2004/02 New South Wales loop - Barrington Tops |
|||
We took another new motorway (this one free!) from Sydney north to Newcastle, still in the rain. We were headed to Barrington Tops, another national park, this time a rain forest in the mountains.
Getting there proved difficult as the roads wander all over the place. We eventually got to Dungog and the ladies in the info centre there helped us by pointing out that the campgrounds for the park are mainly outside on state forest land. They recommended the Allyn River area so that’s where we went.
We passed the Barrington Guest House, a grand old resort, and then climbed steeply in steady rain up to the Williams Top Road, a greasy one lane track with very deep ditches on either side. It wasn’t a very forgiving road. We eventually found the campground; a soggy stretch of grass along the road, with a couple of campers already hunkered down under tarpaulins.
Sandie decided to sit it out, but I went for a walk in the forest. This was real rain 
forest, very dark under huge buttress fig trees and wall to wall ferns, and infested with leeches. These were the tiny guys that lurk in the wet grass and crawl between your toes for a meal, so you don’t see them until they’ve feasted, got fat, and dropped off onto the floor, and got squished into a gory mess. I got tired of pulling them off. I had to ford the river at one point and that was running fast enough to wash most of them off.