to a small, nearby town called Walcha to do their parkrun. (parkrun--all one word, all lowercase--if you've never heard of it, is a free, weekly, timed, community event that's held every Saturday morning... except on the rare occasion that we get an extra parkrun on another day of the week!)
Walcha parkrun was awesome. We had a blast. We both ran well. And, since the locals were chatty and friendly, we found ourselves at their local café chatting about all the things runners like to chat about.
Before we left we asked if there was anything we should definitely do in Walcha before we returned to Armidale again. The immediate and resounding answer: "Go to Apsley Falls."
So we did! We jumped in the car and 17 minutes later we were rolling into one section of the sprawled, large, protected green space known as Oxley Wild Rivers National Park.
When we got out of the car we checked out the various walks on the signboard and thought we'd just do a quick out-and-back to one of the lookouts, drive to another lookout and then head back to our accommodation for a rest.
But one short walk lead to another and another and before we knew it we'd linked together several very short walks to make one pleasant still short loop that took in several pretty stops.
The sign informed us that this is Dunghutti Country and that Aboriginal people (the Dunghutti) from this area had many sacred sites here. While I hate to think what happened hundreds of years ago when this area was explored and then taken over by said explorers, I appreciate that there is, nowadays, references in many Australian National Parks to the people and things that existed prior to the beginning of White Australia in 1788.
Speaking of whitefellas, here's a sign about the things that were built in the 1900's by well-meaning locals who wanted to bring more tourism to the area. I can understand why they wanted to build access points down to the bottom of the gorge. It is beautiful!
And very, very steep!! No wonder they kept having to remove the stairs each time! (If you're wondering what I'm talking about here, read the sign above!)
Of course, where there's a steep gorge there are waterfalls and even with little rain in the last few months, there were still several waterfalls running into this massive gorge.
Our last stop before we got back to the car was a quick walk over the top of this very cool bridge. It must have been fairly new (the bridge) as it was in great condition considering tourists had been visiting this part since the early 1900s.
There were also plenty of birds and lizards and bugs of all sorts. Brad has developed a really good eye in the last few years for critters that will photograph well. I have no idea what this creature is but I can tell you its spikes tell me not to touch it... and for the record, it's only about the size of my pinky finger!
Final photo: my favourite plant we found at Apsley Falls. I wish I'd paid more attention to the signs to see if I could have found the name of this plant! But even this nameless beauty deserves to be seen by you. I'd never seen it before (despite spending a lot of time outdoors and travelling to a lot of places in Australia). I can only guess it's an endemic species (i.e. growing only in this local area) but who knows! Do you? If you do, tell me in the comments!
Otherwise, that's it, folks! I'm glad I could take you on a stroll through the Apsley Falls area inside the Oxley Wild Rivers National Park in New South Wales. It's a long way from any capital city in Australia but definitely worth a visit if ever you happen to be in that area :)
{All photos were taken by Brad, aka @new.things, my photographer extraordinaire. Thanks must also go to Strava for the cool map!}