1995/11 Australia trip - Myall Lakes |
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Next morning, Saturday, we drove a little way north to Wyrrabalong national park, which is a forest growing on sand dunes between the sea and Tuggerah Lake. We spent the morning hiking around the trails, some of which we had to fight our way through, trying to guess what all the different plants were. Gum trees and banksia and palms we could identify but everything else was new to us.
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Most of the birds were so high that we couldn’t identify them. We’ll have to wait and look at the video tape I made. One bird made a high pitched whirring noise followed by a Star Wars phaser blast. In the absence of any other ornithological information, we named that one the splat bird.
We saw one couple, but otherwise we were on our own. Then it was back to the road, heading north through Newcastle (yes, and Swansea and Cardiff). They haven’t just inherited the English names, but also English roundabouts, dozens of them. It’s just like driving around Crawley! But now that I’m remembering to go around them on the left, the same way as everybody else, they aren’t so bad.
We headed for Myall Lakes national park, another park squeezed between the sea and some big lakes. This is an out-of-the-way spot with little traffic so it was a good opportunity for Sandie to practice some driving. We pulled into the first campsite to find that it was much like some of our parks. You find a campsite, pay the man, and search for the bathrooms (by nose). This campsite was a lot different, hemmed in by forest. We were listening to the bugs and frogs and birds instead of the surf.
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Myall Lakes (3.50) |  |
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We still had a few hours before dark, so we set off to look at Seal Rocks at the other end of the park. We took our neighbour’s advice and avoided the road that was on our map, as he thought it was now impassable. Instead, we took what the locals call the “punt”, which is a chain ferry that holds five or six cars, chugging across a narrows in the lake.
There was a resounding clang as we drove onto the punt and another as we drove off! The camper has two-inch steel “bull bars” wrapped around front and back, intended to ward off cattle, and another steel cage which covers the lower half of the windscreen. So, the bull bars weren’t damaged and we continued. By agreement, we are not supposed to drive anywhere that isn’t tarmac’d, but as soon as we were away from the punt, the road turned to rock and gravel, and Sandie was weaving between the potholes. The road down to Seal Rocks soon turned to gravel too, so we gave up worrying. The village was much like Cornwall or the Isle of Man, with a sandy beach squeezed between two high rocky headlands, and fishing boats on the beach.
After clambering around on the rocks until dark, we tried to take the closed road back to camp as the punt would be closed and the only other route was 50 miles extra by way of little places called Tea Gardens and Hawk’s Nest. Well that road went from bad to worse, but it was all to no avail, as it turned out to be only a route into a back-country campground anyway. So it was back down the road and take the long route. This experience is not unusual, as the Aussies don’t seem to bother much with road signs, or quote road numbers, or distances, all those little clues for where you might be.
Next morning, Sunday, we thought we’d take another wander in the forest, this time through this park’s swampy areas, which were squishy, but open so that we’d see more wildlife. Some spectacular giant red gums, and lots of other plants we couldn’t identify. We heard and then saw a kookaburra.
We’d started this walk off in cloud and then wished we had hats as it got so hot, and then we got drowned in a downpour, about two miles out from the camper. We managed to keep the cameras dry but nothing else, so we got very soggy, and then gave up on the walk and headed back. In the middle of the next downpour, we ran into a similarly soggy Aussie couple, dressed as we were for the sunshine. “Lovely day for a walk, mate”.