What We Do

Our Touring Range

Nature Trail is based in the regional town of Katoomba, situated 100km west of the Sydney CBD, in the heart of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area of the state of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia.

Our Touring Range extends out from/to our Katoomba base into the following rural and wild regions of NSW:

NSW Blue Mountains Region (spans ~10,000 km², size of Lebanon)
NSW Central Tablelands Region (spans ~31,000 km², size of Belgium)
NSW Southern Highlands Region (spans ~2,600 km², size of Luxembourg)

Combined, these three regions cover an area the size of the American state of Ohio (44,000 km²), or the country of Denmark (45,000 km²).

So there is a lot to see and experience!

Our Travel Modes:

Nature Trail offers a range of quality bespoke commercial tours with a choice of the following Travel Mode options:

Hiking Tours
Road Tours (with special interest focuses)
A combination of Hiking Tours and Road Tours
Treks (available only to our Trekking Alumni subscribers)

Our Touring Methods:

Only by exclusive private group charter. [*Read Editor’s Note below]
For our Treks, we offer these exclusively to our subscribed Trekking Alumni

*EDITOR’S NOTE: We have chosen to no longer offer public tours (that is to a group of strangers to participate on a given trip).

This is due to wisdom gained from our trial experiences realising limited uptake, also the administrative complexity of processing multiple individual bookings for one trip, and a compounded risk and supervisory burden of leading a group of strangers (‘herding cats’ syndrome).

So, we politely suggest that for public tours enquiries, they be directed to our competition. 🙂

Our Group Sizes:

We emphasise a small group size on each of our tours.

Hiking Tours – We welcome group numbers from just one solo tour guest (no surcharge) up to a maximum of six tour guests (for reasons of safety and ecological respect of where we go)
Road Tours (no hiking) – We welcome group numbers from just one solo tour guest (no surcharge) up to a maximum of ten tour guests

Our Tour Durations:

Short Tour – just 1 hour, 2 hours, or 3 hours
Half-Day Tour – about 4 hours
Full-Day Tour – about 5 to 6 hours
Extended Full-Day Tour – about 7 to 9 hours
2-Day Tour – day-time x 2 days with quality stay options
Multi-Day Tour – day-time 3 to 14 days with quality stay options.

Our Road Tours:

Nature Trail’s Road Tours are all about venturing in our dedicated 4-passenger luxury restored 4×4 Range Rover to explore our favourite regions by road – typically along country roads and selected local village streets.

We also invite a tour guest group to tag-along in their own vehicle or two as a convoy arrangement. On our Road Tours we accept up to 10 tour guests to maintain our for small group personable quality experience approach. When there are more that two vehicles we provide UHF-CB radio intercoms on speaker so all share the enroute conversations as a connected group. We find this works really well and enhances the travelling bond amongst our guest group.

There are plenty of opportunities to hop off and walk around at various places enroute. The walks are not long nor demanding of exertion – we are on holidays! Our Road Tours do not involve any hiking as such.

Each of our Road Tours are bespoke (we tailor to your group’s preferences, interests and limitation). Various options can be included such as quality gourmet catering options (cafe, restaurant, picnic, or self-catered as requested).

We call into heritage villages, friendly private properties and provide a rare opportunity to sample the real countryside – its folk, way of life, local stories, country cooking and hospitality.

Nature Trail also offers an array of bespoke designed and fully researched special interest tour options including venturing to places deeper into the Blue Mountains World Heritage and beyond, as follows:

Our Multi-Day Deep Country Escapes:

These extended tours are exceptional. We offer them to a travelling group fortunate to have generous time on their hands, having a sense of exploration and desire to get to know the countryside, its backroads, landscapes, special features, artisans, local gourmet, and to meet the friendly locals and wildlife by chance.

We put a considerable amount research time and effort and reconnoitring into our Multi-Day Deep Country Escapes, to ensure delivery a wonderful and unique life’s travel experience.

This can include one or a combination of the following regions of our specialist knowledge and planning:

NSW Blue Mountains Region
NSW Central Tablelands
NSW Southern Highlands

Check out our ROAD TOURS SELECTION

Our Tour Directing:

Tour Directing is an umbrella skill set responsible for everything that goes into providing a professional tour.

With Nature Trail this includes everything needed to arrange and deliver a tailored tour to our customer’s preferences:

Tour Design – comprehensively detailed to your specifications
Trip Planning – for each iteration of a designed tour
Trip Delivery – for each iteration of a designed tour.

Each Trip Delivery included compliance with best practice trip governance:

To provide all the necessary logistics, equipment and catering as required to ensure a best practice tour experience.
To Deliver the features and benefits as pre-agreed
To Deliver to tour guest expectations, preferences, limitations and abilities
To Deliver reliably to our agreed route and itinerary
To monitor and ensure tour guest safety, welfare and enjoyment

Our Tour Director, Steve, is qualified to fully design, plan and deliver a tour to your preferences.