Driving in Australia is like working out on a treadmill - you get tired and you never seem to get anywhere. New South Wales is a place of great diversity where you travel five hours and cover an inch on the map: farmland, wine country, scrubland, rain forest and the best beaches in the world. We wanted to see them all, which meant driving over 1,200 miles in a single week. A decent car was a must and Avis came up with the best option for the price, a four-door Toyota Camry. Mudgee is four hours from Sydney, a pioneering town of 8,000 people in the northwest corner of the Hunter Valley. Mudgee's climate is hot and intense in summer, cold and withering in winter - the ideal climate for vines. Mudgee itself was designed by the man who then went on to design Melbourne; wide streets, covered sidewalks where everyone nods to each other, a dry cleaners that delivers your clothes back within an hour, and a sense of exactness that has everyone's car parked, rear to the kerb at a precise 45 degrees, as if the mayor of Mudgee is an eccentric traffic warden.
All the ladies do their shopping in the early morning here in summer, all the men wear short trousers, knee-high socks and shining brogues, follow cricket, drink two or three half pints of shandy on a Saturday night and say "Streuth" and "Too right, mate". At night the town's water supply must be dosed with Valium for by 10 p.m. the streets are deserted, the pubs and restaurants closed and the cicadas are left with the run of the place.
But it's peaceful. We stayed in a charming guesthouse of wide verandas and bedrooms done out in brass and white curtains like sets from a Tennessee Williams play. For supper we had our first taste of kangaroo - somewhat like venison. Wine is a developing industry. Mudgee wines, big gutsy Shirazes and oakey Chardonnays weigh in regularly at 14 per cent plus. The vineyards and the traditional sheep farms, where muddy-looking merinos are raised, run right to the edge of town. In the evening, after a day in which the temperature rose to 39 degrees, sitting on a veranda of a farmhouse outside Mudgee, sipping a cool drink and listening to the cockatoos screeching at one another down at the waterhole, it wasn't difficult to imagine how life out here could take a hold of you, how you could fall in love with these green valleys and dusty tracks and long days set down in the middle of nowhere.
During the long drive up north from Mudgee, through Tamworth and Armidale, the countryside grows gradually from rolling parkland into the kind of limitless plains you find west of the Rockies. No vista is less than 100 miles. Light is vast. Roads run straight and true and are well maintained. You had better not let your petrol tank get low since 50 miles between filling stations is common and when one does appear, if it's after 6 p.m. it may be closed. Tamworth is the country and western headquarters of Australia; the bars and restaurants play it non-stop. Tenterfield is the last town before you cross the rainforest of the Great Dividing Range and come down through Lismore and Ballina into the ocean front resort of Byron Bay.
The beach at Byron Bay stretches from the base of the lighthouse - Australia's most easterly point - forever. White, white sand, warm azure ocean. No one on the beach. Walk for a mile, if you can take the heat, and you'll not meet a soul. These are favourite waters for dolphins and, from May to September, for humpback whales. Byron Bay claims to be the only place on the planet where you can sit amid wild flowers on a sea cliff on the edge of a rain forest and listen to whales breathing in the sea below you.
This is the point on the Australian continent that will first see the light of the new millennium. Expect crowds next December 31st.
There's a jewel of a hotel run by Club Med called the Byron Bay Beach Club, where you stay in chalets in tropical gardens set right on the edge of the sea. The chalets are rudimentary structures of plywood, but clean and with plenty of hot water. "Alternative" is the adjective most Australians use when talking about Byron Bay. Men with flaxen beards and tattoos of mermaids on both shoulders glide around the town on Harley-Davisons.
The comparative weakness of the Aussie dollar makes travelling seem quite cheap. Petrol and diesel are less than 40 per cent of the Irish price. You buy a very decent bottle of wine for a fiver and eating out shouldn't cost more than £10 a head. The Pacific Highway, the main road from Brisbane to Sydney, goes through Byron Bay. "Highway" is a bit rich - the road is often more like a boreen and frequently dangerous. Heading south, it turns inland to Grafton through rich, lush land fertilised by the Clarence River; in less than four hours you're in Coff's Harbour. Once a whaling port, more lately a centre of banana growing, Coff's Harbour has a certain down-at-heel feel to it. The best place to stay is the Pelican Beach, just north of the town, on the sea. It is the perfect base from which to explore the nearby rainforest in Dorrigo.
Starting early, the drive south-west through the sleepy village of Bellingen takes one hour. The road then snakes uphill into the mists for over 15 kilometres. The Dorrigo National Park is the largest sub-tropical rainforest in New South Wales and one of the most important in Australia. If it doesn't occur to you - as it didn't to us - that it might be raining in a rainforest, then take a tip and wear walking shoes and bring a waterproof top. This is the real thing, a canopy stretching to the limit of vision, home to koalas, ringtail possums, red-necked wallabies, bush rats, kangaroos - and leeches. Signs advise you how to deal with leeches: scrape them gently off your skin, then dab the wound with cotton wool before applying a plaster. Expecting something with sharp teeth to land with a plop on the back of our necks, we set out down the path into the jungle. No blood was drawn. We walked through the echoing atrium, listening to the calls of the parrots and cockatoos. Back on top of the mountain we walked out on a long platform, a skywalk with the gigantic forest below it, with farmland in the near distance and with the Pacific Ocean on the horizon.
Virgin Atlantic in conjunction with Ansett Australia, flies daily from London to Sydney, via Hong Kong. Return fares from £1,060. Reservations through any travel agent.
Avis Rent-a-Car, Sydney. Reservations: Tel: 02-9353 9000
Lauralla Guest House, Mudgee, NSW. Tel: 02-6372 4480; Byron Bay Beach Club, Byron Bay, NSW. Tel: 02-6685 8000; Pelican Beach, Coff's Harbour, NSW. Tel: 02-6653 7000.