Call of the wild, from Maria Island, Bloomfield Track, Great Ocean Road and Sydney
On foot or by 4WD, Australia’s great outdoors beckon with these tracks and trails.
Maria Island Trek
Riedle Beach on Tasmania’s Maria Island should get a gong for the best, least-known beach in Oz. There’s hardly anyone but you, the walker, to revel in its 3.5km isthmus of pure white sand. This rugged, vehicle-free island, just off the east coast town of Triabunna bristles with history, from extensive 19th-century convict ruins at Darlington to later, quixotic schemes for agricultural and industrial riches. A four-day, three-night hike here is easy, and the glamping-level fixed camps feature good beds and spacious tents. The wines and cuisine are far better than any trekker might expect and the guides are founts of local knowledge. Maria Island is a national park with a wildlife menagerie of Australian icons — kangaroos, sea eagles, wombats, echidnas and Tassie devils. To get your heart pumping, there’s also an optional non-technical climb to the top of the Bishop and Clerk rock towers.
Bloomfield Track
The great green heart of the coastal route from Cairns to Cooktown is the Bloomfield Track. Scoot through gentrified Port Douglas, cross the wilderness Rubicon at the Daintree River and soon you’re amid a World Heritage range of luminous mangrove shorelines, crocodiles and canopied rainforests. After a quick look at Cape Tribulation Beach, press on to the main event, the gauntlet of creeks, gradients, bulldust, potholes and wet-season quagmires known as the Bloomfield Track. With the Coral Sea on your right and a 130-million year-old rainforest on the left, you’ve got 65km of pure rock ’n’ roll four-wheel driving ahead on this road that was controversially gouged through the jungle in 1983. En route are the spectacular Wujal Wujal Falls; request permission from the Aboriginal community custodians before entering. At Rossville, stop at the legendary, 140-year-old Lions Den pub for a beer and steak sanger to complete your Bloomfield rite of passage.
Great Ocean Walk
The guide rounds us up like a blue heeler as the rising tide at Johanna Beach snaps at our boots. We scramble up the dunes and wait for a pickup ride to the lodge. Our first day on Victoria’s Great Ocean Walk started as an amble and ends with visions of Johanna in a dramatically rising swell. A bonfire and wine, plus the chef’s gourmet specials, await us at Twelve Apostles Lodge. Day two is tougher, uphill and down rainforest gully from Milanesia to Moonlight Head, then back to the lush lodge for showers and a feast. Day three’s 17km are a challenge, with mountain ash, the world’s tallest flowering trees, looking down on our labours and kookaburras guffawing. On the last day the stranded Apostles loom from the sea, still awaiting rescue or redemption. We drop our weary packs, a fine footslog well done. All that remains is a bonus helicopter ride to
re-count the Twelve Apostles from above.
■twelveapostleslodgewalk.com.au
The Spit to Manly Walk
Not all hikes involve rations and bush-bashing. On this Sydney harbourside trail that runs from The Spit to Manly, scenery is the real star. Expect untouched headlands, a vast blueness, yachts and sometimes a breaking bombora or in winter a migrating whale and calf. The 9km track skirts the northern foreshores of Sydney Harbour National Park, starting at the Spit Bridge and running past Clontarf, Castle Rock and Grotto Point. Almost every step of the way gives you views of what one First Fleet officer described, perhaps excessively, as “the finest harbour in the universe”. Washaway Beach offers the chance to break for a swim (especially for nudists). Reaching Forty Baskets Beach, the track segues from wild, back to the milds of suburbia and the manicured foreshores of Fairlight. It ends at Manly, so named because that’s how Captain Arthur Phillip considered the local Aborigines. Indeed, they were so manly that they speared him, albeit non-fatally.
