Australia’s Great North Walk was originally conceived as part of the celebration of Australia’s Bicentenary in 1988 The idea arose 7 years before that when two walkers from Sydney, Gary McDougall and Leigh Shearer-Herriott, came up withthe idea of an official walk from Sydney to Newcastle. Various grants from theNew South Wales Bicentennial Committee finally made the whole track official intime for Australia’s 200^th birthday. The documentation and website state that the full hike takes 12-16 days and is traversed by more than 40,000 tourists and dinky-die Aussies each year. My 2 weekender ‘starter’ sample does not entirely support these assertions.

We began at Warners Bay that 

on the top end of the Lake Macquarie system well to the north of Syd

ney. We are not sure where the 38,997 of the hikers were; we saw only two groups of genuine hikers: a gang of probably school students on oneday carrying tents and indeed camping since we saw them later in their tents and two pairs of stalwart walkers with big rucksacks going the other way to us.  We were also greeted by a guy who pulled his car over on one of the very shortstretches of road walking to greet us. He told us that he had done the walk from Sydney to Newcastle last year and was recce-ing it in his car to go back the other way this year. He did offer us a ride but (what a shame!) was only joking.

The best thing was seeing our first  ‘in the wild’ echidna, which literally wandered across our path in the afternoon.  We tried to get close in for a photo opbut the echidna simply squeezed under a fallen log displaying the verysignificant quills of its back and tail and looking for all the world like anenormous, rather sharp, fir-cone. It wasn’t until we walked on down the paththat we saw it come out again to continue it’s foraging. Still, it was jolly exciting to see one in the wild and, apparently, not very frightened by us.  Speaking of frightening wildlife,we also had a worst experience on this trip too - we managed to get tic-infested.  The tic had to be dragged out still kicking and no doubt screaming with tweezers (doubleyuck!!).  This was NOT (despite what was said later) because I spent a happy few minutes poking a stick into atermite mound—after all tics don’t live with termites – do they

Next day wewalked up and over Sugarloaf Ridge to end where we had ended day one: at HeatonGap. This walk intersected many power lines – Newcastle is famous, like its counterpart, for coal-mining and power stations – and many of the walking tracks that the Great North Walk intersects lie under the spoke-like radials ofpower lines spinning out from the Newcastle greenhouse gas emitters to powermuch of NSW. We also saw wildlife on this day, the most impressive of which a wallaby and joey and some leeches.

Our next 3days took us from Wattagan Forest over the next two ridges to Paxtan (great pub there!) and then on to Wattagan Creek. We did take the middle day off in the vineyards of the Hunter Valley – ofcourse this wouldn’t be an Australian walk if there wasn’t both great pubs anda wonderful side spur up into wine growing region.   By day six, we were looking for something fairly flatand indeed we had planned our trip well because most of our last day’s walk wasalong the lake and bay front from the outskirts of Newcastle, past Warners Bay and on into Teralba itself. The locals who use this very attractive waterfront walk for biking, skateboarding, scootering etc. and also a beautiful pair ofpelicans who roost on the sodium lights on an impressively engineered bridge crossing the Five Islands entrance to Warners Bay and swoop from these man-made perches to fish in the bay edge.

After six tough-ish days, tics, leeches, echidna, roo and wallaby sightings, many pelicans and a fair few blisters on the rear flippers of my official carriers, I have accomplished 85 km, so that’s just 165 left to do.