As East as you can go . . . . 31st May 2012

The sun is shining on us and Byron Bay so it is time to get hiking. The plan is to do the 6.5km round trip from the caravan part to Cape Byron Lighthouse and back. A beautiful walking path from just outside the caravan park led us along the edge of the beach and up towards the cape and as usual we detoured off to every lookout and read every interpretative sign. The one that we were unsure of was the term "Littoral Rain Forrest" as some of the areas were called on the signs. That immediately goes on the list of things to Google at night. Watching the surfers at Wategos Beach delayed us for a while. It was interesting as the direction of the surf means that they are travelling parallel to the beach instead of coming in towards the beach at right angles. Great for the surfers as they only had a short paddle to the beach and could walk and carry their boards back out to the break without the long paddle back. Very unusual!

It is lovely to have rain forest coming down to the edge of the beach like this. As we approached the Cape I wanted to go down to a lower lookout which I felt was the furthest East lookout. While Trish reasoned that the main lookout up near the lighthouse was the furthest East. We have these light hearted verbal jousts throughout our trip. There was no sign proclaiming "Eastern most part of Australia" down on my lookout so it was onward and upward to the other lookout. I got there first and took up position in front of the sign saying "Eastern most point on the Australian Mainland" but that did not work as Trish saw through my plan to hide the sign from her. As I'm the one gifted with an internal compass and sense of direction and well Trish has a knack of always going the wrong way - say no more!, I still contested that we had stood further East at my point even though the land itself sticks out a bit further at her point. More of our verbal jousting, not that we are both competitive hee heee. Later exploration on Google Earth proved us both right. Trish's chosen point, the one with the sign is the land that extends furthest East and mine where we stood because of the position of the lookout fences actually put us furthest East. Not that I'm being pedantic here by any stretch of the truth.

Despite this we took in the wonderful views, had a great cup of coffee while watching Hang Gliders and birds soar overhead. Finally it was time to head back to camp and we wound down through more "Littoral Rain Forrest" which on later investigation turned out to mean - Rain forest in very close proximity to the Ocean where the tree canopy encloses the area underneath and restricts the cover to 70% or more. I bet you really wanted to know that!

What a shame that we had to go back past the hamburger place where we had lunch yesterday. Yep they are the best Beef Burgers that I have ever tasted. A 6.5km walk with all our stop offs, coffee and sign reading took us the best part of a day.

Dave

PS As family will know Trish and I have been having a "Pinch and Punch for the first of the month competition for some time now - finally we have called a truch ( cease fire ) so that we can get some sleep tonight.