Brisbane to Sydney Road Trip (Part 1)

Here is part 1 of the seven day road trip with Andrew, covering around 1500 km in total.


Saturday: meet at Brisbane Airport - Hertz Desk, drive to Tweed Heads (Gold Coast) via Mount Tamborine
Sunday: drive to Ballina, North Coast NSW
Monday: drive to Bellingen in Northern Tablelands
Tuesday: drive the Waterfall Way and New England Highway to Tamworth, via Armidale
Wednesday: drive to Mudgee
Thursday: Wine tour around Mudgee
Friday: drive to Sydney via Blue Mountains

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Andrew had been at a conference on neuroscience in Noosa on the Sunshine Coast and stayed on in Australia for a brief holiday; so whilst he caught a bus to Brisbane last Saturday morning, I flew up from Sydney. After an initial problem trying to find each other at the airport (caused by each airline at the domestic terminal having their own set of baggage carousels, which, helpfully, are not numbered sequentially, so there is more than one "Baggage Carousal 3") we hired a car and drove to Tweed Heads, with a stop at Mount Tamborine for a rainforest 'skywalk'.

Tweed Heads is a bit like Blackpool, and the huge RSL (Retired Servicemen's League) club with its numerous restaurants and bars was an interesting experience, given that we were 20 years younger and 20 kg lighter than the average patron. We opted not to take part in the line dancing.


Following the unsuprisingly souless experience of a Gold Coast motel, we drove from Tweed Heads down to Ballina, staying in cabin accommodation in a park on the outskirts of town near the ocean. In contrast to the built up tourist trap of the Gold Coast, Ballina is a sleepy coastal/estuary town at the opposite end of the spectrum; surfers in Ballina are here to surf, not to parade up and down the beachfront.

river view from a bar in Ballina

Sharpe's Beach, Ballina

Mandatory morning dip (too rough to swim so more of an in and out job)

Our self contained accommodation was miles from any shops or bars and given the stormy weather we picked up some boutique beers to carry out our own 'beer tasting' evening (more to follow).

From Ballina we drove south to Coffs Harbour, then cut inland on the Waterfall Way - ranked in the top 10 of great Australian drives. As we headed up in to the mountains the weather took a considerable turn for the worse. Gill had warned me of severe storms that were forecast for the area and sure enough we were hit by one. It's the only time that I've been in such torrential rain that I've had to stop the car - we were doing around 80 kph on a dual carriageway at the time, and along with about half a dozen other cars had to pull in to a layby to wait for it to pass; visibility was barely a couple of metres and the road, which was on an incline, turned in to a river. Fortunately the rain abated enough for us to complete the journey up to the sleepy mountain town of Bellingen, where once the storms had passed, we had a great view of the surrounding hills and valleys.

From Bellingen we continued west, stopping for breakfast at the quiet town of Dorrigo, before making a few stops and detours to see the waterfalls and panoramic vistas of the surrounding countryside. 

Dorrigo pub (and our hire car)

Most of our stops were fairly brief - the wet weather had brought out a lot of flying insects, and with one of our stops being 20km off the main highway on gravel tracks, there was a possibility of getting caught in a flashflood or cut off (at one point we had to cross a dry creek bed). The view from Point Lookout made the detour very worthwhile - one of the best I've ever seen and hard to do justice in photos (I took a short video clip too, complete with bird sounds).

cow-rush hour

In Tamworth we stayed with Gill's aunt Lyn and David (whose wedding we went to at The Dag earlier in the year). Lyn treated us to a tour of Tamworth in their convertible BMW, stopping at David's construction business. Tamworth is a big country town and home to the annual Country Music Festival that Gill and I will be going to in January, when the population of the town doubles, so it was good to get a feel for what it is normally like.

view of Tamworth from a nearby hill 

We had a fabulous meal at their home in Tamworth that evening, and on the Wednesday morning met David for coffee in the centre of town. To complete the country experience, we went to another cafe to try 'the best coffee in town', which, whilst excellent, was not the highlight: the cafe is next door to the office of the local independent MP Tony Windsor, who was sitting at the table next to us. Ordinarily I probably wouldn't recognise many MPs, but because the minority Labor government is kept in power by the support of one Green and two independents, he's pretty high profile. I couldn't quite bring myself to grab his photo though! We then stopped at Lyn's school, where she is a librarian, for a tour, before heading cross country to Mudgee.