The Coast
In the second week of our recent trip to Oz we headed in my father-in-law’s campervan to the South Coast of New South Wales, staying for a few nights in Huskisson on Jervis Bay. I’d been out to the coast a few times when living in Canberra, but mainly to the stretch between Batemans Bay and Narooma. Another time I visited Kiama, and at one point passed through Eden and Merimbula on my way up from Victoria before turning inland. Never Jervis Bay.
It’s a beautiful spot. Huskisson Beach was broken up by weirdly pocked rocks, and people (and dogs) glided across the calm waters on stand-up paddle-boards. Driving south, we visited Booderee National Park in Jervis Bay Territory, the bit of the bay that isn’t in New South Wales. (I used to think it was part of the ACT, but it isn’t.) Green Patch Beach in Booderee has supposedly the whitest sands in the world, although they didn’t seem that much whiter than Tasmania’s Friendly Beaches to me; still good, though. We also walked its Telegraph Creek Nature Trail, full of grasstrees in flower, and spotted some eastern grey roos and swamp wallabies.
In Huskisson we went on a whale-watching tour out past the heads of the bay, to look for migrating humpbacks. I’d been on a similar tour in Narooma in the 1990s, when we got so close to some that they swam right under our boat. This time around, we spotted some at a distance... and after a while, they came so close that they ended up right next to the boat. On the return journey, we kept spotting new ones between the boat and the cliffs; and at the very end, looking back where we’d been, we watched one leap almost fully out of the water, flippers outstretched, its underside a brilliant white in the sun—a spectacular breach that I completely failed to photograph (but would never have managed on full zoom at that distance anyway).
On the day we headed back to Canberra we drove south to Batemans Bay to join the Kings Highway, stopping along the way at Depot Beach in Murramarang National Park. This was the best yet, with some great rock pools on a shelf jutting out of a headland, and a mob of kangaroos resting on a grassy patch up behind the beach. They were faring better than their mates living inland, judging by the frequent roadkill we spotted on the drive to Bungendore.
There are several panoramas of Jervis Bay and Depot Beach in Panoramas VIII. These galleries also include a few photos of Fitzroy Falls and Kangaroo Valley on the drive out to Jervis Bay—and here’s one from downtown Huskisson, home of a little-known world-famous attraction:
I would have ordered the flake, but it was off.