The Journey Part Two

Hyams Beach on Jervis Bay

Let me continue from where I left off last time...

Our GD greedy on gas car would not start. It sounded like the battery but the lights and things still worked. We were quite worried it was something more than just the battery. Anyway, we needed to get it going and take it to get fixed or something so Andy asked the man in the campsite closest to ours if we could get a jump start from him. And boy was that a good choice in who we chose to ask for help... this guy was a rally car driver and knew EVERYTHING about cars and even had a spare battery with him and all his tools! So we put his battery into our car and tried to start it... Nada. SHIT. Well wait a tic... our battery was coeroded as shit all over the terminals and so the guy helped Andy clean them off and discovered that one of the terminals was so f*cked that he gave us one he just happened to have hanging around and didn't need. !!! Then the car started. Thank gawd. Then with the car still running we took our his spare battery and put ours back in. He said that was a good sign, it meant the alternator (the thing that charges the battery when the car is running) is fine and it must be the battery and might just be the coeroded terminal he just replaced. So we let it run 10mins. Then turned it off for 30 to see what would happen. It started again, yay! It must just be the crappy old terminal. Problem solved. I still sort of wanted to go get a new battery that day just to be sure, but whatever that line about hindsight is... blah blah blah. So we set off and into town and took the car for a drive to Seven Mile Beach National Park and stayed another night in Kangaroo Valley with the wombats. The next day we set out for Jervis Bay and a night in the popular Booderee National Park, Cave Beach Camp Ground. It was beautiful day and the car worked! Along the way we checked out Hyams Beach, which boasts the whitest sand in the world, it was beautiful and the water was amazingly clear! Then we went to the camp site and checked in and went to the beach! Andy tried some more unsuccessful fishing. I was no help as I've never done ocean fishing before. We saw a pod of dolphins a couple hundred meters off shore too. Then in the middle of the afternoon a few black clouds rolled in and there was a big thunderstorm with rain and everything. We huddled under the overhang of a wildlife information kiosk thingy near the picnic area until it passed.

Cave Beach at Booderee National Park

After that we got into the goon and played some cards and then had some visitors! Kangaroos! A couple bunch, over a dozen at least. They came right into the camp site and feed on the grass. We was pretty sweet.

Furry visitors

After some dinner we went back to the rocks for more fishing and I thought we were gonna die when another thunderstorm rolled in from nowhere and we were stuck on these rocks and it started pouring! But it really wasn't that bad, I just over reacted, haha. By bed time it had cleared up and the stars were out.

Cave Beach from the rocks, approaching dusk and thunderstorm

Next day we had to get up and move out of the camp site since we could only stay there one night (it was booked for the long weekend). It was also Andy's birthday. It ended up being a pretty shit day to tell the truth. First we tried to go to a free campsite but couldn't get there because the dirt road going in was so bad. We ended up hitting a rise in the road and later we heard something fall off our car... we found out what that was about a week later, haha. So we powered on to another free campsite, again down a dirt road, but not as bad this time. It was in Eurobodallah National Park. The camp area was among very tall, old gum trees and low shrubbery... it was a little erie almost with the wind from the ocean, that you couldn't see through the trees, ripping through. All this camp site had was a hybrid toilet aka a hole in the ground with a plastic seat in a small outhouse above. Stinky.

We decided to stay here 3 nights to wait out the long weekend busyness. The weather was shit and the wildlife intimidating. First night a saber tooth ant made it into our tent. It's teeth glistened in the light they were so big and it took a lot to kill the sucker. We saw another few outside the next day and they again seemed to come back to life another you thought you killed it! Then the giant lizards (some sort of monitor lizard I think, or goanna) came out from the bushes and climbed the trees. These were like 4foot dinosaurs. By the last day here we were going a little bit crazy and smelt bad and hated camping. We left on Australia Day hoping we'd find a campsite in Merimbula. We did and it wasn't even that expensive and had two pools, camp kitchen, and hot showers! Heaven. We decided we'd stay here 4 nights or maybe longer. It was time to look for work because we were slowly but surely running out of money.

Giant lizard who ran up the tree... check out the claws!

To Be Continued!

Up next: No harvest work ANYWHERE and Andy makes some calls.