Tag Archives: camp

Australia, Ben Boyd NP, NSW

Stuart’s Birthday Holiday, Part 5a

The big day had finally arrived. It just wasn’t dawn yet. In fact, it was still pitch dark.

Stuart wanted to see dawn in walking along the beach. And so instead of a lie in, instead of a nice comfortable bed, instead of breakfast in bed etc, his birthday alarm call was before it was even light. By the time we had done our teeth and (very quickly) got clothes on, it was starting to get light and by the time we made it to the beach and down to the water, it was almost light. But the sun wasn’t shining on us yet, it was stuck behind a cloud bank on the horizon, so he did actually get to see it “rise”.

And although it took a very long time, we made it to the far end of the beach.

Birthday boy. He went via a hairbrush when we got back to camp!

I found these two photos on his phone, so included them.

It took even longer to get back to camp.

One the where there, I came across this lovely patterning in the sand.

This image also came off Stuart’s phone but shows the size of our next surprise.

A Superb Lyrebird with its amazingly long tail was walking around the campground add though humans didn’t exist. It wasn’t very bothered about us at all.

Sadly it was still too dark under the canopy to get any really decent photos of it.

And then there was breakfast, watched carefully by that male kangaroo.

Stuart had decided that he wanted sausage and eggs for breakfast, so we had sausage and eggs with bread. We couldn’t quite (easily) manage the toast part. And this is the you’re doing what face!

Now for that roo.

With that, we started to pack up and get ready to move on. We wanted to go to the lighthouse at the very tip (bottom tip) of this bit of land and, well the weather was currently good…

But this campground had one more surprise in store for us before we left. With a final toilet trip, whilst waiting for Stuart, I was reading a noticeboard when I heard and spotted the longer grass and ferns between sites moving. Intrigued, but very wary, I moved closer until I could see what it was. Whatever it was, it was large and quite slow moving. It was between our site and the next one. Finally it showed itself in a small gap. It was a large lizard of some kind which set about climbing up a tree when Stuart arrived. But it disappeared before we could get a camera. We pointed it out to the man on the neighbouring site who was walking back across our site with his camera in hand. There was another one on the otherwise of Serenity on the tree. Getting my camera or of Serenity, we went to have a look.

Stuart went first, looking at the tree high up and down, desperate to spot it. Before he finally stood on it, I pointed out out to him. Apparently the guy had said it was on the tree, so Stuart having just seen one climbing up a tree well above head height, was looking way too high up to actually spot it. Well that’s his story anyway.

This one was huge. It’s a monitor lizard apparently and it was busy sunbathing.

A nice beach with a pleasant sunrise, a good walk and breakfast, along with some different wildlife had changed our impression of this campground overnight literally; it’s just best used out of season and reminded us of the need to check which campgrounds you actually need to book.

Birthday or not, it was also time to leave the campground.

Australia, Kosciuszko National Park, NSW

Stuart’s Birthday Holiday, Part 2a

The night passed quietly and in the early hours it was cool enough to be using sleeping bags as sleeping bags (not as quilts).

Morning eventually dawned. My alarm had been set for 6am as usual but it was another 40 minutes before it was to be light enough to consider getting up. It was however a beautiful morning and as planned we got the early morning light to dry the condensation off the roof tent.

The plan had been to go to the thermal spring this morning, but it was too cold to consider that just then, and I wanted to follow what looked to be a much more interesting road than the map indicated. So we headed off to the right, the opposite way to the one we had planned and into the dead end, knowing that for whatever reason, the causeway was closed. Mind you it was still a single track dead end dirty road even if the causeway was open!

A causeway meant that there had to be a lake somewhere and eventually we were to find it.

We have finally found it. Isn’t the light so like Scotland? Mind you so is the scenery except that is higher than Ben Nevis, as was last night’s camp!

Another track and another glimpse… It’s blue sky now.

We followed the track as far as it went but we didn’t get that far sadly, so after Stuart had scent marked and claimed his patch, we headed back.

Somewhere there’s a causeway in the photo below… We’re not tempted to try it.

One of our final glimpses of the reservoir and we were to spot these.

Have you spotted them? Dead center. It was as far as my camera could zoom. I’ll add an enlarged picture for you.

We think they were pelicans which we hadn’t seen in the wild before now.

Finally it was time to disappear back to the caves, have a lazy lunch at one of the BBQ sites using the free gas BBQ to cook some tempeh for lunch before heading off to reception for a lift down to the thermal pools.

To be continued