Begin high and dry. Armidale sits on the New England tablelands, and the first stretch of Waterfall Way runs across open, elevated country where the air is thin and clear. The drama is hidden until you reach it. A short detour off the route leads to Wollomombi Falls in Oxley Wild Rivers National Park, where the river simply disappears over the rim of a vast gorge. The falls drop some 220 metres into the chasm and were once believed to be the highest in Australia, a place where the tableland abruptly reveals how far it has to fall to reach the sea.

As the road descends it passes through gorge country and into rainforest that is older than almost anything around it. Seven national parks lie on or near the route, and three of them are World Heritage-listed as part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, surviving fragments of the forests that once covered the southern supercontinent. Near Ebor, the Guy Fawkes River pours over Ebor Falls in two tiers. Cathedral Rock National Park raises its great granite tors beside the road, and at Point Lookout in New England National Park the escarpment falls away in a single breathtaking sweep toward the coast.

The waterfalls that give the road its name cluster around Dorrigo, where a high, rain-soaked plateau sheds its water over the escarpment edge. Dorrigo National Park, another piece of World Heritage Gondwana rainforest, holds cascades like Crystal Shower Falls and Tristania Falls along its walking tracks, and its Skywalk reaches out over the canopy toward the sea. The town of Dorrigo, cool and green and one of the wettest places in the state, makes the natural pause point, the high green heart of the drive before the final descent.

West of the village of Thora the road tips into its most demanding section, a steep 14-kilometre run of tight bends as the tablelands give way to the coastal lowlands. Take it slowly. Overtaking is limited on the Dorrigo Range, kangaroos drift onto the road at dusk, and storms have been known to wash sections away entirely. The reward is the change you can feel in the air: cool mountain damp warming into coastal humidity, rainforest opening into riverside farmland around the artsy town of Bellingen, and finally the Pacific at Coffs Harbour. Allow two and a half hours of driving, then ignore that figure entirely, because the whole point is to stop at the falls.