Sydney & Surrounds – Zig Zag Railway
It was coming to the end of the week and I already had some riding plans with my buddy Greame when I got a message from some local Polish riders asking if we were up for a trip out to the Blue Mountains … well as the matter of fact: yes we were!
We all decided to go riding through Wollemi National Park, a part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. The park is a gorgeous mixture of rivers, canyons, forests, and cliffs, and is apparently the largest wilderness area in NSW. There’s great camping spots and lots of places for swimming and even canoeing.
25,000km … and then some!
We all met at Lithgow. One of the Polish crew was Eryk Krasny, an experienced rider who has just ridden his bike from Poland to Australia. Starting in Poland, he’s been through Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Turkey, India, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Laos and Malaysia. Yep, after 25,000km … 8 months … and a lot of hard yakka, he made it to Darwin and is now touring this ‘Great Southern Land’ – as we say here in Oz: bloody great effort!
Glow Worms!
After a quick meet and greet, we went off searching for some adventure (aka dirt roads) around the Zig Zag Railway.
The Glow Tunnel Rd turned out to be an awesome gravel road, very rocky at times with a lot of potholes, but heaps of fun to ride on. It leads through some scenic pine plantations, cuttings, embankments and a rock tunnel that was part of the ‘Shale Railway’ (closed in 1932). As we got to the end of the road it turned out that there were more attractions still – namely the Glow Worm Tunnel which is only accessible via a 2km walk.
Unfortunately we couldn’t ‘make it’ this time (read: can’t be bothered walking in our riding gear!) but for those who are keen walkers, the Glow Worm Tunnel sounds absolutely enchanting, and aptly named as it’s lit up by glow worms!
After a day of relaxing riding, Greame and I setup camp next to a fine looking picnic table on the side of the dirt road, started cooking up a bit of ‘gut luggage’ (as he called camping food) while our Polish mates took off to meet another group of friends.
Another serene weekend of riding in Sydney’s Surrounds … stay tuned for more!
In numbers:
Total kms: 250km
Fuel cost: $14
Camping cost: $0
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hello, love reading your stuff, you are very fortunate to live in a country where you can travel like this, I live in England, it has some fantastic places and some fabulous biking roads, the sad thing is most of it is actually owned so you can’t go on it as you would be trespassing, still nice place though,