We'll Never Be: Royal National Park

Do you know the great thing about Sydney? Not only do we have some amazing national parks in our borders, some of them are even suburbs.

Royal National Park

As a place, the Royal National Park is entrenched in Sydney culture. 

If you're an Instagrammer, you come here to take booty pictures in front of a sheer cliff edge that you climbed over the safety fence for. 

If you're a motoring enthusiast, the winding roads of Nasho are legendary. Not to mention this Facebook Page.

But for me, all that matters is this national park at Sydney's southern edge has been designated by the Geographical Names Board of NSW as a suburb, which means that this blog has to step into this idyllic patch. 

Naturally, my first stop in the park was the visitor centre where I could buy a day pass for the car ($12) and start taking a few photos without risking ending up on the previously mentioned Facebook page. It's worth mentioning that at the visitor's centre is a cafe and lovely little picnic area. 

With my dues paid, I was now ready to explore the park proper. 

Now, this is a huge park with endless bushwalks, beaches, and tourist hotspots. For today's visit, and too early in the year for the summer crowds to begin, I took the gorgeous turn-off towards Wattamolla.

Wattamolla is a site with trails, a waterfall, dam and beach, and seemed as perfect a place as any to head to for this Royal visit.

After parking the car, I was at liberty to begin exploring the Coast Track.

Usually, when you go for a bushwalk, you have to go a bit of a distance to reach spots like waterfalls. Here, however, Wattamolla Waterfall is right next to the carpark. Neat. 

From here though, you can take an easy walk into the bush.

I liked this plant.

This is actually a pretty great walk if you don't want to (or can't) go too far. In a short distance, you can peek through the trees for glances at the thick bushland all around you, 

before you soon arrive at at the rather pretty Wattamolla Dam, a small pool with added bushland views. 

From the car park to the dam is only around 800m each way. Heading back, it was time to check out more of Wattamolla,

with the handsome beach beckoning. 

Thankfully, the path to sea level is also quite a short one. 

After a quick stroll, I arrived to the banks of Wattamolla's lagoon, which is somehow behind the beach. 

From here, you can see the face of the waterfall I strolled by the top of earlier, 

as well as this great palm tree. 

If you want to get to the beach itself, you can either swim, or head back on the path to get there properly.

This takes you through an unglamorous walk,

and a glamorous one too. 

If, like me, you're not interested in the many steps to get from the cliffs to the sand, you can instead continue on this path. This walk takes you to the Providential Point Lookout where you can look at some great water views, 

and some arguably greater cliff views. 

What a city.

Having done my small exploratory tour of Wattamolla, I was ready to hit my next point of interest. 

As such, I backtracked to return to the car park. 

From here, I hopped back in the car to both leave the national park, but also stay inside it.

This will make sense in my next post.

Royal National Park: How people overseas imagine Australians live.