Camping at last

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After leaving Cronulla we headed off to the shops to kit out the van, now we are ready with torches and sheets and all the camping stuff we need. The Royal National Park is only about half an hour away but as we enter it seems like a whole world away from the hustle and bustle of Sydney. The only thing that remindes me we are close to a city are the planes flying overhead every now and again.

The hut is at a place called Garie Beach which when we arrive is iddlyic. There are only a few people around and so we follow the directions to the hut which seem to suggest a short walk over the beach and up some stairs into the forest. Half an hour later we are exhausted after carrying much of our belongings through the bush to reach the hut. But when we get there it is all worth it as we are literally in the middle of the bush and you can hear the waves from the beach below.

The hut is very basic with only solar electiricty and an outside toliet which I think I will give a miss after reading in the visitors book about leeches in there! The first night we stayed 6 other people turned up who had been hiking all day so we had a good chat and they told us about a walk to do tomorrow along the coast.

The next day we sat outside the hut and I discovered the stories about the leeches were true as i had two little ones on my leg! That's it I am definietly not going to the outside toilet now. So we headed off on the walk and about half an hour of walking up over the hills and back down again we found the most perfect secluded beach, we played in the surf and sat on the beach to get dry. That was when we noticed the naked man lying on the rocks, so not so secluded afterall!

We took the next part of the walk over the rocks by the shoreline, this was really breathtaking with cobal blue rocks and boulders that look like they were from the flintstones changing into green rocks that had craters making it seem like they were from the moon. The next beach was burning palms and we went on to try and find the figure of 8 pools that the hikers had told us about. We imagined these to be big pools you could swim in but when we eventually found them, while they were very deep they were no exactly big! Shenton jumped in but I didnt as after he got out all this weird white stuff was floating around in the water.

So headed back around the rocks and got back to the hut to find 4 Norweigen surfers were staying that night. We had a campfire and chatted while watching the stars, this really is a great place and well worth the effort of getting here.

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