Saturday, 3rd June 2000

For the third day in a row, Iwoke up before sunrise. OK, it isn't hard when the sun rises at 7:15 but this is me, who hates getting out of bed (at least when it involves going to work). I felt a twinge of regret at leaving Merimbula. It is quite pretty there and I had hardly explored it. Most of the time I was out of town, looking for and/or at national parks. I said goodbye to my new friends, Babet (from the Netherlands), Patrick (from Reunion Island) and Melissa and her daughter Madison. Melissa just so happens to work a bit over a kilometre from where I live....small world.

The drive back down the coast was somewhat more leisurely. I checked out Pambula Beach. It has one of the largest lawn bowls clubs I have ever seen, and as I drove around, I saw quite a number of the locals, who seemed to be a fit and healthy, if rather old, bunch. The local caravan park is a hangout for the local kangaroos (sorry, no pics - they are roos, ok? You are big. You know what they look like!).

I drove past my next intended stop - the signposting was not at all obvious and I think I was hassling a slowster at the time. I enjoy my driving and like to do the speed I choose (within legal limits cos I like my licence) rather than the 80kmh limit imposed by some cow cocky (farmer) wandering down the road to visit old Bart or whoever. Oh well.

I had expected the next intended stop would involve lots of driving on dirt roads. Huzzah, the main road into Ben Boyd National Park was a lovely new sealed road! I drove up to Boyd's Tower, an amazing structure if ever there was one. Apparently some 160 years ago, a chap by the name of Boyd was determined to build a city to rival Sydney. He set up a town (cunningly named Boydtown) with industries based on agriculture and whaling. The tower was built out on the point of Twofold Bay and acted at a lookout post for whale spotting (or to see Old Tom, a killer whale who with his pack would herd a whale into the bay where it could be harpooned by the whalers. Once they had the whale bailed up in the bay, one of the killer whales would alert the whalers. The killer whales' reward were the lips and tongue of the dead whale). Doesn't sound like much, does this tower? Only the stone, yes stone, that the tower was built of was carted from Sydney, and it is several stories high and built out of good, solid, beautifully shaped stones. Have a look at the pictures below. Boyd must have been a loonie building a tower like that in the middle of nowhere. He eventually went broke (not surprising) and ran off to the Californian gold rush.

I drove back to the Davidson Whaling Station, a heritage area. No, they don't perform whaling there any more and haven't for many years. The access road was as rough as all b*ggery. Some of the corrugations were so bad that I lost all traction when only doing 20kmh. It was like the car was bouncing on a pogo stick rather than having four wheels. The station itself was sorta interesting but I don't reckon it was worth the trip down that road!

Greencape Lighthouse looked pretty, so little chops and I endured another 21km of dirt road travel to get there. It would have been worth about hmm up to 10km of roads like we travelled, but not 42 on the round trip. Plus it cost $6 to tour the lighthouse - not jolly likely! The lighthouse was very picturesque and the coast amazing. More cliffs and huge wavew thundering in. Boom! Crash! They didn't warn me that the Pulpit Rock track was much more suited to 4WD vehicles (SUVs or recreational vehicles for you Americans), but it didn't take long to figure that one out. The track was marked by regular "up and overs" where the grader had pushed the gradings off the road. They were like enormous speed humps, only the rest of the road was so rocky that you couldn't do more than a crawl anyway. The City Rock track was much better - lots of up and overs still but the road was excellent for a packed sand track. City Rock, a fairly flat rock platform about 30m across, wasn't really worthwhile - pity cos the track was good and I had hobbled there on a really really sore ankle.

Little chops and I bounced and rattled our way back to civilised roads. I stopped not far up the road where the NSW forestry mob had thinned the trees out. The undergrowth was superb, as was the roadside flora - banksias, wattles and heaths were all in flower (Epacris impressa being the standout, in red, salmon and magenta - much brighter than the whites and pinks we get around Melbourne). I won't bore you with many pics, but if you want to see more, email me, or just crawl around the .jpgs in my home directory.... I hope they, the forestry mob not my jpegs ;-), don't set fire to the bush repeatedly so that the undergrowth dies off and they are left with a near monoculture of gum trees.

Then I set off down the road again, over hill and dale, through forests, across rivers and into Victoria. Picture time! Hello my lovely home state! Pity that I missed the shot pretty much entirely and made it fuzzy. hence the mockery that you see above - I think I should do a web page of all the failures of pics I have taken from fast-moving vehicles...there'd be a few....

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Dr Bunny's trip to Merimbula and Mallacoota/email me/last modified 30th June 2000.