The One Drive from Sydney That Is Worth the Car: the Grand Pacific Drive

Sydney has one drive that is unarguably worth hiring a car for, and it is not the one most visitors pick: the Grand Pacific Drive, 140 signposted kilometres from the Royal National Park through Wollongong and Kiama to the Shoalhaven. Give it a full day, not a half one. If you would rather not drive it — one driver, a long day, and the wrong side of the road to learn on — the Secret Coastline day trip to the Kiama blowhole and Wollongong wildlife covers the same coast in ten hours for €91.71, rated 4.7, and the driver has done the road several hundred times.

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The Blue Mountains gets the attention, and it is well worth a day – but the train goes there in about two hours for the price of an ordinary Opal fare, and the car adds nothing except a car park at Echo Point. The wine regions are worse: hiring a vehicle so one person can stay sober is a strange way to spend a holiday.

The coast south of the city is different. The public network becomes slow and indirect, the interesting stops are strung along a road rather than clustered at stations, and – this is the actual point – the road itself is the attraction. You are not driving to get somewhere. You are driving because the driving is the thing.

The route, and how long to give it

The Grand Pacific Drive is a signposted 140-kilometre route that begins 45 minutes south of Sydney’s International Airport, in the Royal National Park, runs down through Wollongong, and continues through the coastal towns of Shellharbour and Kiama before ending in the Shoalhaven region. Reassurance signs along the way list the key locations and distances, so it is difficult to lose.

Do not attempt it as a half day. The distance suggests two hours of driving and it is roughly that – but a day on this road consists almost entirely of stopping, and a schedule that does not allow for stopping turns the best drive in New South Wales into a commute with views.

One day, leaving early, gets you comfortably to Kiama and back. Two days, with a night in Wollongong or Berry, gets you to the Shoalhaven and Jervis Bay with time to walk somewhere. Anything less than a full day and you should take a guided day trip instead, because you will see the same things from a seat you did not have to concentrate in.

Three guided trips down the same coast

If you decide against the car, these cover the route from Sydney with someone else driving.

The Jervis Bay trip is the only one of the three that reaches the white-sand beaches, and it costs you two more hours on the bus to get there.

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The first 45 minutes cost A$12, and that is the best money on the trip

The route starts inside the Royal National Park, and vehicle entry is A$12 per vehicle per day. You can pay at the visitor centre, at vehicle entry stations, at pay machines in the car parks, or through the Park’nPay app.

Three things about the park that the drive brochures leave out:

• It opens at 7 am and closes at 8:30 pm, and it “may have to close at times due to poor weather or fire danger”. That is not boilerplate. In a hot, dry Australian summer it is a real possibility and it can happen at short notice.
• Roads inside the park can be extremely busy, and traffic delays should be expected on weekends and public holidays during summer. The park itself says so.
• The car parks fill. The park publishes real-time parking updates through the @RoyalNPAlerts account, which is worth checking the morning you go rather than discovering the problem at Wattamolla.

The practical conclusion is unglamorous and useful: go on a weekday, or go early. An 8 am start through the park on a Tuesday is a different experience from an 11 am arrival on a Sunday in January, and it is the same road.

The bridge

At Coalcliff the escarpment comes down to the water so steeply that there is no shelf left to put a road on. The Sea Cliff Bridge is the answer: a 665-metre curved span, opened in December 2005, carrying Lawrence Hargrave Drive out over the sea at the foot of the cliff, with rock on one side and open ocean on the other.

It is the photograph everyone takes and it deserves the attention. It is also, driven at the speed limit with your eyes on the road, over in under a minute – which is why the viewpoints matter more than the crossing itself. Bald Hill at Stanwell Park, on the headland above the northern end, is the one that gives you the bridge and the coastline in a single view. There is parking. It fills on weekends.

Cross the bridge, then double back and cross it the other way if you want it twice. Nobody minds and it costs nothing – there is no toll on this road.

What the rest of the day is made of

South of the bridge the drive settles into a rhythm: escarpment on your right, ocean on your left, small towns in between.

Wollongong is a real city rather than a stop, with beaches and a working harbour, and it is the sensible overnight point if you are taking two days. Kiama has the blowhole – a sea cave that fires spray through a hole in the rock when the swell is right, which is not always, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. A big southeasterly swell is what makes it perform. Gerringong, Berry and the Shoalhaven past Kiama are dairy country dropping down to the coast, and where the drive stops being about the cliffs and starts being about the farmland.

If you take it as far as Jervis Bay, you reach beaches whose sand is famously, almost uncomfortably white. That is a two-day trip from Sydney by car, not a one-day one, whatever an itinerary tells you — which is precisely what the twelve-hour guided version is for.

Summer or winter?

Both work, and they are genuinely different trips.

Summer gives you swimming, long evenings and the beaches at their best – and also the crowds the national park warns about, the car parks full by mid-morning, and the possibility of a fire-danger closure. It is the season that most rewards an early start and most punishes a late one.

Winter on this coast is mild, the roads are empty, the light is better for the clifftop views, and the whale migration is passing offshore; one Sydney operator describes the season as running from early May to late November. The headlands along this route – Bald Hill and the Kiama coast in particular – are ordinary land-based vantage points during those months. Nobody can promise you a sighting from a clifftop, and any page that does is selling something.

The one thing winter takes away is swimming. If the beaches are the reason you are going, go in summer and go on a weekday.

When you should not drive this

There are two clear cases, and it is worth being blunt about them.

If your group has one driver and a long day. Sydney drives on the left. If that is unfamiliar, the Grand Pacific Drive is a poor place to learn it: the road is winding, the drops are real, and the scenery is actively competing for your attention.

If you only have one day and it is a weekend in summer. You will spend a meaningful part of it in the queue inside the national park. Take the tour, let someone else deal with the car park, or shift the trip to a weekday.

Otherwise: hire the car for this, and preferably only for this. A two- or three-day hire in the middle of a Sydney stay costs a fraction of a week’s rental and removes the parking problem from the days you are in the city. Compare what a short hire actually costs before you commit to a week – and read what gets added at the counter first, because the daily rate is not the price.

Three things to do before you set off

1. Check your navigation app’s toll setting. Routing software will happily take you out of Sydney on a tolled motorway, and every toll road here is cashless, so nothing will ask you at the time. The charge reaches you later through the hire company.
2. Fill the tank in Sydney, and treat the park as having no fuel.
3. Check the park is open, and check the parking alerts, on the morning itself rather than the night before.

Our recommendation

For most people, drive it. That is the whole point of the article: this is the one trip from Sydney where the car is not a convenience but the attraction. Take a full day, start at 8 am on a weekday, pay the A$12 at the park gate and plan to stop constantly.

If you are not driving it, take the Secret Coastline day trip at €91.71. Ten hours, 4.7 from 111 reviews, and the cheapest of the three guided versions of this coast — the sensible default if the left-hand side of the road, a single driver or a summer weekend has decided it for you. What it will not do is let you linger at Bald Hill for an hour because the light is good.

If the white sand is the reason you are going, the Jervis Bay day trip at €104.65 is the one that gets there, with dolphins and kangaroos on the way. It is twelve hours and 834 reviews at 4.4 — the lowest rating of the three, and a long day in a seat. Do not take it expecting the clifftop drive; it is a trip to a beach.

And if you want the best-rated version of the day regardless of price, the Sea Cliff Bridge, Kiama blowhole and wildlife tour is 4.9 over 79 reviews — but at €176.40 it is nearly twice the Secret Coastline price for the same ten hours on broadly the same coast, so be clear about what the extra is buying you.

The route description and park fees are as published by the NSW Government and NSW National Parks; park hours, fees and closures change — confirm them for your date.