How I got there: I booked this river adventure for my husband and me. We drove to the Deerubbun Boat Ramp, which is the meeting point and where there is a huge parking lot and the jetty, and this is where the adventure begins.
Total duration: Half a day, starting at 8:45 A.M.
Traffic light for children: Yellow, depending on the child's comfort with kayaking.
Website : https://riveradventures.com.au/
About the place: Amazing, Amazing, amazing! Just 45 minutes from Sydney city is this massive wilderness which makes you feel like you have entered another country! The Mooney Mooney bridge is the point of entry to Sydney from the North and you always pass this bridge if you want to travel to or from the central coast or up north. Every time we drove past this bridge, I saw the water down below and kept thinking what lied there in the wilderness of it all. One day, I googled and found that there are actually really adventurous tours that you can go on here in the Hawkesbury River and I booked one straight away.
I did the River Kayaking Adventure, and I was spellbound to see that Sydney has so much to offer you! It’s like the Halong Bay in Vietnam, the waters are green, there are untouched islands with remarkable flora and fauna (like white bellied sea eagles) and absolutely no people in some of the islands. There are abandoned houses and what appear to be big hospital like buildings in some of the islands (like the Milson Island), which used to be mental asylums years ago, it feels haunted!
You also get to see the shipwreck of HMAS Parramatta which apparently mysteriously appeared there, on the island shore. It was astounding. To think that you get to go really close to a shipwreck from the 1910s and see a water fall amongst islands near the wreck, and to know that there are absolutely no people living there, it is like something off of a book. This tour had a really good sweet potato roll as lunch which we had on a deserted beach island nearby. The beach itself was so nice and when you actually kayak amongst these islands and islets, you get to learn from an amazing teacher, this is more of a history lesson, with the tour guide explaining all about the Australian history, I would say this is an Open-Air History Lesson, the best I’ve ever had. There are some houses and sea shacks in some of the islands, as you get to live there in an Airbnb, but the wilderness and vastness of it all will blow your mind away. It is almost a pity that not many people know about this piece of paradise, but at the same time exciting to wade past the green waters and (and jellyfish!), being one of the very few ones over there.
Looks very calm, quiet and serene too. Wonderful ❤️