SUPER VARIO WORLD

Hello – guess what? We’re still in Port Macquarie! Yes, we like it so much we decided to stay a week at a campsite and now it’s Easter and many of the sites are booked up, so we’re staying put till next week. The site we’re on has the beach at one end and the town centre at the other, so it’s ideal.

Not much to report this week, the title says it all really. Last weekend there was a Blues Festival on in town (overpriced tickets, especially as you could just sit on the town green and hear it fine), which incorporated a Beard & Moustache competition (not many entrants) as well as the 2015 Australian BBQ Wars (40 odd teams cooking various cuts of meat and all being judged). The BBQ teams were all at our campsite, which made for some delicious smells, but also a lot of woodsmoke over the weekend. Some of their set-ups were incredible, looking more like steam trains than cooking equipment.

bbqwars

Within the centre of town there is a nature reserve that plays home to a colony of flying foxes. Every night at dusk they leave their roosts and fly over town on their way to find food. It’s estimated there up to 200,000 of them. Seeing all these spooky creatures silently flying overhead is really amazing, so one day we decided to find their roost. We ended up in one of the most hostile environments we’ve yet encountered. Stinking, mosquito infested mangrove swamps below us, thousands of screeching, pooing, weeing megabats in the trees above us. The noise was deafening, the smell sickening and when the mozzies started biting, we literally ran out of there to the safety of the neighbouring housing estate – which we imagine has the most modest property prices in town. There were some very cute semaphore crabs running about, waving their claws at us. They must have been telling us to “go back before it’s too late”!

Most afternoons we’ve spent at the beach practicing our bodyboarding. We’re slowly getting better, but also battered and bruised. We’ve both got foot injuries from hitting submerged rocks and general aches and pains from the sudden and unexpected increase in exercise. We’ve just bought some swimfins which are meant to make it easier for you to paddle out and then also catch the waves. They’re taking some getting used to, it’s almost like starting again – but we’ll keep at it!

So we’re here until next week. We were going to move on, but when planning ahead for Easter (we didn’t want to end up in some car park for the weekend, so wanted to book in somewhere) we realised most decent sites were full. We were hoping to get to Byron Bay for the weekend, but there’s (another) blues festival going on there over Easter, so all accommodation is booked out. After trying various other places, with mixed reviews, we decided better the devil you know and have extended our stay here. Plenty of time to eat chocolate and then hit the beach to work off the calories!

Hope you all have an eggcellent Easter.

Hoo Roo!