Saddle up for a virtual horse riding ecotour and discover Main Creek the best way! How? On a Topline Park horse, of course! Take a Cyber Tour and explore the trails at Topline Park...

Hi! I'm Lisa, your guide. Our cyber tour is a half day ride with a Gourmet Picnic lunch, taking about 3 hours (in reality, not in cyber space!) It's a tour for riders of average fitness and you need not be an experienced rider to ride with us.

First, we need to match you with a horse. If you'd like to choose your own horse, check out the Horse Paddock. I like to match riders with horses to suit their build and riding experience, so when booking your tour, please let me know a little about yourself...

For first-time riders, I recommend Nugget, Tommy or Rocky. For more experienced riders; Jade, Patch or Jake. Bailey, Trigger, Roly and Tosca are wonderful mounts for young riders.

After fitting you out with a riding helmet, you can get to know your horse on the ground as we adjust stirrups and discuss safe horse handling and the trail we're riding on today. Pass items that you don't want to carry with you (like sun screen or cameras) to our ground crew. They will bring your gear to the lunch time meeting place in the four wheel drive.

Lead your horse into the arena and, after a short talk about important things like how to control your horse and balance yourself, mount up!

We help riders mount, using a mounting block if needed. Some of the horses like Jake and Wally are quite tall!

Establish communication with your mount in the arena and polish your riding skills with assistance from our guides.

Here are Robyn and Wendy getting to know their mounts, Mazkaa and Red, before the tour.

In the photo, Robyn, a novice rider, is getting to know Mazkaa. I'm standing next to Patch (the white horse), giving Robyn a "tip" about turning him… Once everyone feels comfortable, we head out onto the trails! If you look behind us, you can see where we'll be starting the tour. We ride through the paddock and turn into the wattle trees, onto the "bellbird trail", (just beside Robyn's left arm in the photo…)

As we ride into the shelter of the wattle trees, the chiming sound gets louder, "ching, ching…" Look up to see little green birds darting overhead. They are bell miners and make the loud chiming sounds. We pause in a clearing to look back at the first of the views over Main Creek, then continue climbing into the forest.

Even though it's a fine, warm day the forest is cool. Here we turn onto the "old road", (an old logging road, which was also used to transport cream by draft horse sled from a dairy) to climb the ridge. I call out "Look!"… A big, dark goanna has run across the track in front of Patch and climbs a tree next to us. He peers down as we ride past.

Here's a good place to trot. You shorten your reins and give your horse a gentle leg aid. He pops easily into trot. Relax and go with the motion of the pace. We trot gently along, before turning onto the "cliff trail". This trail winds along through sclerophyll forest, above a rain forested gully. You look out to one side and down on the tops of great trees. Along this trail are geebungs (a "bush food" tree) and the koalas have left their signatures (little scratches) on the trees.

We're getting close to our picnic spot now...

Continue the Tour or return to the Home Paddock.