Bundeena to Otford

Yesterday Mel and I drove to Cronulla and caught the ferry over to Bundeena - then walked the length of the national park to Otford and caught the train back to Cronulla! It was a long day - but worth it!

Here's a map (you can click on it to move it around) :

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It was a mission (about 26km walk) but well worth it.

Some pictures (You can click on the pictures to make them bigger - then just press "back" to go back to the other pictures!)

The ferry from Cronulla leaving us behind at Bundeena.


This is the start of the walk, at Bundeena, looking south down the coast.



Thar she blows! The first whale of the day, a fair way out:



We kept walking and I admired the beauty while Mel admired the view!




These white cliff's are cool

This is before we got to Marley.



Mel spotted these whales (not sure how many- maybe 5?) coming towards us! You can see them just over her shoulder.

At this spot there were at least three groups that came past in less than an hour. 3 or 4 in one group, maybe 5 in the next group and then two - which we thought at first was just one. !



It was like these whales were heading straight for us! We were right above them on the cliff.







This one did a massive tail flick - just missed it with the camera but you can see the splash!


And then Mel took this great photo!




And I got these great videos (If you click the "arrow box" on the right hand corner it goes full screen - just in case you didn't know!):







So after the excitement of the whales we pressed on - aware that we had wasted a lot of time and daylight was against us!


We reached a great little river:

Mel took this photo of me from where she is standing ^



Then we saw an awesome Eagle:

Then we saw an awesome rock that looked like an Eagle!


We walked and climbed and carried on a bit further... You can see in this photo all the hills we still had to climb:



When daylight finally beat us:



We walked for about 9 hours all up (with a few stops) and 2 of those hours were in the dark - with our small lights we barely had 3 metres visibility through the Burning Palms Jungle and up the Burg ridge. When I say up, it's 300 metres high and virtually straight up!

This terrain map shows it pretty well:

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UPHILL, in the dark, through the jungle, with tiny torches. It was awesome!!


Here is someone elses photo showing what part of the track looks like during the day! Try walking through there with your eyes closed!

It was a shame we couldn't see all the palms and jungle (Having to walk through here in pitch black - we did lose the track a few times as well!)

We finally got to Otford, and could hear the train coming - but in our weary state managed to miss it by less than a minute and then had to wait 2 hours for the next one (and it was cold)!!!

We contemplated lighting a fire, but opted for the hobo look instead: