It’s hot …. So, the best bet in the heat seemed to be to head for the hinterland. About an hour’s drive inland from Coff’s Harbour is Dorrigo. The Dorrigo national park is an area of remnant transitional rainforest and so was much cooler than staying on the coast. By the rainforest centre was a ‘skywalk’ – a boardwalk out over the forest which would have had an excellent view of the Dorrigo valley if it hadn’t been covered by a haze. It was still a good view, but not that clear. So we headed off on a 6.6km circuit from the rainforest centre through the forest to various waterfalls.
The track was called the Wonga track, so any pom heading off along it might think that it was their lucky day and they would find lots of wonga (UK slang for money). However, it is named after the Wonga Wonga vine (Pandorea pandorana – after the Greek mythological figure). This is a climbing vine which will wrap itself around saplings and other trees to try and climb to the canopy. As a result, it often looks like a twisted piece of rope. The track took us first to the Tristania Falls.
The track then headed round and back up hill with the next stop being the Crystal Shower Falls. It was possible to head round behind these and look out through them ….
However, they looked a lot better without me standing there …..
On the way back we stopped and had a look round Bellingen. This is a town on the Bellinger River, though the difference in names is apparently as a result of a mistake. A draughtsman who was compiling the local colony map from original documents misread the writing of the government surveyor and read the final “n” as an “r”. So the Bellingen River became the “Bellinger”, while the town retained the correct name of “Bellingen”. What a shame George Bush didn’t suffer from a similar typo and invade Tie Rack rather than Iraq ….
The town was lovely and is the venue for various festivals including a Jazz and Blues festival and a classical music festival. The area was first settled around 1842 by cedar cutters though they were often attacked by local Aborigines trying to keep them off their land. The supply of red cedar was so plentiful though that by 1849 it was estimated that 2 million feet of cedar was being extracted each year. Not surprisingly it ran out quite quickly and so by the early 1900s Bellingen was better known as a dairy farming centre. All the land that was cleared of timber was then used for cattle instead! However, that industry crashed in the 1960s with the rise of the European Common Market which signaled the death knell for dairy exports from Australia. The town has further re-invented itself since and the presence of a ‘hemp store’ indicates the direction of travel ….. It does though have some lovely old buildings from the turn of the last century.
The Commercial Emporium is now an eclectic mix of traditional arts and crafts and expensive clothes and shoes – a very quirky place though with no grocery or ironmongery as the picture may suggest!