An afternoon at Lake Parramatta

The Easter weekend was a good opportunity to get out of the house for a while and enjoy some of what Sydney has to offer. Several friends have recommended Lake Parramatta, a small dam and reservoir less than 10 minutes from our house, but we've never been there before. It was built in the late 19th century to provide drinking water for Parramatta, but these days it's a recreation area. It's sometimes swimmable, I think they're still working on the general cleanliness of the water (lots of stormwater drains etc empty into the catchment area).

There's plenty of parking etc at the entrance, barbecue areas, covered seating, even a playground for the little 'uns. It was quite busy considering sunset was less than an hour away, lots of families having picnics and so on.

We took a brief walk round the easy part of the reservoir, down to the dam wall itself. There's a small creek at the base of the dam, with some pretty lush vegetation from the water that trickles down from the dam (although the picture above doesn't explicitly show it, the wall is constantly damp, as the water finds its way through and down).

The creek at the bottom is crossed with a line of stepping stones. There's a lot of brown algae in the water, so it doesn't look very pleasant, but I think I got enough of an angle above so that it doesn't show. The full circuit around the reservoir is about 4.2km (I did say it was a little reservoir!), and although some of it is paved and flat, some of it requires a bit of a scramble. We'll have to save that for another time, because we got there not long before sunshot, and also because Emily is a bit too pregnant to be climbing anything at the moment.