The Month-Long Week

I can hardly remember where we last left off. The past week has been so full of travels that it feels like several weeks have passed. D.D. Brown continues to do well, though she definitely needs to see a mechanic soon regarding her radiator. Luckily we haven’t overheated since the first day. As for us, we’re adjusting quite well to the carpacking (I can’t bring myself to call it “backpacking”) lifestyle. Both Pete and I have minimalist tendencies and enjoy simplifying as much as possible. If we can’t think of a use for carrying around an extra fork, we get rid of it. Much like backpacking, anything in excess of the basics becomes dead weight. It’s surprising what a big difference one little adjustment can make when you’re working with a space as confined as a Falcon.

We’ve given the car a thorough cleaning and made some slight home improvements, the best of which was an upgraded mattress. The previous mattress, if you can call it that, was about two inches of foam that was so thin that I woke up feeling like I’d slept on a board. Our new bed is about 5 inches thick. We purchased it in Kempsey at a discount furniture store. The bored saleswoman who sold it to us was convinced that we were British and kept warning us not to sleep at rest areas because of the young British guy who’d been killed at one several years ago. “Don’t you remember when that happened?” she kept prodding. I didn’t want to correct her as to our origins yet again, and I didn’t have the heart to explain to her that Australian news doesn’t have much of a global impact, so we smiled politely through her warnings and left as swiftly as we could manage.

We haven’t been sleeping in any more rest areas, those are a refuge of the desperate, and we have not been lacking for wonderfully hidden-away national parks with oceanfront vistas populated by kangaroos and a handful of other campers. Because it’s only the first week of spring, it’s still off-peak as far as tourism goes, which has been great for us. In the past few days we’ve stayed at Point Plomer Campground in the Limeburner’s Creek Nature Reserve, where we awoke to three kangaroos feasting on grass, two of which were carrying little joeys (photos to come); Arakoon National Park, in the surf town of South West Rocks, located in Hat Head National Park; Boorkoom Campground in Yuraygir National Park; and for the past two nights at Woody Head Campground in Bundjalung National Park, a destination spot for “oldies” driving caravans.

As you may have noticed, or already known, Australia is full of cookey-sounding names. Australians are also fond of shortening words or adding “ies” to the end of a noun to make it sound cuter. For example, breakfast becomes “brekky,” old people becomes “oldies,” bottles are called “stubbies,” while cans are referred to as “tinnies.” There are all kinds of silly abbreviations for words that make communication difficult.

One of the highlights of our trip so far was our night and day at Point Plomer, which was located on the beach. Other than seeing kangaroos up close (they are surprisingly docile and unafraid of humans), we walked up a short track (Australian for “path”) to a cliff overlooking the Pacific. From here we saw several pods of black dolphins and a whole bunch of whales. At first we could only identify the whales by their trumpeting spouts and the classic curves of their tales sinking between the waves; but after much patience one of them actually breached, and we saw its entire body as it heaved its bulk above the water several times in a row. Other animals of interest were a large rodent-like thing that was hopping around our campsite (the Australian opossum?) and a very large goanna, an intimidating lizard (about three-feet long and nearly half a foot tall) that decided to sun himself in our campsite yesterday.

Next stop, the tiny town of Nimbin.