Watagan Wanderings

I have had the hankering for some serious bush walking for a while now. Today we finally managed to head the Watagan National Park to do a couple of walks.
Can I just say that information about bush walking in New South Wales is ridiculously hard to come by; the internet has next to no information and when you there, there are hardly any signs to help you find the walk let alone information about the wildlife/area. Meghan did get her first go at driving on a dirt mountain road... Brandon took over on the way back.

Anyway, after a few wrong turns we found ourselves at Monkey Face lookout. It was an unplanned stop, but after a wrong turn led us there we thought we might as well look. It was a pretty nice view...

We managed to find our way to Gap Creek Rest Area. Helpfully called Gap Creek Camping area in the information booklet, but not on the sign beside the road. Just a short walk and we found ourselves at the base of a pretty little waterfall. But not before passing a family with two girls under ten, extremely worried about all the leeches. There was some screaming. 

Seeing this dude hanging out should have been a warning

Getting down was a bit slippery

We then did some guess work and managed to to end up at Heaton's lookout, the start of the Watagan trail.

The only sign to tell us where to go

Slippery and mossy

Oh exciting another sign!

Pretty leech pool?

Leech protection

We were about 30mins into the 5 hour walk when Brandon realised his shoes (both of our shoes actually) were alive with colonies of leeches and we decided to sprint/slip our way back out of there. We then spent about 20mins flicking leeches off our shoes and socks. Next time we will pick a weekend where it hasn't been constantly raining for 3 days.

Oh and we saw an echidna beside the road and got some awesome video of it wandering away!