We have recently spent a week at Barrington Tops in New South Wales. It is only about a forty minute drive from where I live in Newcastle. Barrington Tops is a twenty-five-kilometre long plateau extending between a series of extinct volcanic peaks in the Mount Royal Ranges, an easterly offshoot of the Great Escarpment. Eighty kilometres west of surf and sand, as the black cockatoo flies, one-and-a-half kilometre high mountains rise to swirling mists. On a plateau stretched between their summits, alpine meadows awash with fragile wildflowers in springtime spread out beneath snowgums' open boughs. Melted snow becomes lithe white water dancing down to the sea through ancient beech forests bathed in an ethereal green light. Pure clear water flows from sphagnum moss swamps that retain and slowly release great quantities of water from the plateau, fed by mists, melting snow and an annual rainfall exceeding fifteen hundred millimetres. If you love bush walking or rapid riding this is the place to go. We spent hours everyday White Water rapiding I had a ball.