THE Illawarra Fly Tree Top Walk has officially taken off, heading through the rainforest and offering stupendous views of green and undulating countryside, lake and sea.
The walk offers views over the Illawarra. Picture: Dee Kramer
Perched among native trees atop the Illawarra escarpment fringing the southern highlands, two hours' drive south of Sydney and 25 minutes from Kiama, the walkway consists of a 500m elevated steel canopy at treetop level. It stands among enormous blackwoods, gully gums, ferns and sassafras trees about 25m to 30m above ground on a site 700m above sea level.
The $6.5 million fly opened on March 15, and that weekend attracted 1000 visitors. Regional tourism chiefs expect 200,000 visitors a year, and see the fly as a key asset for the Illawarra region.
The fly delivers the sort of panoramic outlook generally seen from an aircraft or hot-air balloon. It includes two cantilevered arms that place you directly above the temperate rainforest, as if you are hovering. The cantilevers' soft swaying in the breeze heightens the experience.
In the middle of the walkway, the striking, 45m-high Knights Tower -- its corkscrew staircase and round observation turret capped by a distinctive octagonal roof -- provides the most astounding vista of all.
Illawarra Fly Tree Top Walk general manager Sean Haylan calls this tower "the stairway to heaven" and the nickname is likely to stick.
You reach the top by an external spiral staircase. Round and round we walk, anticlockwise, with me panting just a little and perhaps regretting those final few beers the night before at a lively microbrewery.
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Drink: Five Islands Brewing Company in
Wollongong has done great business since its inception in
2001, brewing its own beer and serving mod-Oz cuisine just
50m from the beach. Tipplers can choose between Dapto
Draught, South Peach, unfiltered Snowboard Hefeweizen,
Bulli Black, Barbeerian, Porter Kembla, Belgian-style
Longboard or Lighthouse Light. Then there's Parkyn's Shark Oil (named after a former local shark catcher) and Pig Dog, a classic European-style pilsner. Pig Dog was the nickname of managing director Michael Bolt when he played rugby league with former NRL club the Illawarra Steelers. He now devotes himself to the brewery: "I have a great job. Every time I have a beer on site it's quality control. Every beer off site is research and development." Five Islands Brewing Company has become popular with Chinese tourists. Bolt thought: "What about beer and fish and chips or a steak sandwich by the beach?" "We put a beer menu out with Mandarin translations and the concept took off." Often Chinese tourists drop in on a trip to nearby Nan Tien, Australia's largest Buddhist temple. www.fiveislandsbrewery.com. Dine: Among the seaside villages south of Sea Cliff Bridge, Samuels in Thirroul has made a name for itself. In Kiama, the newly opened restaurant at Kiama Blue Grand Mercure Apartments is attracting attention. Wollongong offers plenty of options, including Lagoon in a parkland setting near the beach; it serves excellent seafood, from lobsters to grilled snapper fillets. Fly: Bald Hill, towering over the Tasman Sea on the southern tip of the Royal National Park, marks the Illawarra's northern end. It was here Australian inventor and aeronautical pioneer Lawrence Hargrave tested his box kites. A memorial to him stands on the site and the main road through Wollongong's northern villages is named after him. Today, Hargrave's successors launch themselves from the cliffs in hang-gliders. Some, such as former US hang-gliding champion Curt Warren, who lives in nearby Coledale, offer tandem flights. www.warrenwindsports.com.au. Ride: As the crow flies, the distance between Bald Hill and the Illawarra Fly Tree Top Walk is about 60km. The obvious way to connect the area's attractions is by car but much more exhilarating is a trip by Harley trike. Passengers wear helmets fitted with visors and two-way radios. You can converse with the driver and your fellow passenger (the trikes take two passengers) and listen to a little music on the way: tracks such as Born to be Wild. My chauffeur, Ian Bosler, is prominent in the Ulysses Club, a social club for motorcyclists over 40 with a motto of "Grow old disgracefully". With his grey beard, dark glasses and leather jerkin, Bosler looks the part. "We have a choice of leather jackets for passengers," Bosler explains. "You can either wear a sports biker type or a Brando type." The latter is the wide-lapel style made famous by Marlon Brando in his 1953 movie The Wild One. Curiously, Bosler notes, nobody chooses the sports biker style. When passengers are roaring though the Illawarra, they all want to look like Brando. www.triketrips.com.au. Peter Needham |
At the summit the panorama takes my breath away. It stretches from the Royal National Park in the north, spanning Lake Illawarra and Wollongong and extending south to Bass Point near Shellharbour, with the Tasman Sea running along the distant horizon, blue and glittering.
Excited exclamations flow from fellow climbers as each reaches the top. "Great, isn't it," smiles Haylan. He knows a thing or two about treetop walks, having worked on an associated project, the Otway Fly Tree Top Walk on Victoria's Great Ocean Road. Both were built by Canopy 01, as was the Tahune AirWalk in Tasmania.
"I've been here for the best part of a year on this project and I was at Otway for 2 1/2 years," Haylan says. So how does the Illawarra version compare with Otway? "This one leaves it for dead. It combines view and forest. The other is mainly forest, (as) it's in a valley."
Treetop walks rank among the most ecologically considerate forms of forest exploration. The Illawarra fly will allow thousands of visitors to see and appreciate the rainforest of the Illawarra and Southern Highlands without touching the ground. A soft footprint indeed. Rainwater is collected in a 600,000-litre tank for use on site, and all waste is removed for appropriate disposal. The walkway's steel spans were prefabricated in Tasmania, trucked in, assembled and erected "like a giant Meccano set". The building crew used existing fire trails for access, disturbing as few trees as possible.
The site is on 16ha of private land once used as a protea farm. During construction, Haylan came to know the site's resident wombat which, as yet unnamed, stays in its burrow most of the time, emerging to forage, as wombats do.
Giant earthworms, the length of a man's arm, tunnel silently beneath the soil, though few were encountered during work to erect the towers that support the spans.
The Illawarra Fly Tree Top Walk comes with interpretative signs, an information centre, and staff to explain the surroundings and chat about local birdlife. Lyrebirds are common, along with yellow-tailed black cockatoos, crimson rosellas, kookaburras and powerful owls.
Despite the fly's treetop height, you don't have to climb to reach it. It has been built against the side of a hill, so just keep walking and the hill drops away beneath you. The gentle grade makes the attraction suitable for all visitors, and a golf buggy caters for less-mobile guests.
During the past two years the Illawarra region has notched up more than $200million worth of tourism development, progressing from one international-standard hotel (the Novotel Northbeach in north Wollongong) to six, the latest being the Medina Executive Wollongong. Greg Binskin, Tourism Wollongong general manager, attributes the boom largely to "the popularity of the new 665m Sea Cliff Bridge and Grand Pacific Drive touring route".
The sinuously seductive bridge, built in "balanced cantilever" style (not unlike parts of the Illawarra fly), winds along the coast among pretty seaside villages north of Wollongong. It has replaced a dangerous, cliff-hugging road closed by authorities in 2003. The new bridge serves as a gateway to a rugged coastal region variously compared with Cornwall, California's Big Sur or Italy's Amalfi Coast.
Checklist
The Illawarra Fly Tree Top Walk stands near the
southwestern end of the Illawarra, not far from Jamberoo Action
Park, the biggest theme park in NSW. More:
www.illawarrafly.com.