We hired a car and drove from Sydney up to a place called Wanderer’s Retreat in Port Stephens (about a 3 hour drive away). If you check the site you’ll see that you can stay in a luxury tree house in koala country with beaches a short walk away and more plant and animal life around you than you can shake a stick at. We were there 5 nights and it was absolutely beautiful. It must be the most beautiful place we’ve ever stayed and I’d go back in a flash! Just along the road was Nelson Bay and this shot from a hill above shows the sort of place we were staying:
One thing we noticed is that no two houses look the same (we made the same observation in New Zealand when we were there). It makes such a change from all the clone-houses you get in the UK where imagination is a missing ingredient.
It was around this point that I was completely eaten alive by mosquitoes. I was too busy looking out for snakes, scorpions and spiders to think about them but 25 bites in one day, each of them coming out in a large, super-itchy blotch an inch across certainly got my attention! So the next day, after getting some antihistamine and very strong cream, we took a ferry across to Tea Gardens (strange name for a village I thought) and had a look around – far less action-packed I know but I was suffering! We weren’t alone:
And in fact a few dolphins decided to put in an appearance in the harbour:
When we got back to the tree house we had a run on the beach (I love being by the sea!) and then I got into a nice bath full of cold water to calm the mosquito bites down. And it worked!
Every day we’d been walking around looking up into the trees for a glimpse of one of these elusive koalas with no success. But luckily on our final day we managed to see three of them – and they’re so cute!
Apparently they’re not very active during the day but I didn’t mind, that made them easier to photograph. Its child was climbing around the other side of the tree and was even cuter, although was clearly camera shy. The thing about Australia is that there’s an incredible depth of plant and animal life that we Europeans can only dream of. And to have these furry little beasts living in trees where you live must be so cool.
It rained really heavily one night and into the next morning. As we drove back to the house after a shopping trip I heard this noise and thought the car was breaking down. I stopped and opened the window to be hit by a wall of deafening noise! Turned out it was Cicadas that are incredibly ugly and even more incredibly noisy insects – but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss hearing them now!
I also miss scenes like the one above. Port Stephens is a beautiful area and we only scratched the surface.
hehe koalas are pretty cool but I would hazzard a guess that most aussies have never seen one, they are hard to spot, and well, city folk are everywhere and go nowhere
cicadas are dam noisy though, but great fun when you are a kid, they leave their empty shell hanging on to the trees and it used to be great fun to go around and collect them (when I lived in queensland anyway, here in WA they arent as common)
Really? I suppose most people who’re from Australia take it for granted and aren’t that bothered about seeing koalas and such like.
I couldn’t believe how big and ugly the fully grown cicadas are though – they’re like aliens!
lol, i suppose cicadas do look like something that may burst foward from your stomach
but what I meant about the lack of koala sitings is city folk have a habbit of not leaving the city much, and koalas arent well known for hanging of skyscrapers 😛
and for those that do leave the city a couple times in their life, they are hard to spot
Yeah, I guess that’s city-folk for you. Some people I know in London never step outside the place except to go abroad. They don’t even see their own country.
And you’re right, we spent 5 days looking for the little beasts and only spotted three of them. And if they’d not been pointed out to us we’d most likely have missed them!
I can assure you that not all Australians take koalss and our other native animals for granted. I think we have the best native animals in the world. So many of our animals are unique (the platypus – an egg-laying mammal is just one example). Koalas never drink and eat the leaves from only one particular eucalyptus tree. So, of course these animals are not seen in urban areas – there is no habitat for them. But I know that a lot of Australians regularly visit native wildlife parks and sanctuaries so that they can admire and enjoy these animals and make an effort to see them in their natural environment when they visit country areas for their holidays.