Port Macquarie to Sydney
Travel blog Australia.
Our second week of adventures.
The trip from Port Macquarie to Sydney, we had an amazing time and saw a lot of beautiful places, i hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Day 8 * A weekend in Port Stephens.
Still in the beautiful Port stephens, an early wake up today to see the sunrise, this was as incredible as the whole area is! after that we had a good breakfast and left to see the sand dunes in Anna beach, we walked for little bit in to the dunes and found ourselves in a sandy dessert, A very nice spot and also a must visit spot if you’re in Port Stephens. After the sand dunes we went off to Hunter Valley, the wine country close to sydney and Newcastle, about an 1.5 hour drive, on our way we saw how dry and hot it is in hunter valley, and how much smoke they still have.. sadly a very hard time for all the winemakers in this region. For the night we stayed at a free campsite in broke a little old school town in the hunter valley.
Day 9 * Climate change and Bushfires.
Woke up in the Hunter valley, and when you’re here you need to do some wine tastings of course. Our first tasting in the Hunter Valley was at Margan winery, just next to our camping and very beautiful. This winery has some “different” style wines than the normal winery’s, they work a lot with grape varieties that are not really common in hunter or Australia and that makes it very interesting. Second winery was arscella winery, a biological winery with a good heart and mind for nature. We met the very special owners who are beautiful people and passionated about what they do. We had a winetasting in the middle of the garden under the silk tree with a view on the vineyards. The owner explained to us how difficult the vintage 2020 is for them and other wine makers in this region, because of the change in climate the hunter valley is hotter than ever and they have a lot of fires and hail storms that destroy the winery’s, and because of the draught and the fires the animals are having a hard time to, and they take every food they can find including the grapes, all the winemakers in this area could use all the support there is, so definitely a must visit when your here, to support this region what makes beautiful wines, and if you see a bottle in the store from Australia from the vintage 2020, treasure it because there are not going to be many of them made this year. Our tastings took quite some time so we went back after the second one, to cool off again at the coast of Newcastle.
In Newcastle we went to the Bogey Hole, a natural “pool” in the rocks filled with ocean water, a very nice spot. Also we found our spot for the night to sleep at the Mere-weather lookout. (Sorry it wasn’t really legal, but very pretty)
Day 10 * koalas and kangaroos
We left Newcastle again but before going further south we went to the Blackbutt nature reserve this is a small reserve with native animals like koalas, wallabies and kangaroos, and unfortunately also a lot of mosquitos. After being stung over a 100 times, we went to the beach in Belmont, and went for a little walk along the beach, cooled off again drove a bit further and ended up in the Central coast, where we found a beautiful place to stay for the night at Wamberal lagoon, a lagoon with the ocean on the other side. This lagoon was also full of fish and beatiful birds, so chris had the time of his live.
Day 11 * Hotel in Sydney
Woke up with a beautiful pink sunrise at Wamberal lagoon, went for a nice long beach walk to wake up. Today we are going to sydney, i booked a hotel so we could load up our energy again and sleep in a real bed! A very nice route all the way to sydney. Arrived at the hotel and did some ultimate relaxing the rest of the day, being happy for having a hot shower again.
Day 12 * Sydney attractions
Still in Sydney and today is the day to explore, left early to the city centre where we found a parking spot after some hard searching ( this is really difficult in Sydney) All parking garages are around the 16 dollars an hour, and are only for cars less then 2.0 meters high, and ours is 2.3. We started in Darling harbour a beautiful harbour with lots of nice restaurants and bars. From Darling harbour we walked all the way to the opera house, a 45 min walk but it’s beautiful and worth it, the big boats you see on your way are impressive. We arrived at the Opera house, and it looks even more beautiful then i imagined. Next to the opera house there is the royal botanical Gardens nice to check out some weird trees and plants. We ended up in the shopping streets of Sydney. You can walk here for hours if you feel like shopping. And so the shopping street leads us back to Darling Harbour, and just behind the harbour we found a perfect spot to have lunch they call it the Canteen it looks like a food market with all kinds of delicious stuff.
After some spicy lunch we decided to stop walking trough Sydney for the day as it was incredibly hot.
We stranded at a random free campsite and had a good glass of red wine from Arscella, the winery we visited the other day.
Day 13 * Blue bottle Jellyfish
We drove further south of sydney to Woolongong, a little town next to the ocean, on our way here just on a hill the brakes of our car broke... and didn’t work anymore, what was pretty scary as this was happing while we were on a steep hill. We were very lucky and blessed that nothing really bad happened. 3 hours later after getting our car fixed we went for a refreshing swim, between the blue bottle jelly fish, they are here often with lots in January/February (we didn’t knew this) and their sting doesn’t feel very nice, i can speak out of experience unfortunately.. got stung on both of my legs. After taking care of my jellyfish bites we went looking for a good spot to spend the night and ended up in a beautiful place called Minnamura, a big saltwater lake that you can swim across, you can make a little forest walk and end up mystic beach one of the better surf spots in the region.
Day 14 * market weekend
Woke up with a beautiful sunrise and we actually really wanted to go for a good surf and lucky we are right next to two of the best surf spots in Australia the Farm beach & Mystic Beach. They are a part of the Killalea national park, a beautiful nature park with the most incredible view over The Farm beach, lucky enough they had their famous farmers market a busy market and very loved by locals, packed with good food and drink, a market with the most incredible view over Farms beach. Unfortunately the waves weren’t that good but we still had fun on the market. After we went looking for a place to spend the night again and found a free campsite at a little village called Jamberoo.
for so far our second week, i hope you enjoyed it, leave a comment if you want and please subscribe if you want to be the first one to get notifications if we post anything new.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hx7Ywqkefg&t=28s
