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For me, the ecstasy* set in around three hours in – splattered in mud from head to toe, running my bike along a rocky trail as my (embarrassingly much fitter) family members cycled on ahead. As Travel and News Editor at Time Out, my job is a lot more adventurous than most, but I still end up spending at least seven hours a day staring at a computer screen. And although I love writing stories, the joy that comes from hours spent outdoors is unparalleled – an exhilarating, life-enriching sense of aliveness.
*The feeling, not the substance
As a family of hyperactive fresh-air enthusiasts who can’t sit still, cycling trips have become my family’s holiday of choice, and we’ve spent some of my favourite weeks together cycling around tiny European towns and quaint British villages. The opportunity to really connect with a new landscape is the main appeal of cycling trips, but I think it’s the shared sense of achievement that makes these kinds of holidays so perfect to complete with people you love. I don’t see my family often, but thanks to our cycling habit, I’ve built a solid bank of memories that keep us connected, and the promise of our next adventure (we’ll be cycling from Dubrovnik to Mostar in May) keeps me going while they’re trapped on the other side of the world.
This summer, we took the tour Down Under, and spent seven days exploring the Mid North Coast of NSW on two wheels.
On our European trips, we generally make our first Sangria stop at around 11am, and the whole thing is a pretty unathletic affair – a way to while away the hours before arriving at our next destination for settling in for our evening round of cards and cervezas. With a total of 275 kilometres to cover over seven days, the NSW adventure was different: a genuinely challenging trail that took us through a mountainous, bucolic corner of the state.
The trip kicked off in the charming little town of Kendall, and on day one we cycled for around 45 kilometres to Crowdy Bay Eco Resort – a collection of glamping tents that we called home for the night. We stopped for lunch at Mojoz, a country café serving an excellent line in high-calorie meals (order the chippies), then carried on for a final hour or so to Crowdy Head. A courtesy bus from the Harrington Hotel picked us up so we could end the day with a pub feed by the water, then dropped us back at the resort (did you know that every pub in Australia is supposed to provide a free courtesy bus for guests? I didn’t).
On day two, we cycled for around 40 kilometres from Crowdy Head to Bonny Hills via a series of quiet coastal back roads and sun-soaked gravel trails. The terrain for the entire trip was mainly gravelly tracks and fire trails, with only a few short sections on main roads – so if battling with traffic is what puts you off the idea of long-distance cycling trips, this route is the one for you. It’s worth noting that my uncle’s partner carefully planned our low-traffic route using various maps, so don’t rely on a one-and-done Google Maps search. We arrived at Bonny Hills (which is as adorable as its name suggests – a perfectly low-key Aussie beach town home to long stretches of beach, a pub, a beachside RSL and not much else) in time for a late lunch, and spent the afternoon reading on the beach with fish and chips from the town’s general store. Our accommodation that night was a glamping tent at Reflections Holiday Park, which is home to a network of big canvas tents hiding between the trees, and a handful of cabins overlooking the ocean.
Day three took us from Bonny Hills to Wauchope – with two short detours to look out across the water at Queens Lake and check out the beautiful 200-plus-year-old “Corymbia gummifera” (Red Bloodwood) tree located deep in the Burrawan State Forest. In 30-plus-degree heat, and with more hills than we were expecting, this day was particularly gruelling. We were mercifully met just outside of Wauchope by family members carrying sugary drinks and chunky meat pies from local fave Phat Phuc, but if you don’t have this kind of service available, I’d suggest packing extra drinks and snacks for this leg of the journey. After a dip in the public swimming pool at Wauchope, we headed to the Hastings Hotel for a drink, and then filled up on panang curry and pad kee mao at Lotus Garden – it’s slightly out of town, but so worth the journey. There are a few Airbnbs in Wauchope, but we leaned into the on-the-road energy and booked a few old-school rooms at Wauchope Motel.
On day four, we took an easy-breezy 30-kilometre ride from Wauchope to Long Flat – a tiny, remote village in the bowl of a green, farm-studded valley. The Long Flat Pub was our accommodation for the night, and it’s worth visiting if you’re in the area even if you’re not sleeping over. Just off the Oxley Highway, this roadside institution is a beloved drinking hole for bikers, with a huge beer garden dotted with picnic tables and strung with festoon lights. Beyond the beer garden, a path leads down to a campsite on the banks of the Hastings River, and this is where we spent the afternoon and the following morning before setting off again for day five.
After a few hours spent reading by the river with coffees and stacked bacon and egg rolls from the Long Flat general store, we set off towards the Toms Creek Nature Domes – a 30-kilometre journey that took us through gorgeous (though pretty fly-infested) dairy country and through the bowl of the Ellenborough River Valley to the base of the Comboyne Plateau. Again, we got most of this journey done by early afternoon, and spent the rest of the day cooling off in our domes’ private plunge pool and the creek that runs through the bottom of the property.
I spent most of day six off my bike, pushing it up the mighty 588-metre climb to Comboyne – a cute little village at the top of the Comboyne Plateau. We stayed the night at a beautiful converted sawmill on the banks of the Camden Haven River, and spent the afternoon in the garden beneath the shade of the fig trees. The Comboyne RSL serves up perfectly hefty pub feeds with views of the valley, but there’s an IGA if you’d rather cook up a feast in the house before jumping into the hot tub.
The owners of the property (there are two houses available to book via Airbnb, sleeping up to eight people) insist that the river is alive with platypuses, so we set our alarms for six for the best chance to see them. We were out of luck, but enjoyed the morning reading on the deck above the river before heading to the cute-as-heck cow-themed Udder Cow Café for brekkie.
Our final day was supposed to be a sub-two-hour sail back to Kendall, but we ended up getting lost and spending four hours cycling slowly around what appeared to be the same rocky forest road. If you’re better than us at navigating, this should be an easy last day, but truly I could have kept going – sweaty, sure, but no less at peace.
Cycling holidays probably aren’t for everyone, but if you love spending your days outdoors and earning your 3pm Spritz, spending a week cycling around the Mid North Coast comes highly recommended. The views blew my tiny little mind, and though the Sangria count was considerably lower, this route just about trumped our cycles around Europe – and reaffirmed my decision to move across the world to the beautiful country that I'm now lucky enough to call home.