Day 57 (Brisbane to Ballina, 231 km)

Christmas Eve, we left Brisbane around 9:30 AM for our drive to Ballina. We originally thought we would go to Gold Coast, one of the biggest tourist destinations on the east coast. Traffic was very heavy. As we worked out way through the traffic, it seemed like less-and-less of a good idea to go to a tourist area during one of Australia’s biggest tourist holidays at the beginning of the summer school break.

We had already planned to make one other stop on our way at Mynion Falls. If you've been following our blog to this point, or many of our other posts on Facebook, you may have figured out that waterfalls are among our favorite natural attractions to visit. I have a strong inclination to wax philosophical about water being the substance of life. About it being a fundamental building block of…blibber-blabber.

It's possible that those are factors. I think people have been trying to figure out what makes something beautiful and appealing as long as there has been art and written expression. Mynion Falls are gorgeous. Set high in the hills, they are accessible only through a myriad of twists and turns of narrow, often one-lane roads. The forest is dense and green with regular warning signs about the potential for koalas on the roads. Being the kind of tourists who are ga-ga for koalas, Faith nearly got herself sick watching the trees, and I looked up every chance I could take while driving. There weren't many on such a circuitous route.

Minyon Falls are on Repentance Creek. The drop is about a hundred meters down to a pool off a horseshoe-shaped ridge of sheer cliffs. It is possible to take a 4 km hike down to the pool. We didn't have the time. I walked the concrete steppingstones across the creek and then about two hundred meters along the south trail to see if it might be possible for better photos of the falls. It would be...if a fellow was interested in being nominated for, and likely winning a Darwin Award, effectively eliminating his genes from the pool in an indecorous splatter. Yeah, no thanks!

It was a lovely drive up and an equally lovely drive back down into the valley. We finished our drive into Ballina and checked into our motel. As I was reading about Ballina, one of the suggestions for things to do was to go snorkeling in Shaws Bay. Shaws Bay is an isolated tidal lake. It has a tiny inlet on the East that lets water in during high tide. 

I left my wetsuit with Faith for about 30 seconds as I walked into the water. Then I walked back out and donned my wetsuit. This definitely was not the far north where the water approaches 80° f. I have the coolest little 1.5 mm wetsuit. It is lightweight (super important when packing for 81 days of travel) and works well for water down into the high 60s or low 70s. It was almost too warm in Thailand. It is a full body wet suit when coupled with my booties, gloves, and hoodie. I got it because this is stinger season up in the north of Australia where they get the deadly box jelly that I talked about in a prior post. And I knew I was going to want to do a lot of snorkeling. 

It was late afternoon by the time I started snorkeling Shaw's Bay. Being so isolated from the ocean's flow, and being a holiday with loads of people, the bay had been churned up such that visibility was maybe a half a meter or less. That's like 20 inches. I snorkeled for about 20 minutes staying mostly in the shallows where I can see the bottom at less than 2 feet deep. It is a super creepy feeling snorkeling in deep water with virtually no visibility. Nightmarish in a way. It has been that way ever since I saw Jaws in the theater when I was about 9 years old. So, I paddled around in the shallows. Until I snorkeled right over that top of what at the moment seemed like a ginormous stingray less than a foot beneath my fully submerged face.

Good Lord did that startle the bejesus out of me. The online blurb about Shaws Bay mentioned that you can swim with big fish. Up to that point I was thinking it was a ridiculous exaggeration. Wow was I wrong. I could have touched that stingray with a half-bent arm it was so close. And it didn't move as I swam right over it. They are apparently accustomed to us crazy humans swimming with them. I, however, was not accustomed to swimming over the top of them at half a meter. And I definitely didn't want to have a Steve Erwin moment with one of those darn things stinging me.

I backed way off of it, checked to make sure I had not soiled myself, and took a few deep breaths. Then I screwed up the courage to go looking for it again to see if I could get a picture or two. Just close enough for a picture, not for a Darwin Award.

I found that one, or another within a few minutes. Unfortunately, as I noted above the visibility was abysmal. And having only my cell phone in a little plastic zippy, the photos I did get were unrecognizable. So, while this is a story about fish, it isn't a fish story, if you take my meaning. That was the biggest darn fish I have ever snorkeled with, though I would hazard a guess that its water wings were less than two feet across. That's pretty small for some species of rays.

In the midst of all this crazy stingray stuff, Faith was chilling out on the sand, reading her Kindle and watching the paddle boarders. I'm sure I detected an ornery smirk out of her when I told her about the ray. Sort of like, "Serves you right for going out there and paddling around while I'm stuck here on the beach." Just kidding. She encouraged me to go. "Get! Go! You're driving me crazy." Just kidding again. Sort of. Ouch! Quit hitting me. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

After I got cleaned up from snorkeling, we found a Thai / Chinese place that was open on Christmas Eve and had a nice, easy dinner. The restaurant had Christmas music playing which was a treat. 

Day 58 (Ballina to Port Macquarie, 457 km)

So, there is this thing in Australia. This big thing. This really big thing. Actually, it is something like 30 really big things. Apparently, there is a tourist route you can take in order to do selfies with giant things. Like the boot we did a couple weeks ago. Only this time it was a giant prawn. Yes, Ballina is the proud home of the giant prawn.

And between Ballina and Port Macquarie, right along the motorway is the giant banana. Alright, let’s be specific. It is The Big Banana. The Big Banana is part of The Big Banana Fun Park, where you, too, can ride rides inside of a banana just north of Coffs Harbour. Not sure about riding rides in the banana. I’m just speculating based on the name of the park. And the big banana out front.

Our drive that day, beyond just prawns and bananas, started with an unscheduled stop at Emerald Beach. I was driving along and caught a glimpse of an island. It was all alone and lonely. Aptly named, Solitary Island is a short distance out in the Coral Sea from Emerald Beach. It looked like it wanted some company. Having a car and no particular deadline, we slammed on the brakes, swerved left, smashed the accelerator to the floor and raced to the shore. Or, we put on the signal and made a leisurely jaunt to the coast for some fantastic pictures. We even managed to find one of those noisy little cicadas. They are smaller here in Australia than in Texas and seem to work hard to make up for their small size in their large volume.

From Emerald Beach, we continued on our planned route up to the Forest Sky Pier. Up in the Ulidarra National Park is a lookout that does resemble a pier on the coast. It juts out over the forest and provides a superb panorama of the coast south of Emerald Beach.

A short way down the hill from the Forest Sky Pier is Korora Lookout. While lacking the wow factor of the Sky Pier’s architecture, the northerly view of the Solitary Islands was every bit as impressive if not more so. And Korora Lookout included a Gumbaynggirr indigenous tribe’s dream story about Gumgali the giant goanna. Gumgali escaped a group of hunters by burrowing into the hillside below Korora Lookout and emerging down by the sea.  

From Korora Lookout, we made our way to the Waterfall Way and up to Dangar Falls. We drove the Way for several miles and started to mock the name since there were no waterfalls along Waterfall Way. But the Way vindicated itself after maybe 40 minutes of twists and turns. We saw two waterfalls along the route, Newell Falls and Sherrard Falls. Both were wittle bitty baby waterfalls that only grow up to be big daddy and mommy waterfalls when they get one of those crazy rainstorms we drove through on our way down from Cairns.

Dangar Falls spills into a lovely bowl-shaped pool surrounded by rain forest high in the hills. It was an easy 300-meter walk along a pathway with about a 30 meter drop down to the pool from the top. I saw folks walking back up with their swimming trunks. So…I went swimming in a waterfall pool in the Dorrigo National Park. And I got to annoy the heck out of Faith by repeatedly calling the town of Dorrigo, Dorito. Now, now, it was an honest mistake. There is no way I would deliberately call it that just to poke the bear and see if she would growl. She did growl. She didn’t roar. I don’t think I tried hard enough.

After Dangar Falls, we drove to our B&B in Port Macquarie where we met our host, Glenn. We had a nice intro conversation and then went to see the town. Port Macquarie is a lovely coastal town at the sea mouth of the Hastings River. We had some Indian food for dinner. By the time we left, it was getting on toward sunset.

We headed over to the Tacking Point Lighthouse and immediately decided that it was our spot for sunset photos. Along with everybody else in the city, the county and the greater New South Wales state. Maybe not quite that many. But enough to take every parking space and to jam the roundabout into a standstill. I dropped Faith off, backed up for a u-turn, parked four or five blocks away and hustled back so I wouldn’t miss the sunset.

I was not disappointed. Just….wow! What a lovely spot. I believe I have mentioned this a couple of times. Seattle is breathtakingly beautiful. The eastern coast of Australia is equally beautiful. San Antonio…is okay. It is nice. Isn’t that what folks are supposed to say when they go on a date that is just sort of, meh? “It was nice. I had a nice time. He/She was nice.”

Day 59 (Port Macquarie to Soldier’s Point on Nelson Bay, 246 km)

We started the morning with a scenic drive that was not scenic at all. It was, in fact, monotonous and boring. Fortunately, it was only about 20 minutes of the drive. From the map, it looked like a beach-front road. It was more a wetlands road surrounded by scrubby brush just tall enough to block our view of the coast for the entire drive. The rest of the drive made up for it.

The scenery in Australia continues to remind me of Washington state in the Puget Sound area. It has beautiful, tree-covered mountains all along one side and a body of sea on the other. Of course, the sea goes on for thousands of miles in Australia where it is just a few score miles of the Puget Sound in Western Washington.

The Washington Coast and all along the Oregon coast, the mountains are too close to be a proper comparison. The Australian Barrier Mountains sit back from the coast for the most part between 15 and around 50 miles along the stretches we have driven. That leaves an abundance of room for farmland, cities, towns, rivers, lakes, koalas and kangaroos.

Oh, and for monitor lizards. Great, big, beautiful monitor lizards called goannas. Like 3/4 of a meter long (nearly three feet). Just walking along the side of the freeway. Just walking along like it was a regular thing. Just right there. Of course, I was going over 100 km/h. No camera to be had. You might be tempted to imagine this to be a fish tale. The big one that got away. Check them out. They grow up to two meters in length. That’s over six feet my skeptical friends. This one was just a little lady or fellow. A wee little pup. A spring-chicken. In fact, it probably eats spring-chickens.

We made one stop along the way to our next B&B. We stopped at the National Motorcycle Museum in Nabiac. 1065 motorcycles from 1909 to the present. Just…wow! They even had a Honda 70 that looked virtually identical to the one that my brother, Steve, had when we were kids. Mine was red. His was yellow. This one was yellow/gold. It had mud flaps, taillights and blinkers. Ours did not. Otherwise, it was spot-on. Really took me back to when I was 10-years old riding my motorcycle. Such good fun.

We checked into our B&B in Soldiers Point near Nelson Bay just before 4 PM. Then we zipped over to Fly Point for some snorkeling. Yes, I got to snork again (yes, I know that isn’t a word and it bugs Faith just the perfect amount to be ornery fun but not so much that I get smacked). The highlights were a few flathead fish that were about 6-feet long and probably weight 100kg each (now that’s a fish story in case you wanted to see the difference). Maybe they were closer to 18 inches. But they were big. Man eaters. Hey, they could if the man was one of those little green army men we played with as kids!

At any rate, it was good fun snorkeling. It was cold. I’m not sure if it was the sea water or the river water. Some of the water was close to 80 degrees. The rest was closer to 70, if not just a touch cooler. I could have used my wetsuit. I took a gamble. It was fine, but I couldn’t snorkel as long as I wanted because I started getting chilled.

We went to have American food for dinner and the diner was closed. So, we had salad and pasta at a nearby hotel. Then we capped off the evening and this leg of the trip with some amazing views at the Gan Gan Hill Lookout.

- See you in Sydney -