Sydney - a trip to the Hawkesbury River

As part of our quest to find somewhere to live near Sydney we decided to go north instead of south. About an hour's train trip north of Sydney is the Hawkesbury River area and so we hopped on a train and headed north to a little place called Brooklyn. After looking around we headed north to the much bigger town with the magnificent name of Woy Woy.

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Brooklyn station. The train takes about an hour to get here.

The train line north passes over a causeway to Long Island. More about that later.

Like the Chesapeake Bay, this area is a water based community. There are quite a few communities that can only be reached by boat.

I suspect this the commuter boat park. You take your boat to this wharf and then take the train to downtown Sydney.

Reserved parking boat places. One of the reasons why we came here was because I had found this area with remarkable locations and views combined with relatively cheap housing prices. The negative issue is the need to travel to you house by boat.

We thought this might be a ferry going to the nearby Dangar Island which is another of these communities only reachable by water.

Enclosed swimming area.

Swimming is very popular in Australia. We all are taught how to swim when we are kids and it is terrific exercise. I dislike freestyle but I like to do backstroke and breaststroke.

Suburban train on Long Island.

We noticed a couple about to set off in their small boat. Marianne talked to the wife about living in the area. Apparently it is a challenge.

This is not a regular suburban train. This requires further research.

Houses up the hill and boat houses by the water.

We continued to walk around Brooklyn.

It was amazingly quiet in this area. Perhaps a couple of weeks in Sydney in Marrickville influenced us but we both remarked on the comparative silence.

We took another train a few miles north to Woy Woy. We stopped briefly at a small station Wondabyne. This appeared to be the only house in the area.

This is the only photo I have of Woy Woy which I took as we took the train back to Sydney. The down town area of Woy Woy itself is not spectacular but it might be a possibility as a place of future residence. It certainly is much closer to Sydney than Ulladulla. I seem to remember that Spike Milligan's mother lived in Woy Woy. 

Milligan famously named Woy Woy "the largest above ground cemetery in the world" when visiting in the 1960s.

I took some photos on the train ride back south to Sydney. Expansion to the south of Sydney is blocked by the Royal National Park and to the north by the Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park.

The Ku-Ring-Gai park is interlaced with the waters of the Hawkesbury River. The river attracts people with a different attitude towards life which you can see in the film Oyster Farmer. We watched it on a Netflix DVD,

House on the other side of the water. This is another place you can only reach by water.

The train trip back to Sydney is spectacular, especially in the early morning. In the morning the sun reflects off the water but in the afternoon it is still beautiful. Australian scenery is just so different but it is still beautiful.

More of these isolated houses. I suspect living in them would be both wonderful and a pain in the neck.

I suspect these are oyster farms.

 

This rail bridge is one of my favourites. Occasionally when I was young my family would take the train down to Sydney from Queensland. This bridge seemed to fascinate me. This bridge replaced an earlier bridge and you can still see the old pylons. At the far end is a tunnel thorough Long Island and then across the causeway to Brooklyn.

Dangar in the distance.

A pylon from the old bridge.

Houses on Dangar Island.

Somebody constructed a residence on top of the old pylon at the southern end of the former bridge. It probably has a great view but I suspect there is a lot of noise from the trains.

So it is an area of interest but I am not totally convinced this is the area we should move to. It's hotter north of Sydney as you might suspect. But who knows, a house with water access would be different.