‘Where the bloody hell are you?’

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The mildly offensive advertfrom the Australian Tourist Board that was running a few years ago promised that they had got the sharks out of the water, the ‘roos off the golf course and poured us a beer so what were we waiting for?
I too asked myself ‘Where the bloody hell am I?’ on the drive from Sydney to Coffs Harbour on the day after Boxing Day. It was nine o’clock at night, teeming down with tropical rain and we had been on the Highway of Death (as the locals affectionately call the Pacific Highway) for over eight hours. Road-train after road-train had pulled up so close to the back bumper of our tiny, defenceless Spaceship© that I couldn’t even make out their headlights, such was the glare from the wing mirrors. A couple of drivers gave us the horn on the single carriageway stretches because we were only going at 90km/h in a 100-zone … Worst of all we knew that even if we survived these waves of attacks that we had to set up the new spaceship for the night, in the dark, in the rain having had to wake up the campsite owner, who sounded pretty grumpy on the phone!
Needless to say, we survived both the drive and a night in the camper, lashed by the rain and the wind. We awoke to yet more rain and the discovery that William and Emily had spent the night on a sodden mattress … all of our bedding and most of our clothes were wet too. Luckily, Peter Andre (our campsite host – uncanny likeness!) took pity on us and stuffed the mattress in the boiler room; we were so grateful that we forgot to ask about whether it was clear of spiders etc.
So, what do you do on a rainy day in a New South Wales looking all the more like the old South Wales I knew from my childhood? ‘Let’s go to the rainforest in the rain!!!’ seemed like a really good idea of Diana’s – William and Emily looked less than impressed. The Waterfall Way from Bellingen to Dorrigo is one of ‘Australia’s ten most beautiful drives’ … in the sunshine, presumably. It was certainly dramatic; waterfalls cascading under the road, hairpin bends in the fog and more than one section of the road that had been reduced to single-track by washouts and rockfalls.
The entry to the rainforest was through an excellent visitor centre, where we watched a video about this World Heritage-listed environment and looked at the displays before braving the Skywalk, a 100m-long boardwalk through the top of the trees. Despite the warning signs about leeches and other forest threats we ventured under the canopy for a couple of kms into the strange Jurassic landscape of the rainforest floor. William and Emily saw every twig and leaf as a potential threat and our progress was slow, stopping every few paces to remove another killer leaf from a child’s Croc. William had us panicking when he shouted ‘Mummy, this one won’t come off!’, only for Diana to respond ‘William, that’s because that one is a freckle!’ Eventually, P’s temper snapped and he told the children that there was absolutely no chance in a million years of being attacked by a leech if we stayed on the path … now, could we just get on and walk! The laughter was lengthy when P took off his flip-flops, on getting back into the driver’s seat, to reveal the only leech to have sucked onto any of us. When he finally pulled it off, a little panicked, and brushed off his feet with a towel, he made matters a little worse by tossing the towel to Emily, without seeing the leech rearing up on the towel looking for its next feed…
As the screams echoed around, we drove the 900m back down the escarpment with a short stop in the beautiful little town of Bellingen. As we pulled into the campsite and set up for another rainy night, do you know the sky seemed far less threatening?

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