All Things Visible...: Royal National Park, Australia

hiking the Coast Track in Royal Nat'l Park

The other day, I decided to take an impromptu break from Sydney city life and my slightly obnoxious hostel and booked a 10 dollar campsite in Royal National park. To get there, I took a series of trains to Cronulla beach, and then a ferry from Cronulla to Bundeena. The trail goes from Bundeena to Otford, about 26km not including the distance to/from transportation.

The day before, surfing at Manly beach, I bumped into a few Swedish girls out in the water. Amazingly, as fate would have it, they showed up for the small town ferry to Bundeena right when I did! It turns out Josephine and Elin were also doing the exact same backpacking trip and camping at the same spot as me! So they let me tag along. Elin lives in Manly and Joss came out from Sweden for a two week visit. They were awesome backpacking companions.

The trail was fairly easy to follow as it for the most part went along the coast. However, we weren't 30 minutes in when we had our first wildlife enounter. Elin, leading the way, started screaming, turned around and ran right into me, nearly plowing me over, shouting "RUN! RUN!" My first instinct was, "Bear!" but a few seconds later I remembered what continent I was on. It turns out she was a few feet away from a large brown snake on the trail! As she frantically ran uphill to call her boyfriend on her (out of reception) cell phone, Joss and I assessed the situation. I grabbed a large branch and Joss started stomping on the ground and after a little stare-off, the snake slithered away. Turns out it was Australia's "Brown Snake," the most deadly snake in the world! Yikes. After that, we carried a "snake stick" and watched our steps more closely.

The trail was absolutely incredible and I could not believe that we ran into a just a small handful of people the whole time. Gorgeous clifftop views, completely deserted beaches, a range of desert to rainforest type landscape, and small seemingly deserted fishing villages dotted the route. I'll admit, it was more strenuous than I thought, especially on the first day since we had to carry in all our drinking water and food. Plus, the first day's hike was about 20km. We stopped several times for photos and to cool off in the waves. We camped at North Era beach, in a picturesque cove that reminded me of something right out of "Lost." Our only company that night was one older local backpacker and two British surfers who I enjoyed some drinks and stories with as the sun was setting. The second day was a lot shorter (6k) and equally stunning. I highly recommend this trail for anyone in the Sydney area! Definitely could be done as a day trip, with an early start, but it was nice to camp and wake up in this paradise.

Back in Sydney, exhausted and starving, we hit up this amazing restaurant in Chinatown before I parted ways with my new Swedish friends.