Bateman's Bay and surrounds

From Queanbeyan to Bateman's Bay only takes about an hour and a half or so, except I stopped at Bungedore cos I had heard it has good arts and crafts and, more interestingly for me, there is a quite good photographer of landscapes out there. It would help if I could remember his name. Michael Scott Lees. That is it! After oohing and ahhing at his work for about an hour, I finally chose a little picture that I could squeeze on my desk at work.

The plains around Canberra were looking a bit bleak - it being well into autumn and all. They aren't perfectly flat, having many rolling hills, but even that feature reminded me scarily of Wisconsin.

I arrived at Bateman's Bay just in time to get to the info centre. As I mentioned before, I had cunningly not brought the YHA book with me, which meant that I had no idea where the YHA was. It was lucky that I had booked ahead because a big festival was happening in BB that weekend, and I was told that I had gotten the last bed at the hostel. As it turned out, there was me and another female in the female dorm that night, with six empty beds. Dunno where the others slept, but if it was with their boyfriends in the male dorm, the beds would have been a bit squishy....

After locating the YHA, I went in search of a good sunset shot and also an internet cafe. After three whole days offline, I needed a fix of email. Alas, BB has no internet cafes! But I did get a couple of nice sunset shots.

There wasn't a huge amount to do at BB at night so I went to bed early and got up early (I get up before dawn when I am on holiday - why can't I do that when I have to go to work?), then drove down the coast aways. I had heard that there was a very scenic spot at a place called Guerilla Bay.

These are some of the pretties I found along the way:

beaches and headlands	a secret bay (?Lilli Pilli?)	two echinoderms
long beach	surf beach	roos
different angle on secret bay	littoral forest	headland
near Bateman's Bay	rocks	teatrees

Along the way, I passed by many bays and beaches with such names as Lilli Pilli Beach, Mosquito Bay (wonder why it was called that - for both its size and the little bitey insect?), Pretty Point, Malua Bay...

I finally found Guerilla Bay, and it was sorta different to what I had expected. The pictures had shown this misty romantic bay at sunrise. I got there at about 9:30, a bit after sunrise ;-), and found a sunny bay with an island to one side of it. Quite impressive to look at but not what I had expected. I waded out to the island - at low tide, a sandbar is not quite passable to those who want to keep their shoes dry. Me and my trusty tevas have no fear of getting wet, so I sloshed out to the island and climbed up. The only photo I have from there is "rocks".

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