We got up at sunrise this morning to look for penguins and discovered that we had parked at a whale watching point. We watched for whales and penguins for a while but couldn’t see any so drove down the cliff for a closer look and a walk on the beach. I took some great sunrise pictures here and it was lovely to be up so early walking along in the sand, even if it was rather chilly. Sadly we got back to the van to find that it wouldn’t start! Vincent went one way and I went the other looking for someone to start our van, of course the people who had been parked by us had just left, then we both came back with someone. The guy Vincent found came round from the campsite at the end of the road in his shiny new SUV, parked up next to us then looked at us and said, ‘hope you know what you’re doing mate, I’ve never had the hood up before’ (!!) Luckily we have both looked under bonnets of cars and even jump started many before in spite of being at least 15 years younger than him, so we were soon off. We headed for Nowara next as they had a lovely 7 mile beach. We stopped at the lookout point for elevenses and had our bananas watching the whole 7 miles stretch out below. It was still pretty cold though as we were only just turning North up the East coast, so on we went to look for Kiama blowhole, recommended by both James and Peta. The blowhole was not well signposted but being in the van had us both very relaxed and wrong turns just didn’t matter as we got to see other bits of Australia and it really didn’t matter when we got to places. When we did get to Kiama the blowhole was pretty impressive. It was most interesting the sound it made as the wave hit the right frequency to shoot out the hole into the air several meters there was a huge ‘wooomph’ sound. Again lots of photos were taken and we went for a walk in the surrounding area to look at the lighthouse that was there and then to look for some fresh fish. I decided some time into our trip that I was going to give up eating chicken again as the chicken you get back home was just full of fat and chemicals and the chicken in India and China looked ‘foul’  I still wanted to eat fish though, but only fresh fish, and this was the place to do it according to the throng of pelicans at the fisherman’s landing site. We found a chippy and I had grilled bream and chips and Vincent had a veggie patty and chips – a little treat after rice for so long. We decided that as it was lovely day we would press on for Bondi beach and try and spend a day on the sand, oh and more importantly find somewhere with showers that we could use!
On the way however we spotted a wildlife park where you could feed Roos and cuddle Koalas so we stopped there and did just that! As we were there pretty late on in the day there was no one else around and the girl working there took us round the first bit herself calling on the animals so they came over, including a really old Tasmanian Devil who looked a lot like Taz and tried very hard to look fierce, but was actually quite sweet. The Koala was very, very soft to stroke but we weren’t allowed to hold her as apparently it is now illegal for anyone without a job at a zoo to hold them – which is good as apparently they were getting stressed by lots of tourists holding them and they also have very long sharp claws that they were digging into people! The Roos were the most fun though as they were just loose in the park and the girl on the desk had given us free bags of Roo food. They came and ate from our hands and one Wallaby in a cage even did the Skippy the kangaroo noise, no really it did! They also had goats and a couple of Shetland ponies, Emus and Ostriches a Meerkat area and a reptile area. They had a huge Australian Croc in one of the pools there so we took some pics of him then it was time to go already. We could have spent ages stoking Roos and feeding them.
Sadly by the time we got there the sun had gone down so we started to look for somewhere to park. We tried the big car parks but they were either too expensive or shut at night or ‘no camping’ so we ended up driving up the cliff a little way. Our Wicked guide did say that we could ‘keep parking tickets as souvenirs, don’t pay them! It’s a wicked thing to do’ but we didn’t want to end up being towed away or wheel clamped so we kept looking until we found a building site where they were building a house in a row of others. As there was no one living there yet there was a space just outside it, and although the loos were locked there were plenty of bushes in the nearby dog walking park.