This morning the sun rose about 6am so as usual I did too. As we had an early night Vincent was also up so after a quick shake for breakfast, loo break and a disposal of rubbish we were on our way again. Today we wanted to head for a place called Narooma where there was meant to penguins and whales. I drove for the first part of the day then we switched after elevenses. When I was navigating I had spotted a map that had more detail than our Australia wide map we had for the journey at the elevenses rest stop. It showed a path to the place we were headed, Mallacoota, that was off the main road and went through a place called Croajingolong National Park. It sounded like a pleasant drive so we took the turning for it and off we went looking for Roos and Koalas and Wallabies all the while. I spotted one small Wallaby by the side of the road jumping along on the grass which made what was to come worthwhile. There are two types of road in Australia, sealed and unsealed, and we were about to come across unsealed. It meant that the road we were on basically turned into a gravel track. Still convinced that the road went through to Mallacoota I navigated us on down, even using the compass at an unsigned junction to show which turn went east, but sadly it was not to be. As we reached the bottom we saw that we had driven down a spit to a lovely little camp site, but there was no way across the water to the mainland again and our destination. We weren’t the only ones to be fooled and a crazy pair of old Aussies who had overtaken us on the stretch of gravel road, we slowed down so as not to be rattled to death, were there too. They very proudly showed us the inside of their van that they had made themselves, they had a fold down bed and even a fridge that plugged into the lighter. We all decided to turn round and head back to the main road and they sped off at top speed hitting the potholes like there was nothing there! We headed back at a more stately pace trying not to rattle too much.
Eventually, along the highway, we reached Mallacoota. We stopped in the first car park we saw as Vincent had spotted Pelicans. They were huge! Some of the pelicans stood at least 5 foot tall, we took load of photos of them and the fishermen who were next to them give an idea of their size. We discovered they were standing where they were because it was the fish cleaning station and they wanted the scraps.
We drove round to a quiet car park area and found a nice picnic bench with a view of the water and got out our little primus to try and cook lunch. The egg fried rice and veggies went surprisingly well and we were quite satisfied with the little burner.
We spent most of the afternoon taking turns at driving until we reached Narooma. It was a long stretch and took us a little into the dark, but we were told duck and early night were the best times to see the penguins so we found a car park and settled down for the night. As it was dark when we went for our walk we didn’t see penguins, there were however hundreds of large bats, probably fruit bats, flying overhead. We cooked the dumplings for dinner but they mostly fell apart as they had defrosted yesterday in our cool box, that wasn’t very cool. We slept to the sound of waves crashing on the rocks again going to bed early at about 7.30pm so we could be up and going by 5.30am when it was possible to se penguins again.