Good morning all and welcome back.

So, when we left off in our last blog we were anticipating departing Sydney on wednesday afternoon at 13:00 after booking the Greyhound the day before. Our luck deserted us (again!) though as, thanks to the flooding along the east coast and the subsequent road closures, our bus was cancelled until the following day, leaving us as a result with an extra day in Sydney.

First job for the day was to decide what there was for us to do that we had not done already in the week we've been here. We were up bright and early anyway and as we spotted the hint of a blue sky we decided to take a walk around the other side of Darling harbour, the side that we had not looked at when we had been previously.

As we arrived at the harbour the lovely blue sky soon clouded over into the increasingly familiar grey (which we had hoped to leave behind in the UK) as we found ourselves diving for cover as the heavens began to open.

Fan-tastic.

After debating whether to spend $50 each to visit the aquarium and the wildlife centre, mainly because they were both indoors, we opted in the end (after consulting the guidebook) to give the captive Koala's and Sharks a miss and hopefully see them in their natural environments somewhere else (the latter from the safety of a cage), instead taking a trip to the Autralia museum to learn something of the indiginous autralian culture.

On route to the museum we stopped briefly at Saint Mary's church, considering momuntarily to wait half an hour for the start of mass (out of curiosity more than anything). In the end we had a quick look round and then carried on to the museum a further ten minutes or so up the road.
We managed to gain entry to the museum for reduced rates ($8 rather than $12 each) thanks to the guy on the desk spotting my Liverpool jacket and immediately taking a liking to me as a result - bonus!

We spent around 5 hours in the museum, exploring the skeleton section as well as the big area on the Indiginous people including accounts of the racism that they have endured over the last two centuries following european collonisation of their land along with the imfamous 'lost generation'. This area in particular was really interesting and well worth the visit.

Finally we had a look around the native autralian section and the dinosaurs (my favourite) before heading out into the late afternoon sunshi...erm, rain.

One last thing we thought would be good to see was the Opera house at night when it is lit from below so after leaving the museum we headed for the harbour. as we arrived however we couldn't see the Opera house (we saw it a mile off during the day), finally noticing that we were in the right place - it hadn't moved - but it wasnt lit much at all, not from where we were looking anyway.

Disappointed but not fancying the prospect of the walk over the bridge to view it from the other side we instead headed back to the hostel for dinner and to make sure everything was packed for our expected trip tomorrow (fingers crossed).

The following morning we were up and ready bang on 9 - as the Greyhound office opened. After calling and confirming that our bus was actually leaving today (praise the lord) we got our things together and checked out before heading to the bus stop at about 12.

The bus driver turned out to be from Liverpool originally (which he informed us of after delightedly shaking my hand after spotting my Liverpool top), although he left about 40 years ago so you couldnt really detect anything resembling an accent.

After waving goodbye to Sydney we were off up the coast on our 8 hour journey to Port Macquarie. We stopped on route in Newcastle, which is about 3 hours north of Sydney, and frankly besides the beaches it didnt look too impressive so we were glad we decided against spending a night there. After one more short stop for lunch we arrived in Port Macquarie at around 8:30, the journey going a lot more quickly than we had anticipated.
The hostel we had booked for Port Macquarie was aptly named "Port Macquarie Backpackers" and the owner, Tony, picked us up from the bus depot by the time we had unloaded our bags.

The hostel had a good write up in our guide book including free internet, pickup, breakfast et cetera and as we arrived we both liked the place pretty instantly. The owner is a really nice guy (a backpacker himself) and the hostel itself is much smaller and homely than Base in Sydney.

We had originally stopped here mainly due to the road closures further north preventing us going any further, but after arriving and having some of the sights highlighted by Tony it seemed that there was a lot more to see and do here than we had thought, a full days itinary was scheduled for the following day to visit the Koala hospital (which is free) as well as checking out the port, where you can often sight dolphins and occasionally whales.

We also happened to be sharing a room with a couple of American brothers, one of whom had a very strange hobby, bordering on (as he admitted to) obsession - with fungi.
He had been out that day and found some extremely rare glow in the dark mushrooms, so as we entered the room to see him stood in the dark photographing some strange luminous objects, safe to say it was a strange sight.
I never thought id be impressed with a mushroom though.
After marvelling at the glowing fungi for ten minutes or so and realising that our simple digital cameras were not made to photograph glow-in-the-dark mushrooms we left our American roommate to it and set up camp on the beanbags in the lounge room of the hostel for the rest of the night to watch one of the DVD’s they had left in their collection (I say ‘left’ as most had evidently been stolen as we went through a good few empty cases).

The following morning we arose bright and early, mainly as we didn’t want to miss the free brekky, and after a few rounds of (free) peanut butter on toast we headed out towards the town centre for a look around.

We had heard from a guy at the hostel that there were wild dolphins in the river the day before so we wandered down to where the river met the ocean hoping they were still around. We walked all the way down to the end of the pier which was lined with huge rocks on the water side that had all been painted on, seemingly legally judging by the fact that all the rocks had been ‘defaced’ and left as they were. We did consider adding a ‘Mark and Aimee were ‘ere’ to one of them but realised we had no paint, or a pen for that matter. Unfortunately no dolphins were spotted either so we headed back into town and then began the half hour hike onto the Koala Hospital - which as an added bonus was also free!

The Australians must have ran out of money or concrete (or both) when they were constructing their paths as they seem to just stop randomly all over the place, leaving you with two options: the road or peoples gardens.

We tried the garden option initially but after being literally wailed at by some strange fellow we shuffled onto the road.

As you head off the main road towards the Koala hospital the first building you come across, directly in front of the hospital, is Roto house. Roto house is a restored 19th century house originally built and owned by one of the first European settlers of the area. The building itself was abandoned in a state of disrepair after being sold by the family to local authorities about twenty years ago but was subsequently restored to its former glory. It is now a national monument as well as (and more importantly) being free to go in and have a look around so well, that’s what we did.

After a wander around the house (which is just what you imagine an old Aussie house to be, right up to the white picket fence at the front of the house) and a chat with the English tour guide we carried on up to the Koala hospital.

The Koalas in the hospital are housed in outdoor enclosures which you can view any time of the day by just walking around the perimeter.

They had four or five housed whilst we were there, including two permanent residents, one blind Koala and one elderly female of whom had been in the hospital ten years before with a leg injury and released (with a limp) only to be found injured on the side of a road in 2005, recognizable by the very same limp.

Aimee decided that these were now “the cutest little things”. She obviously forgot about ‘her little calves’…

The hospital is run entirely by local volunteers and relies on donations to function. After talking to one of the volunteers here it’s obvious that the work they do is invaluable to the Koala population, but we were also left in no doubt that the Koala is in danger with numbers on the decline mainly due to clearing of their habitat. The decline in numbers was obvious even here at the hospital when you noticed the distinct lack of numbers.

After tearing Aimee away from the cuddly little bears (that are not in fact bears at all but relatives of the native Wombat, in case you were wondering) we marched back towards the town and in particular the walkway that runs next to the town itself, through the last remaining rain forest in New South Wales, past nationally protected marshland and across the local creek. It was really nice but we had to make a quick exit half way through the forest section of the walk after Aimee realised what the increasingly loud squeaking above us was…

Hands up if you have any ideas.

Yep that’s right, another few thousand flying foxes, or bats as they are better known. After some brief flapping (and even breaking into a mild jog at one point) we escaped the confines of the forest and made our way back to the hostel for some welcome evening chow (chicken fajitas).

The evening was spent in the hostel lounge room again along with Tony, the owner. After some random chin-wagging and agreeing on the fact that most Americans are morons (in our humble opinions), we also found out that he is actually in the process of selling the hostel and moving to Switzerland. Shame really as he seems a really nice guy, quite rare in comparison with the other hostel owners we’ve encountered. It also emerged that he has a, *cough* - ‘agreement’, whereby if you worked for three months at his hostel, the local farmer would provide you with the necessary paperwork to state that you had actually worked on the farm for those three months and therefore qualify for your second year working holiday visa. Nice little agreement if you didn’t really fancy the manual farm labour and, as it happened, there were also two jobs advertised in the hostel at the time.

If only he wasn’t selling the place we would definitely have asked about the jobs and stayed for three months, getting the farmer to state we had worked for him instead.

All in all, gutted.

We were both a little sad to be leaving Port Macquarie when we boarded the coach the following lunch time and waved goodbye to Tony, heading off towards Byron Bay for the next few days.

Our home in Byron Bay was to be the (relatively) famous Arts Factory, which is a hostel/campsite situated on five acres of state park (marshland). This place has been around since the 70’s and was one of the foremost hippy colonies of the day.

Not content with a standard dorm we opted instead to spend a couple of nights in their ten man Tepee, which was a huge dark green and red canvas tent thing with a (non-functioning) heater in the middle, circled by ten single beds. Oh, and no real door. It appeared that the tepee had also been around since the 70’s judging by the state of it.

Anyway, after dumping our bags we headed over to the hostels linked ‘Buddha Bar’, which was playing host to a reggae band for the evening.

As we approached the bar you got a strange eerie feeling that you were stepping back in time to those bygone hippy days as you passed by hordes of matted haired, robe wearing, hugging and swaying, extremely spaced out, well, erm, hippies.

The intense whiff of weed only enhanced this image. As did the fact that no-one here seemed to have evolved enough to don footwear.

The band itself was actually really good (called Fyah Walk, in case you wondered) but personally, I couldn’t stop staring at the really odd mosh pit of shoeless hippies hugging and swaying around on the temporary dance floor.

We hung around till about 11pm and then headed in to town to catch the FA cup final. We also met Charlie from Lost. He’s Canadian apparently.

The night was spent trying extremely hard not to freeze to death in our bitterly cold tepee. It was touch and go at one point but we both pulled through to witness another day in Hippy-land.

Before we carry on with the days events I’ll just bring you up to speed on the strange folk we happened to be sharing the tepee with.

There were three English girls, who were fine, but along with them were a couple from Australia (I think) and their friend ‘Scotty’.

Now these three were seriously odd. Scotty was a lanky kiwi with a goatee and a weed problem (judging by his overly relaxed demeanour). The other bloke was a dirty looking hippy complete with dreadlocks and finally his missus, well it’s safe to say that she was a few sarnies short of a picnic.

The first night in the tepee we were awoken by said couple arriving late (minus Scotty) and attempting to determine if Kirsty (one of the English girls who happened to be short, plump and had long dark hair) was in fact their friend Scotty by shining their mobile phone light in her face.

“Scotty is that you?”

“Nah, I think that’s a chick…”

Really!!? Needless to say, we found the whole sight quite amusing and began laughing uncontrollably which led to odd missus firing a barrage of abuse in our direction along the lines of:

“Please do pipe down and go back to sleep, there’s a good chap”.

Obviously not quite as politely.

The other two English girls in the tepee also recounted their first nights experiences with the three oddballs which included being asked if they at all minded if said oddballs had sex, followed by an ingenious suggestion to “push all the beds together”…

Glad we weren’t there that evening. We slept with one eye open from then on.

Anyway, the next day was spent wondering around the small town centre (in the rain) attempting to find a suitable establishment in which to purchase breakfast/lunch followed by a walk to the beach (also in the rain).

There’s really not a great deal to do in a beach town when its raining so we eventually called it a day and headed back to the Arts Factory’s in house cinema to watch “Rock the boat” (which is really good by the way) before retiring back to our tepee paradise.

Tomorrow morning we shall be bidding farewell to this 70’s time-warp and hopping on the Greyhound, heading a little further up the coast to Surfers Paradise.

We shall update you all further soon.

Ciao for now.

Aimee and Mark x