Advertisement
Published: December 31st 2015
Edit Blog Post
A very welcome site
The bonza coffee definitely beat the powered soy milk version I had on waking and gave us the energy for our first river crossing. Today was awesome and saw us leaving Cudmurra beach at around 7.50am (after a lazy morning and slow breakfast on the beach), having lunch and a swim at Bennalong beach and arriving at Mollymook at around 5.30pm. It was a day of amazing skies and vistas, meditative thoughts, exciting rock pools, deserted spaces, mixed walking over sand, through dunes, over headlands and through acacia / tea tree forest with a bit of heath and grassland/eucalypt forest thrown in.
There are also good things about walking through towns when on a long walk... like coffee! On walking through Berrara (a really sweet little town with a nice caravan park) we were stoked to see a sign promoting "bonza coffee" from a coffee van. And it was pretty bonza too. It gave us the energy required for the first of three river crossings for the day. Berrara river crossing was pretty good - it was lowish tide and the water was up to about my waist and the current not too strong, but it is good to have an excuse to strip down to your underwear on a walk... and then continue to walk along the beach a little while in your
The added touch
brought a smile to my lips! How sweet to be loved and have coffee as well. underwear as you dry out! I think at full low tide this crossing would be an absolute snack.
I kept thinking about how much I love long walks, and how I would love to do a good long walk somewhere in the world every year of possible. It feels like what the human body is meant to do (especially when you can keep your pack light). The therapy you get from just placing one foot infront of the other over and over again is amazing. It clears the mind (and boosts the metabolism at the same time!) It slows down the rat race pace to a more natural one. You wake with the sun and go to bed with the sun. You watch the moon change each night, and notice the sunrises and sunsets and stars. You see animals and feel more intimately connected with this place called earth.
Anyways, back to details: some highlights from the day (in addition to the coffee and river crossing already mentioned) also included finding an amazing rock pool just past Berrara which reminded us to keep a level of respect for nature! At first this pool seemed tranquil and the perfect
place to bring our 4 year olds to play mermaids... the occasional wave broke over one section forming a nice gentle waterfall trickling over the rocks... until a set of three really big waves came one after the other and turned the tranquil pool into a gushing and hazardous washing machine! stunning to watch from the safety of being out of the pool but it would have been a different story had we already been swimming in it. Feeling very lucky that we had observed it for just those few moments before diving in, we said good bye to this amazing pool and decided to wait til the next river crossing or lunch for our swim instead! We also obviously decided it was NOT the pool to bring Leila and Ameya to for mermaid antics.
We stopped at Bennelong beach for lunch and a swim. This beach is BEAUTIFUL. The beaches either side of it were wind-swept and choppy but this one was crystal clear and calm with beautiful gentle rolling waves. It was also quite busy, which surprised me because as a kid I remember coming to this beach at summer and there was no one, but that's
ok. Our population is growing and it is good to share beautiful spaces with others (as long as they take their rubbish home with them). Jono and I did do a lot of rubbish picking up... but, not that much given how busy some of these beaches get in summer. Every time I found myself getting a bit grumpy at picking up other people's rubbish I countered those thoughts with thinking about how many people DIDN"T leave their rubbish behind. It's better to be grateful than grumpy! It was also an interesting experience walking the full distance of the coast and having large stretches to ourselves (because there was no road access) and then just coming across 'clumps' of people clustered around car parks. People say the coast is packed at this time of year: it's not really -- just 10meters either side of any car park! Every night we had beach-side camping where we had the beach to ourselves. (Even in Mollymook once it got dark!)
The day saw two more estuary crossings: one at Lake Conjola and one at Narrawallee. With all of the river crossings, we both left our packs and sussed the crossing out before
taking the packs over. Unless you have the time to time the walk so that you cross each estuary at full low tide (ideal), I recommend having a tall person with you! I had to swim sections of both these last two crossings while my long-legged husband carried my pack above his head with water up to his chin, and only once was the water temporarily too deep for him that he dropped my pack briefly before getting his footing again. We were not tooo worried about the possibility of dropping the packs as everything that mattered was sealed in a dry bag inside.
We were initially considering camping somewhere around Narrawallee but we felt like walking a little bit more so we kept going to Mollymook where we found a secluded spot in among the sand dunes to lay our head for the night thinking about the breakfast we were planning to have next morning from one of the best restaurants on the south coast just a three minute walk away from where we were sleeping! (Tallwood).
Advertisement
Tot: 0.108s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 10; qc: 30; dbt: 0.0801s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb