Dorrigo Rainforest Centre
Thursday 26th May 2022. Nauti Time 081
It was such a freezing cold night and we had to keep turning the heater off as it made an extremely loud ticking noise that neither of us could sleep with! We’d eventually nod off only to wake a few hours later freezing again so we’d put the heater back on. This cycle continued through out the night. Fortunately we woke to blue sky’s and sunshine which helped to thaw us out.
Our adventure for today is heading to the Dorrigo rainforest Centre and national park. We have packed a picnic lunch complete with tea and coffee, donned our walking boots and we’re off!
Well what a day we have had. Firstly there was a skywalk that takes you out over the valley to view the rainforest from above and the whole valley extending out to the ocean in the distance. Then we embarked on the 6.5km circuit walk that took us through some of the most magnificent rainforest we have ever seen. Huge tarrowood eucalypts and massive blue gums dominate the forest. They are so tall you can not see their canopy standing at the base. There were strangle figs that had woven and entwined their roots down massive trees sucking out the nutrients until the tree inside dies and rots leaving these large tangled hollow monoliths. Huge tree ferns and elk horn, in and around the trees, moss laden logs with colorful fungi, lichen, moss and liverworts. These along with the cacophony of native bird life and wonderful infrastructure of pavements made the walk through this forest an absolutely magical experience but just to top it all off there were two 35 meter cascading waterfalls that you could stand in awe of on swing bridges that had been built over the gorges they created. The Crystal waterfall even had a walkway behind it so you could venture into a cavern and look out through the veil of waters cascading down in front of you.
We finished our walk with lunch in a wide grassy glade also with valley views.
We thought we would head to other falls but realized they were about 100km away so we found the train graveyard instead. What could have been someone’s private collection of steam engines and hundreds of red rattler carriages lay apparently abandoned in these paddocks at the edge of Dorrigo. An avid collector would have loved these before the ravages of weather and time had taken their toll. They are still beautiful and maybe some could be resurrected but very sad to see them all just rotting away. An era that time has or soon will forget!