Last week in Australia

Since I am so behind on my postings, I will try and finish up quickly.

The weather was not great in Queensland, so we decided to head back to New South Wales where we had really liked the beaches. Friday March 20 we drove 600 kilometers and stayed at a campground outside Nambour on what is known as the Sunshine coast. It poured rain on and off all night. The next day we drove past Brisbane, pronounced Brisbin, without stopping. Here it is thru the car window.


We then took the coast road over to the town of Surfers Paradise. Think Miami Beach, except that I have never been to Miami. This is called the Gold Coast and it is 20 or more kilometers of high rises along a gorgeous wide beach with surfers and surfing schools and swimmers alternating down the coast. So we strolled along and thoroughly enjoyed the scene, and then ate lunch at an Indian restaurant. We camped that night at the south end of this stretch of beach in Burleigh Heads. The headland itself is still reasonably undisturbed bush, so we took the nature trail back around to the beach and town for an evening walk. We discovered that hundreds of lorikeets like to settle in the pines along the beach at night. The sound was deafening! It would make a great movie sound for an alien invasion.

Before continuing south the next day, we took a side trip to Springbrook National Park. Twenty million years ago, this area, mostly just south of the border into New South Wales, was once a huge shield volcano. It has now eroded down to a circular set of ridges around Mount Warning, the highest point in eastern Australia. Here are two view pictures.






















Finally we got to the end of the road at what is called Best of All Lookout. Here is what we saw.
Luckily the internet gave us a picture of what we would have seen on a clear day. If you click on the picture, it will enlarge.

On the path to the lookout, there is a grove of Antarctic beech trees. It the fog and dripping forest, they are very eerie. Of course they haven’t grown in the Antarctic for millions of years, but they still exist in a few pockets in Australia. They recently discovered another tree that was thought to have gone extinct millions of years ago in a deep river gorge just a few miles outside of Sydney. We saw an example of that in the Botanical Gardens in Sydney. Don’t know if they are trying to grow these beeches anywhere else.

So after these wonderful views we continued south and returned to our favorite spot, Emerald Beach for four nights and three full days. I have to say that this north end of NSW is the prettiest countryside that we drove through. The mountains are close enough to the sea to form a lovely backdrop, and the hills and vegetation are very inviting.

I have already talked about Emerald Beach, so I will just say that these days we hiked around the beaches and headlands and swam in the ocean and the pool. We got up at dawn two mornings to see the sunrise. The first morning it was clear enough to see a really brilliant green flash as the sun peeped over the horizon. I have had trouble seeing this at sunset in the Caribbean, although everyone talks about it. I think it may be easier to see at dawn when it is the first light than at sunset when your eyes are semi-blinded by the sun as it goes down. We saw various mobs of kangaroos feeding in the evening on the headlands, and a foot long iguana on the trail to the beach. We spent one day in Coff’s Harbour, once the banana growing center of Australia. The Botanical Garden was pleasant to walk through, and they have converted a WW2 bunker into the Bunker Cartoon Gallery, which had an exhibit of women’s art from around the world. Wednesday March 25 was Ron’s birthday, so we had a gourmet dinner at the fancy restaurant at Emerald Beach.

Ironically, although we had great weather, we read the next week in the newspaper that Coffs Harboour got 44.5 centimeters of rain and the Bellingen river flooded at 8 meters!

We decided for our last full day in Australia, we would return to Sydney, so Thursday we drove 550 K to a camper park right in a nature reserve in a north suburb. The people at he campground sold us an all day train/ferry/bus pass, so we walked to the train station and arrived downtown with one switch. We decided to go to the zoo first, which is a pleasant 12 minute ferry ride. In particular, we wanted to see those iconic Australian animals that we hadn’t seen in the wild, like koalas, dingoes, Tasmanian devil, and platypuses. The zoo also had a number of bird enclosures, although it is still hard to spot a lot of birds in there, even though they had signs around with pictures to help. So here are a lot of zoo pictures.

We had a lot of fun and ended by riding the cable car back to the ferry dock. When we got back to Sydney, we decided it was too late to go to a museum, so we grabbed a quick lunch and took a ferry that went all the way up the Parramatta River that Sydney is on. It was like having a free cruise, since we were using our day pass. When we got back two hours later, we took a different ferry to Darling Harbour, where we had wine and an appetizer at a fancy Indian restaurant called Zaafran’s, although it’s pronounced saffron. Then we walked back to Central Rail Station and took the train back to our campground. We felt we got full use of our all day passes!

Saturday, March 28, we had to return the camper van, but we had time in the morning for a side trip to the town of Parramata to take a picture of the gravesite of an early Australian missionary, another research interest of Ron’s. This also let us avoid the harbor tunnel or bridge, and may have been easier driving. Anyway, we got the van back in good time to collect our other bags, move clothes around, and get to the airport with a comfortable margin before flying out to New Zealand. The airline stewardesses even told us that they were turning as many lights off in the plane cabin as they could in honor of the Earth Hour at 8:30.