The Harbour Bridge looked smaller than we expected from the campervan window. That’s the thing about arriving by road instead of by plane — the city doesn’t hit you all at once from above. It reveals itself in pieces: a flash of water between buildings, the bridge’s arch appearing and disappearing behind office towers, the Opera House roof catching light at an angle no postcard ever uses. We’d spent five days working our way down the coast from Melbourne, and now Sydney felt like a reward we hadn’t quite earned yet.
We parked the van in a lot near The Rocks and walked toward Circular Quay on a Tuesday morning that felt more like late spring than early autumn. The wind off the harbour had a bite to it that the sun couldn’t quite chase away. The Opera House, up close, isn’t the pristine white object you see in photographs. It’s closer to cream, with tiles that catch the light differently depending on where you stand — some sections almost beige, others a pale grey. We spent an hour just walking around it, watching the way the shells seemed to shift shape as we moved. A tour group gathered near the main entrance, but we stayed outside, preferring to measure the thing against the sky rather than through a guide’s script.
The walk across the Harbour Bridge cost nothing. The climb, we’d been told, cost somewhere north of $300 per person, and we decided against it. Instead, we crossed on foot along the eastern side, pausing at the first pylon to watch a ferry cut a white line across the water below. From halfway across, the Opera House looked smaller, a detail rather than a landmark. The traffic rumbled beside us — that constant, low vibration you feel in your chest more than hear — and by the time we reached the north side, the city had rearranged itself into something entirely different. We bought sausage rolls from a bakery in Milsons Point — $6.50 each, flaky and too hot to hold — and sat on a bench watching the bridge from the other direction. The whole thing felt less like a tourist activity and more like the city had simply let us use it for a few hours.
The Rocks, afterward, was mostly cobblestones and the smell of hot oil from a dozen cafes. We ducked into the weekend market stalls that were already packing up, the vendors folding their tables under a sky that had shifted from blue to uncertain grey. A woman selling handmade pottery told us she’d been there every Saturday for eleven years. “You get a feel for which tourists are going to buy and which are just passing through,” she said, not unkindly. We were clearly the latter, or something like that. We bought nothing except a coffee that cost $5.50 and tasted exactly like a coffee should — not remarkable, not disappointing.
That night, we slept in the campervan at a site near Parramatta Park, the city lights glowing orange on the horizon. A possum scratched at the roof for an hour after midnight.
The Blue Mountains, the next morning, were supposed to be an hour west of the city. They were closer to ninety minutes, thanks to roadworks that turned a single-lane stretch into a twenty-minute wait. The van handled the climb better than we expected, though it groaned on the steepest sections, the engine sounding like something we should have had checked before leaving Melbourne. We pulled into Katoomba just before noon, the air cooler and thinner than Sydney’s, smelling of eucalyptus and something damp — wet earth, maybe, or the fog that still clung to the valleys.
Echo Point was crowded. We’d known it would be. The Three Sisters stood under a sky that couldn’t decide whether to rain or clear, their sandstone faces a deep ochre against the grey. We took the path down the Giant Stairway — 800-odd steps, carved into the cliff face — and within ten minutes, the noise of the lookout had faded to nothing. The stairway is narrow, uneven, and not something you’d want to attempt with a bad knee or a fear of heights. The iron handrails felt cold and worn smooth by years of grips. Halfway down, we stopped on a small platform that overlooked the valley floor. A lyrebird scratched at the dirt somewhere to our left, invisible but loud, its movements suggesting something larger than a bird.
The bushwalking trails beyond the Three Sisters demand more than an afternoon. We knew this. We took the shortest loop we could find — the Prince Henry Cliff Walk, which runs along the escarpment edge for several kilometres — and covered maybe a third of it before turning back. The path was muddier than expected, the kind of clay that builds up on your boots in layers until you’re walking an inch taller. We passed a couple who had stopped to photograph a wallaby, the animal utterly unconcerned by their presence. It chewed something slowly, watching them with the patience of something that had never needed to rush. We kept walking, and the wallaby stayed where it was, a small grey statue against the green.
We ate lunch at a cafe in Leura, a town that seemed designed for tourists who wanted to pretend they weren’t tourists. The chicken sandwich cost $18 and came with beetroot, which felt like a New South Wales thing — the beetroot, not the price. A woman at the next table was explaining to her companion why the Three Sisters legend she’d heard from their tour guide was “probably not the real one.” There was no real one, we wanted to say. There are versions. That’s the whole point. We said nothing and finished our sandwiches, the roof of the van visible through the window, waiting for us.
Jenolan Caves, on day eight, required a reservation we’d nearly forgotten to make. We’d booked the “Mammoth Cave” tour online two days earlier, $45 per person, and arrived to find the carpark nearly full despite the mid-week timing. The drive there had been an education in itself: the last thirty kilometres are a winding road that drops into a valley and then climbs out again, the kind of road where you learn to downshift before the turn, not during it. The van’s brakes smelled hot by the time we reached the carpark. We let them cool while we bought tickets and used the toilets, which were cleaner than any public facility had a right to be.
The cave tour lasted about an hour and forty minutes. Our guide was a young man with a beard and a voice that carried well in the chambers — something about the acoustics made every word sound like it had been rehearsed, though he was clearly improvising. The limestone formations had names like “The Minaret” and “The Cathedral,” labels that felt too human for structures that had taken millions of years to form. The stalactites dripped steadily, a constant percussion that the guide said was the cave’s way of “still building itself.” We touched a stalagmite when he wasn’t looking. It was smoother than we expected, almost polished, not rough like stone usually is. The air in the deepest chambers was perfectly still and cold, the kind of cold that doesn’t move. When the guide turned off the lights for a demonstration of total darkness, the absence of light was absolute — not the grey-dark of a moonless night, but a complete erasure of everything visual. Someone near us laughed nervously. You stood still and tried to calibrate your balance without sight.
Afterward, we sat outside on a bench in the sun, eating a muesli bar and watching other visitors emerge blinking into the light. We’d made a mistake earlier that morning: we’d assumed the caves were a morning activity and had planned nothing for the afternoon. The result was a drive back toward the coast that felt aimless, the van finding its own way through towns we hadn’t planned to visit — Oberon, then Bathurst, then a long stretch of road that offered nothing but paddocks and power lines. We stopped at a service station in a town whose name we’ve already forgotten to buy a bag of chips and a bottle of water — total cost, $8.20 — and sat on the van’s step eating them while a dog tied to a post watched us. It wasn’t a bad afternoon. It wasn’t anything, which was the point.
Port Stephens on day nine was a correction. After the inland quiet of the Blue Mountains, the coast felt aggressive — too bright, too loud, too much wind. We arrived at Nelson Bay around midday and found the main beach crowded with families and the sound of jet skis. The sand dunes at Stockton Beach were the real draw, and we’d read enough about them to know you needed a 4WD to reach the best ones. We didn’t have a 4WD. We had a campervan with front-wheel drive and a clearance that suggested its designers had never considered sand. We considered renting a vehicle for the day — the prices started at somewhere around two hundred — and decided against it. Instead, we drove to a section of the dunes accessible by foot, parked the van, and walked the last kilometre through soft sand that found its way into our shoes within seconds.
The dunes were taller than we’d imagined. The first crest we climbed revealed another behind it, and another behind that, a landscape of shifting slopes that seemed to go on longer than the coast road suggested it should. The sand was fine and pale, almost white, and it made a sound when we walked — a kind of squeak underfoot that we hadn’t expected. Someone had left a single flip-flop on the ridge of the tallest dune, and we left it there, unsure if it was trash or a message. A group of quad bikes appeared in the distance, their engines buzzing like insects, then disappeared into a trough between dunes. We watched them go, then turned back toward the van, the sand burning through our socks where the sun had heated it.
The dolphin cruise we’d booked for 3pm was a different kind of experience. Twenty of us on a boat that smelled of diesel and sunscreen, chugging out of the harbour into waters that had turned choppy. We saw dolphins — maybe a dozen of them, surfacing in pairs and trios — but they were distant, black fins appearing and disappearing faster than the camera could focus. A child on the boat kept shouting “There!” and pointing at nothing. The guide, a woman in her fifties with a sunburned nose, told us the dolphins were “being shy today,” a phrase that seemed to absolve everyone of responsibility. We saw one dolphin breach fully, its body arcing clear of the water for a moment that lasted maybe two seconds. It was enough.
Coffs Harbour, on the final day, felt like the end of something. We arrived late, the sun already low and the light turning orange over the beach. The Big Banana is exactly what you expect — a large concrete banana painted yellow, surrounded by shops selling banana-related merchandise and a theme park that seemed to be closing just as we parked. We didn’t go in. We stood in the carpark and looked at it, a structure that had been built in 1964 and looked every year of its age, and felt a strange affection for its absurdity. A teenager working at the ticket booth locked the gate and walked past us to her car. “It’s better in the morning,” she said, not breaking stride. We took her word for it.
The beaches around Coffs Harbour — Park Beach, then Diggers Beach — were quieter than the ones further south. We walked along the sand as the tide came in, the water cold against our ankles, collecting shells we’d throw back before leaving. The hinterland walks through Dorrigo National Park, with their waterfalls and skywalks, would have to wait. We were tired. The van had been our home for ten days, and it smelled of us now, of damp towels and stale crackers and the faint residue of insect repellent. We cooked pasta on the portable stove in the carpark of a beachside campground, the mosquitoes coming out as the light faded, and ate it sitting on the van’s fold-out table with the back doors open to the sound of the surf.
The road north continued the next day for someone else. For us, it ended here — not with a grand arrival or a final photograph, but with a plastic bowl of pasta and the knowledge that we’d left nothing behind that we’d want to go back for. We washed the bowls in the campground sink, filled the van’s water tank, and planned our route home before the morning came.
📷 Photos: Peter Gladwin (Unsplash), Peter Gladwin (Unsplash)
