Crossing into New South Wales

Today it is my turn to write a guest post for Fem's blog. We are sitting here at a campground in Ballina, about 100 km south of the Queensland border. We have traveled about 3000 km sofar. The kids are doing well without their gadgets, having to cope with limited comfort, kind of boot camp at times. The mattresses are thin, the food is basic, tents are small (and hot), and the days are long and hot. We wake up at about 5 am, usually woken by cockatoos or kookaburras, bats, frogs or whatever wildlife is around that day. And if it isn't the wildlife, it is the sun which soon turns our tent into a sauna. But the country side is amazing, the fauna unbelievable and the weather is okay. We do have a bit of rain, but the good part is that the temperatures are bearable. Up north, when we visited the tropical rainforests, the temperature was above 30 something and the humidity high. Now the temperatures are still in their high twenties, but much more bearable.

We traveled south from the gold coast, through subtropical rainforest and beautiful scenery, with several waterfalls along the way. We hiked some of the tracks to viewpoints and waterfalls. The Natural Bridge was very impressive.

Soon after that we crossed the border with NSW, which was marked with security cameras. The clock now has to go an hour ahead, which will give us more daylight at the end of the day. This will come handy as we are traveling low key and only have a tiny torch. The kids are relieved to have an extra hour in the morning as the sun rises an hour later, meaning the birds keep quiet for another hour! Up in the Daintree is would be dark at 7 pm, light at 5 am. Down here, in north NSW, it is dark at about 8 pm.

Camiel reckoned the hinterland is Jackson's KingKong country. He kept looking for that gorilla to jump out of the bush. Back on the coast, the beaches along this part of the coast are postcard pictures. Turquoise coloured water, blue skies and golden sand. There are surfers everywhere. It is also a lot busier, this is the holiday playground for Sydney and Brisbane.


Some of the wildlife we have seen

The scenery and wildlife is absolutely amazing. I can't get over the amount of animals we see every day. On our random bush walks we see wallabies or koalas, goannas or lizards, all kind of birds and parrots and even owls, and the number of flying foxes (bats) goes into the thousands. Frogs and turtles are everywhere and we have even seen snakes. The noise in the bush is sometimes deafening, there must be thousands of cicadas up in the trees. The best animal spotter is Esmee, she spots the tiniest creature or the most camouflaged animal. We are still on the lookout for the extremely hard to spot platypus. We will keep you updated.

-Anja