Quad Biking in Port Stephens – North NSW Coast

Last weekend, myself, Nath and his family headed out to Port Stephens. This is a bay which lies on the North Coast of New South Wales – about a 3 hour drive from Sydney. It’s made up of a couple of towns – including Anna Bay, Nelsons bay, Shoal bay.

 I actually stayed at Anna Bay when I visited Australia a couple of years ago so things were slightly familiar – but of course, so much has changed in my life since then.

We drove up after work on Friday night so tackling the unfamiliar roads in the dark was slightly harrowing and I wasn’t even the one doing the driving – poor Nath, I reckon he got the brunt of my stressful passenger behaviour.

We were staying in a farmstay called Kookaburra farm. We had hired out 2 cottages which each had three bedrooms. Just outside was a farmyard with a variety of animals including these Llama-like creatures, a donkey, chooks (chickens) etc etc.

The donkey turned out to be a cock-a-doodle-donkey as it played the role of the rooster and brayed at 6am each morning. As you can imagine, I was unimpressed!

Naomi’s kids loved it though and they had fun milking the cows, collecting the chicken eggs, riding the ass and feeding the pigs.

Our adventure of the weekend was quad biking on the awesome Stockton dunes at Anna Bay. When I was here the last time, we did some 4 x4-ing on the sands, but this was far more fun.

The guides started off by telling us that we better be careful ’cause if we weren’t we could puncture a lung, break every bone in our body, crunch ourselves under the bike and the only way out is by rescue helicopter which can cost upwards of 20 grand.

Quite the thing for the confidence boost…not!! But it turned out that it was a little bit of build-up as the whole thing was actually quite tame. The council have given the quad operators a small portion of land that they can use for the biking so we had to stay within the orange beacons. After I got my confidence, I was quite tempted to roar around beyond the demarcated areas.

It was alot of fun and soon I was accelerating up and down the dunes and taking the corners at high speed. It was exhilirating with the wind flying through my hair as I zoomed over the sand.

After an hour or so, we were called back to base and transported back to the parking lot.