Something you may not know about me if you haven’t read my other blog posts is that I love exploring. I love going on adventures, whether it is a day trip closer to home or bigger trips for longer periods of time. I am always looking for new places to visit and I look forward to going on trips with friends.
On one of these trips, I went to Bungonia National Park. It is a couple hours’ drive to get there and we made it a longer day trip. I can’t remember how we first heard of it, but I am so glad that we went. We drove down and then spent the day exploring the area, not really sure what we would find. We started with a visit to the Lookdown lookout which had incredible views a gorge, some mountains and valleys. We then went partway along the Green Track which is an easy track that links a few different lookouts.
The National Park has a number of different walks titled after different colours, from the White Track to the Green Track and the Red Track. One that we didn’t get to on this day but were all very interested in doing at a later date was the Red Track. This track started at the top of a mountain, wound its way down and actually went through the bottom of the gorge, out the other side and back to the top. It is an intense walk (although we didn’t know just how intense it would be at this time!) and was longer than we had time for since we were just there for a day trip.
So we made plans to go back a few weeks later to do the walk. We planned to go one morning, do the walk, camp overnight and then head home the next morning. Everything went according to plan as we headed down and got set up at the campsite before heading off on the Red Track.
It was fairly smooth sailing to start with, although we did slip and slide a little bit on the stones, and it was amazing how much the scenery can change in such a short period of time! At the top we were in an Australian National Park and by the time we got to the bottom it felt like we were walking in the Lord of the Rings set. We then got to walk through the gorge which was a fun mixture of walking in sand and scrambling over and under rocks.
By the time we got to the end of the gorge we realised that we had made one big mistake – we hadn’t brought enough water to comfortably get through the walk. Most of us only had one bottle with us, although one or two people thought ahead and brought two bottles. This meant that the last third of the walk, which was entirely uphill I might add, felt very long and was filled with lots of stopping and starting. But we did eventually get to the end – it was such a great feeling when we finally came within sight of the car! The first thing we did was to drive back out to the highway and stop in at Hungry Jacks to fill up on food and soft drink. By this time, we were pretty exhausted, so we headed back to camp and had an early night.
Although the walk was very intense, I am super keen to do it again sometime (I must have blocked out the memories from trudging uphill). The National Park is beautiful and well worth a visit, whether you are game to try one of the walks or even just to enjoy the views from the lookouts.
The Barefoot Adventurer 