Great drives Nerriga and Braidwood

If you leave Sydney early enough to miss the soccer mums and tennis dads, you can enjoy some of the best views of the Great Diving Range, some great Southern Highlands farming country, some wild, windswept gorges, and still have time for a ploughman's lunch and a beer in a country pub.

I've added the major way points in the route to the Google Map below, but the main idea is to circle the NSW highlands just north of Canberra before heading north to cross the mountains and come home via Nowra and the Princes Highway.

The cabin is a very comfortable place to be for the front seat passengers, with two electrically-adjustable seats including lumbar rests that adjust electrically for height as well as depth. There was less leg-room in the back seats than a couple of teenagers would like, but enough room for young children, and the seats are deep and comfortable. The boot is large, flat and at a comfortable height for loading and unloading. When it began to rain in Nerriga we found the deep tailgate door was an ideal height and breadth to shelter under - it was easy to stay dry while loading and unloading, and in our case, taking off some muddy hiking boots.

Off the tarmac on the Little River Road and the Nerriga Sassafras Road, the Touareg actually felt more composed than it had on the highway, with the sometimes too-sensitive steering settling right down and the suspension easily swallowing pot-holes and corrugations up to medium size at up to 80km/hr. My co-driver said that it was almost as if the Touareg had been set-up specifically for dirt highway cruising at the expense of motorway use.

Pulling into Nerriga in the late afternoon, we noticed an old Victorian-era iron rock crushing machine being used as playground equipment in the yard of the Nerriga Public School, dating back to the late 19th century when this area was the centre of an alluvial gold rush. I don't think you could call the Touareg a "rock crusher" exactly but it was definitely a pot-hole smoother.

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The Nerriga Hotel is well worth a stop, with a classic single-story weatherboard premises dating back to the same gold rush period and a lovely front verandah where the locals gather, sipping a schooner while the sheepdogs lie on the warm tarmac in between the working utes.

Despite appearances, it's a family pub, with bad language strictly forbidden and a brightly-decorated kid's playroom out the back with TV and VCR for a mid-trip break from the parents. There are also quite a few walls of memorabilia and historical record on the walls of the pub, so it's quite worth having a walk around. We were even able to buy a few bars of the locally-made hand-made soaps.

On the road again, you'll climb through some spectacular eroded sandstone spires and glimpse some wild hidden valleys to the north as you pass the Ettrema Wildnerness east of Nerriga. It's almost literally all downhill once you pass Sassafrass, but you should take a few minutes to pull over at the scenic Tianjara Falls, which has a magnificent lookout over a gorge worn away over millions of years by the patient waters of Tianjara Creek.

Push on now, and turn left onto Braidwood Road towards Nowra Airport, as this will save you quite a bit of time on the approach to Nowra and the Princes Highway. Once back with the main flow of traffic stop in at the South Coast's most eccentric pub, the Berry Pub, for a gourmet pub dinner before making your way home. Watch out for the many fixed speed cameras, both before and after Berry, but particularly the one as you enter Berry, where it goes quite rapidly from 100km/hr to 60km/hr.