The Tweed might be a little too agricultural for its own good. And the bits that aren’t farms, pastures or sugar cane fields, stick straight up out of the ground a kilometre-or-more, amongst rainforest that might be nice for hiking. But, it isn’t so grand for gourmet burger joints selling locally brewed IPAs, or a Great Australian Ice Creamery.
Maybe that’s why tourists keep missing it. For it’s got nothing to do with access: The Tweed starts barely 10 minutes from where everybody lands at Gold Coast Airport. For decades, I’ve been waiting for the masses to descend. Or a Hemsworth. But you all keep driving by on the M1 south to Byron Bay. Or you don’t leave the Gold Coast.
Which leaves most of The Tweed for adventure types. And there’s some of Australia’s gnarliest multi-day hikes through five national parks in The Tweed, within the World Heritage-listed Gondwana Rainforests of Australia. You could hike and camp your way across one of the largest tracts of sub-tropical rainforest left on Earth.
But what I like most about the Tweed is that you don’t even have to be much of an adventure type to feel like an adventure type. The Tweed’s the centerpiece of the southern hemisphere’s biggest shield volcano – so all of life here is lived along, and below, the sheer green walls of an enormous volcanic caldera. Which means that in the Tweed, you can feel like a survivalist just driving through. Or… riding an e-bike on an almost entirely flat trail.
On the rails
Eventually, the Northern Rivers Rail Trail will stretch for 132km from The Tweed south to Casino, passing through Byron Bay, making it Australia’s third longest rail trail. But for now, it’s a 24km meander from Murwillumbah – 13km south of the Queensland border – to the tiny farming village of Crabbes Creek. You can ride it one way, and pre-book a shuttle back, or ride the return easily in a day.
Rail trails are never a hard slog, especially on an e-bike (for the purposes of exposing the Tweed as a soft adventure Mecca, I choose to go electric). Opened in 1894, the tracks were in use till 2004, then lay dormant till the riding trail was opened in April last year. The first view I get after leaving from the departure point at Murwillumbah’s late 19thCentury train station is of fields of sugar cane framing the Tweed’s mighty volcano – Mt Warning. The tallest mountain on the North Coast of New South Wales at 1159 metres, it was called Wollumbin, or Cloud Catcher, by the local Bundjalung Nation. There are mountains beyond it that dip and crest all the way to the horizon, so that they appear endless. The Tweed’s drastically perpendicular, heavily forested backdrops have a way of making anything you do here feel slightly Spielberg-esque.
The rail trail takes you through towns even locals have barely heard of. Like Stokers Siding – an historic rail town of 663 inhabitants with a pretty main street of art galleries, bespoke furniture makers and historic homes with picket white fences. The vegetation beside the trail changes with almost every corner; I pedal by cow pastures and working dairy farms into sections of unrestrained rainforest that encroach on the track, then back again as quickly. There are 16 historic bridges along the way and a 500-metre-long pitch-black tunnel where glow worms flicker as I ride by with my torch on high beam. There hasn’t been a train through here in 20 years, but I can’t help pedalling faster through it all the same.
Over 100,000 riders have used the trail since it opened last year, but mid-week, I have it almost entirely to myself. There are cafes in towns like Burringbar along the way and a pub serving lunch and dinner at a bistro called the Spotted Cow at the appropriately named Mooball. I’ve barely raised a sweat by Crabbes Creek, but in amongst this topography, I feel like I’ve summited Macchu Picchu.
A river runs by
I pedal back to Murwillumbah and find myself admiring a town that for decades was one of the Northern Rivers’ least lovable. The biggest town in the Tweed Valley – this was a non-nonsense blue-collar hub when I was growing up. The Tweed River passes through it, and the mountains frame the main street in such a way that drivers can stop with no warning when the setting sun leaves rays of gold dust against the dark silhouettes of the ranges. But the trendy art deco origins (the town was rebuilt through the 1920s after a massive fire) of its streetscape were hidden behind a no-frills veneer that was all industrial, without any of the industrial chic.
Things are changing fast. Hardware supply outlets are out-numbered by artisan patisseries, hipster barista cafes with Melbourne-worthy lattes and an arts precinct that’s home to pop-up bars and perhaps the best restaurant in the Northern Rivers, Bistro Livi (it boasts a hat from the Good Food Guide, and a chef from Melbourne culinary institution, Movida). There’s a market on as I pass by the edge of town. I stop and check out the growers and the buyers and remember what I love so much about this Northern Rivers region. This must be one of the only places on Earth where liberals and conservatives live in this sort of harmony. Here you can have your aura cleansed while you wait for your wheels to be aligned, and that’s handy. For every tie-dyed shirt, there’s a freshly pressed polo, for every Kombi, there’s a ute, or a Porsche.
It’s a pretty drive through the green cane fields which line the Tweed River to Tumbulgum. It floods at even the mention of rain in this town, but locals never desert the place, they just build their homes up higher poles. I prepare for a paddle with lunch at the region’s oldest pub, Tumbulgum Tavern, a 137-year-old treasure chest of hardwood timber and corrugated iron where locals gather each sunset to watch Wollumbin light up across the water. The Tweed River flows to the Pacific Ocean through a death-defying bar east at Point Danger. But here the river is calm and wide and welcoming, a beacon for house boats, kayaks and 60 species of birds, from tiny kingfishers to resident ospreys and white-bellied sea eagles. I follow the Rous River canoe trail, down a tributary of the Tweed, into mangrove-fringed bays and creeks lined with hoop pine and rainforest. The trail only takes two-and-a-half hours – but I don’t see another paddler. There are sections in here where I swear, I’ll see a croc – but we’re too far south. I keep paddling to Dungay Creek, a tributary of the Rous River, till I feel I’m as far from the world as you can get this close to an airport (17 minutes) handling nearly 1000 flights a day.
Driving through the world of giants
The Tweed’s a hell of a driving destination. Part of a loop of scenic drives in the Far North Coast dubbed The Rainforest Way, that term was conceived to help sell the region to the world. But the roads I’m on remain free of traffic, bar farmers in slow-moving utes, and locals in faster ones keen to overtake. Adventure travel in the Tweed is as much trying to keep your eyes on the road as anything involving great physical toil. As I travel, my perspective on Mt Warning (Wollumbin) changes dramatically as I circle her. I pass by tranquil, bucolic hamlets like Chillingham, where locals drink beers at an outdoor picnic table in amongst forest beside the town’s general store.
There are places to stay all along this mountainous drive and unlike Byron Bay’s more famous hinterland 40 minutes south, I can reserve my bed only a few days before I arrive. I pull into Selah Valley Estate, one of the more recent additions, set amongst 175 hectares of cow pastures and rainforest beneath a dramatic bluff in a locality without a town, called Limpinwood. This place is a perfect representation of the Tweed, I think, it’s slick and modern in its design, but then I’m taken on a 4WD Polaris ride slipping down muddy tracks to cascades in the wilderness, and to meet the chickens who reside at The Fluffy Butt Hut.
Next morning I drive south, feeling tiny against the Tweed Ranges. The turn-off to Wollumbin (Mt Warning) National Park isn’t far. The roadway narrows to one lane, and I’m hemmed in on both sides by rocks covered in ferns and palms. A carpet snake as thick as my thigh lies curled up by the side of the road, I stop to watch it move, through gaps in the trees I see the sheer rocky face of Wollumbin’s peak tainted gold by the sunshine – it’s the first place on mainland Australia to catch the sunrise.
The walk here was iconic for decades – a nine-kilometre climb through tracts of Gondwana rainforest, home to more plants and animals which remain almost exactly the same as they were millions of years agothan anywhere else in the world. But there are few sites in Australia with more significance to the Bundjalung people. In fact, there’s not many more totemic mountains in all the world. Only Bundjalung men of high standing were allowed to summit. It’s been a point of contention locally in recent years, but to me it’s a no-brainer; just stand back and admire this sacred place. Anyway, there’s a vantage point almost as good further south, called The Pinnacle. It epitomises the easy-access, soft adventure appeal of the Tweed. I walk 200 metres-or-so from the carpark, within the Border Ranges National Park, driving beyond the colourful, alternative community of Uki. Then I stand on the rim of the volcano with 360-degree views across the whole green caldera. Just like Wollumbin, locals suggest it be seen at sunrise, though I don’t mind it either at noon. Early next year a 39km multi-day walk will open right through the Tweed called the Gidjuum Gulganyi Walk (or Old People’s Track), providing privileged access to the ancient Bundjalung Nation, with three walk-in camps. But there’s already hiking trails round most corners of The Tweed.
Rolling in the rainforest
There are far more secrets still. I’ve lived beside The Tweed for most of my life, but as I drive towards Uki from Wollumbin I notice a brand-new sign: Uki Mountain Bike Park. I follow the side road and find eight new mountain bike trails set in a natural green amphitheatre,, with Wollumbin as its centrepiece. Co-designed by one of the world’s best trail designers, Dirt Art, and built by Australia’s leading bike trail company, Trailworx, I find a gathering of riders on what was once land used to feed cattle. Tweed Valley Mountain Bike Riders vice-president Graham Spencer is one of those here to ride. A long-time local, he used to come here to clear weeds in his former role with the council, and said his mind would spin when he’d think about the mountain biking opportunities here. “It was a real Field of Dreams scenario,” he says. “And we built it, and they’re coming. These trails are so different from most trails in Australia; the others are mostly in dry eucalypt scrub, but we’re out amongst rainforest. But it’s the Tweed, so it takes a while for the word to spread; we’re not Byron.”
That’s very true, the Tweed is not Byron (in fact, many Byron people have never been). It’s at least a couple of Hemsworth brothers short of becoming anything like its southern neighbour. But its agricultural orientation, and the sheer scale of the wilderness that make this region an adventurists’ – and not a tourists’ – wildest fantasy might just save this place for another few years yet.
The writer was a guest of Tweed Tourism Co, Northern Rivers Rail Trail, Selah Valley Estate, Uki Mountain Bike Park
