The Last Leg - Orbost to Killalea

9 May

The plan for today was to head for a place called Bairnsdale and spend the afternoon exploring. Once we arrived there, we found that Bairnsdale was much larger than we had anticipated and that our chosen camp spot was miles from the centre of town. We decided to forego the pleasures of Bairnsdale and instead continued to the much smaller but more suitable town of Orbost .

Orbost gave us everything we were looking for except for somewhere decent to eat! Using typical British ingenuity, we bought a mountain of chips from a local cafe, took them back to the campervan and had chip butties for tea! Who says this travelling life isn't healthy?

10 - 11 May

From Orbost, we took the long but largely pleasant drive to the seaside resort of Bateman's Bay. Spending the afternoon exploring amongst the usual array of seafood restaurants and gift shops we spotted two attractions that appealed to us; an animal/bird park (of course!) and a crazy-golf course.

And so, on Thursday 11 we started out at the Birdland Animal Park. We arrived before the 9.30am opening time but a friendly keeper let us in anyway. Whilst we were chatting to her, an expectant looking
Kookaburra landed close by then hopped into the ticket-office waiting to be fed!

As usual, we wasted no time in heading around the park to see wat was on offer. I didn't waste what was to be my last chance to feed some kangaroos:

Among the animal "demonstrations" during the morning was Koala feeding time, featuring Boris (left) and Donny,

the chance to get up-close-and-personal with snakes (Sharon declined, obviously):

and our highlight - the opportunity to hold our new-found most-favourite animal ever; a baby wombat!

We also got a good view of the otherwise elusive Echidna here,

some beautiful - but noisy - Lorikeets,

and the star of the show, a rarely seen Wallaroo joey in his mum's pouch:

After the fantastic morning spent at Birdland, I was brought back to earth with a bump as Sharon roundly trounced me at the crazy-golf course; I put my defeat down to fright at the appearance of a large and lethal red-back spider which appeared at hole three, and which I had to call the manager to come out and kill...

With Sydney just a day's drive away, we decided to bow out of life in the campervan on a high note. We spent our last evening in the van in Killalea State Park, around 20km south of Wollongong, with Sharon rustling up a delicious chicken stir-fry accompanied by another terrific bottle of wine.

Killalea State Park