Driving down the Pacific Highway
The idea behind undertaking an almost 1,000 km drive from Brisbane to Sydney was to see some of the coastline. Well, it turns out that the Pacific Highway doesn't actually run anywhere near the Pacific and that it's mostly lined with gum trees! So apart from those and a few spectacularly broad rivers we saw very little else.
The Pacific Highway is being built in segments, so parts of it are finished and one can drive along at the maximum allowable speed in Australia: 100kph. But in other parts it shrinks to a narrow two lane road which winds through small towns and villages, and in many others there are delays due to roadworks (or road work as the Australians prefer to say).
The peculiarities of Australian highways, for those of us used to motorways, is that they are useable even by cyclists; that there are places where you can pull a U-turn; that you can see houses being transported along them in the middle of the day (as in the photo above); that cars coming from the opposite direction can cut across your lanes to turn up a road on their right (which will be your left as Australians drive on the left) and that similarly you can cut across the lanes of the cars coming opposite you if you want to turn down a road on your right. There are no rest areas and very, very few petrol stations alongside the highway.
If you need petrol you have to go meandering off down one of the side-roads, which is not unpleasant as it did allow us to discover the excellent Rivermark café in Port Macquarie for mid-morning coffee. We sat there happily right by the side of the Hastings river watching the pelicans fish.
We broke our journey about a third of the way down at a sleepy village of 1,718 people at the mouth of the Clarence river called Iluka (pronounce eye-loo-ka) where we'd organised a house-swap for three days. I was really hoping that here I would finally be able to use the mask, snorkel and flippers that had been encumbering my suitcase for weeks. But no! This is a place with spectacularly empty beaches, crashing waves and no lifeguards... at least not at this time of the year outwith the school holidays. So instead of looking for fish I thought I'd look for koalas because we'd seen lots of signs along the road warning of koalas crossing. Nada, nothing, niente. But I had fun looking anyway. Just behind the beaches lies the rainforest and we had a pleasant walk in the shade out to the bluff and then along another huge, almost empty beach. One man was fishing under the gaze of a pelican who was rather more successful at catching lunch than the human was!
Iluka is clearly a place where people come on holiday because there was a small, rather nice camping site/caravan park right in the middle of the village. Apparently people come here to fish. The café recommended by the house-owner is only open from Thursdays to Sundays at this time of the year and we were there from Monday to Thursday morning so had to make do, if we wanted to eat out, with the pub which serves adequate food and nice, cold beers. The overly loud radio, piped even for those of us opting to sit outside, is really annoying but it's a great place to sit to watch the sunset.
Next stop: Sydney.
