Riding to Dorrigo
Everyone gets there from somewhere different, and the default is the highway — the road most riders came out to avoid. Below is the ride we’d take from Brisbane. Tell it where you’re starting and it builds yours instead.
New England & the Waterfall Way
5 days · ~1,675 km · all sealed
The line is the shape of the ride, not the route file — towns and roads are real, the track between them is indicative. Build it and you get the routed version.
- 1Brisbane → Armidale~535 km estLions Road, then Tenterfield and the tablelands
- 2Armidale → Port Macquarie~265 km estWalcha, then the Oxley Highway down to the coast
- 3Port Macquarie → Dorrigo~175 km estKempsey, Bellingen, and the climb up the pass
- 4Dorrigo → Glen Innes~260 km estThe Waterfall Way — Ebor, Wollomombi, Armidale
- 5Glen Innes → Brisbane~440 km estNorth over the border and home
- Roads
- Lions Road, the Oxley, the Waterfall Way
- sourced
- Fuel
- No range worries — all sealed, towns throughout
- sourced
- GPX
- Garmin-ready, day by day
Four nights, three of the best roads in the country, and a plateau at the end of it.
Why the long way
The Waterfall Way leaves the coast at Bellingen, climbs through rainforest onto the Dorrigo plateau in northern NSW, then runs west past Ebor and Wollomombi to the New England tablelands. Sealed the whole way, tight in places, and full of riders whenever the weather holds.
Before you go
The tablelands hold frost and fog well into spring — start mid-morning and dress for the top, not the coast. The Waterfall Way and the Oxley both have blind, tightening corners, and both are popular; ride your own pace rather than the pace of whoever just went past. Book a bed in Dorrigo ahead on a weekend. It fills with riders, which is rather the point.
The ride we’d take
Five days from Brisbane: the Lions Road, the Oxley, a night on the coast, then the Waterfall Way west from Dorrigo. Sealed the whole way, country motels each night.
Read the whole ride →Yours to copy and change — it opens as a real trip you can make your own.
The ride above is yours to open and copy either way — the file comes with it. An account is for building your own.