Nobody builds a monument to a creek crossing, and Gingers Creek is not one. What you get is the landscape itself, which is reason enough to stop.
This is the Great Dividing Range at its eastern edge, where the plateau breaks into steep spurs and gullies that run towards the sea. The vegetation changes by the kilometre. Up on the flatter ground you ride past open eucalypt woodland, tall blackbutt and stringybark with grassy understorey, and as the road drops, it enters pockets of subtropical rainforest, ferns the size of umbrellas, strangler figs, vines hanging like cables. After rain the whole slope drips, and the air smells of wet leaf mould and eucalyptus. The big national parks of this part of New South Wales, such as Werrikimbe and Oxley Wild Rivers, are close by and hold koalas, wallabies, lyrebirds and some of the most remote bushland in the state.
The riding is where the Oxley Highway earns its reputation. This is the section where the road descends the escarpment, with a long sequence of medium and tight bends, some of them blind, climbing and dropping over creeks and spurs. The surface is generally decent but patchy, and in shady corners it can stay damp and covered in leaf litter and bark long after the sun has come out. Logging trucks use the road, and they take their share of the middle, so a hard-braking left-hander behind one of them is something to anticipate rather than find out the hard way. At dawn and dusk, wallabies and kangaroos graze at the verges, and wombats and cattle turn up where you least expect them.
The sure places to fill up are Walcha to the west and the towns near the coast, with little in between, and it pays to leave with a full tank and a bottle of water. Weather matters: mist and fog collect on the escarpment in the cool months, and summer thunderstorms can drop a lot of water fast. Autumn and spring are the most reliable seasons. Pull over where there is room, switch off, and listen: whipbirds crack across the valley and the creek runs invisibly below.