Pambula… Our winters break at the seaside.

 

All the photos which illustrate this can be found here.

 Ok, what follows is just an ordinary tale about an ordinary holiday. No great excitement or adventures were had, and, for a change, no major disasters either. So there you go, you don’t have to read it if you do not want to, and I won’t be upset. However, some people, for reasons of their own, obviously, seem to enjoy these tales and ask for more.

 So here’s another one just for them.

 The day before we were due to leave I realised I had booked the wrong dates for house we were staying at. Oh and the payment for our stay hadn’t actually gone through apparently. Nothing to worry about there then. I got on the phone to Helen, who owns the lovely “Helen’s beach house”, and between us we managed to get it all straightened out. However, to get the dates we had wanted, we had to agree to vacate the premises for an hour on the Saturday, as she was having an “open house” for potential buyers to view the property. Oh no! Our favourite holiday stay is on the market!

 As ever, I booked our car in for a service the day before we were due to drive down. Every time I do this the mechanic, Marcus, books a holiday of his own. In Florida. At my expense. This time was no exception; I could see him gleefully perusing the holiday brochures as I drove into the garage. To be fair the car drove like a dream over the thousand or more kilometres we covered on this break, and did so without even a hint of a problem.

 On the day appointed, I filled up the car with the luggage we’d packed the previous evening, threw Bethy and the dogs in too, and went and picked up Lee-Anne from work. On leaving her workplace we passed one of my loonies who was on the street, remonstrating with thin air as always, and it was rather nice to think I’d not be dealing with his ilk for the next few days.

 The drive down to the coast was beautiful. We were following directions gained from the online mapping service “whereis”, and so were guaranteed to get there without hitch. The last few kilometers were on a new route, one we’d not done before. But as the map and directions told us to go this way, then that way, then left, then right, etc, we couldn’t go wrong. And we didn’t. Until that is we came to Merimbula, where the directions told us to take the third exit off the roundabout. At a T-Junction.

 Still, without too much fuss we found the right road again and were at the beach house nice and early. We unpacked the car, and reacquainted ourselves with the house. That done it was time to make supper, or in other words; “Good, let’s open the plonk!” We had a plain supper of chips, mushy peas and sausages, and I decided to walk the dogs down to the beach. The beach is only a hundred yards down the road, and on a level walk, no worries then.

 Halfway to the beach a bloody great boxer dog ran out of its house and attacked my two mutts. Millie laid into him, and Barnum tried to lay him, and so he ran away again.

 Then I came across a group of roos, who were kindly keeping the local lawns trimmed. As the moon was bright, and it was a beautiful full one, it was almost like day, so I tried to take photos of them. Of course as it was semi-dark the camera’s automatic flash went off, and I nearly got trampled by a roo stampede. I got some photos of manic roo eyes and a lot of darkness.

 I got to the beach; it was empty now as only daft Welsh idiots walk it at this time of night, in winter, on a bitterly cold evening. I rummaged in my pockets and found my mobile. “I think I’ll ring my mam, she’s never heard the Aussie sea!”

 Genius!

 No reply. Ok, so I’ll ring my sister instead. So I did, and we chatted for a while, mainly about how wonderful technology is today allowing her in Llanelli to hear me and the sea in Australia.

 Then I thought I’d ring Nicol and Charlie, as I can still remember their numbers despite my years of dissipation. What I also realised at this point was that my getting up at 5.30 am to go to the gym, the long drive down, plus the cold night air, plus a goodly portion of wine, all added up to me being more than a little inebriated. But when has that ever stopped me? So I rang them. Fortunately they were out, so I left messages on their answer machines. These messages went something like;

 “It’s me… Ha, ha, ha ..I’m on a beach….  In Australia…Its dark and cold.… Listen…… …… ……. that’s the sea!!…I’m a bit pissed….Yay!!   Ta ra tossers!!”

 I’m sure they were ever so grateful.

 Later that night I jumped into bed to find the electric blanket on. Ooh, snug. After an hour I found myself cooking. Well cooking underneath, but freezing on top, as I’d kicked the bloody duvet off. I woke Lee-Anne. “You’re supposed to switch it off, when you come into bed.” This puzzled me, how come she wasn’t suffering? “There’s two of them, one for each half of the bed, you Welsh twat.” Oh that explains it then. Learn something new every day. I then spent a good quarter of an hour trying to switch the bloody thing off, I couldn’t.  I’d exhausted all the options, switched every switch, even somehow managed to turn the radio alarm on full blast, twice, when Lee-Anne gave up and did it for me.

 And so the first day ended.

 

The next morning we took a stroll along the beach. On the way to the beach that same boxer dog came howling down its driveway, only to turn tail and run on seeing Millie. Or maybe it was Barnum blowing kisses which scared him off.

 So then, it was warm and sunny so we strolled down the beach. And that was fine, Millie chased sea birds, and Barnum, for some unexplained reason, decided he liked the taste of sand. Good thing there was plenty on supply for him then. To distract him from this I started jogging off down the beach, speeding up when I knew he was chasing me. I hadn’t got far when he slammed into the back of my legs, sending me face down into the sand. As ever, he was the one to get all the sympathy.

 Just to extract revenge, I decided it was time to give Barnum his tonic. Barnum has got a skin rash. Our vet has never seen one like it before, and calls Barnum; “that dog with the weird rash”. Basically all his exposed skin goes a crinkly black colour every so often. The only thing the vet can do for it is give him cortisone shots when it gets really bad. However, we’ve discovered that a regular six-monthly, dip in the sea keeps the rash in check. The one big problem with this is that Barnum hates going in the water, I think he associates it with the dreaded “B” word.

 So I dragged him in, and he ran out, and so I dragged him back in….(repeat for half an hour) I don’t know who enjoyed it the least, me or him. After a while he got used to it again though, and he got a good soak out of it. We also gave Millie an unwanted sea bath too, just to be fair. Millie, if you hold her above the sea, starts an involuntary swimming action in mid air, which is much funnier to watch than to read about.

 We dropped the dogs off back at the house, and drove into Merimbula to do some shopping. Merimbula’s a nice, small, fishing port with a working harbour and oyster farms. One of the oyster farms is on the road opposite the golf club. An oyster farm next to a twat farm one could say. We decided to get a snack, and found a neat little “Tapas bar”, where we had some sweet-corn and coriander …ermmmm… cake things. They were delicious, and we’re going to make some ourselves, when we figure out how. We got a boot-full of provisions from Woolworths, and, at the till something remarkable happened. Someone said something nice about Canberra. You have to live in Aus to understand what a remarkable thing it is for anyone, or at least anyone who doesn’t live in Canberra, to do that.

 There’s an old Aussie joke;

 “Do you have any kids?”

 “Yes. Two living, and one in Canberra.”

 Get the picture?

 Anyway, just down the road we spotted a tidy looking restaurant, the “Zanzibar Café”, and checked the menu in the window. It looked good, if a bit pricey, but had a reasonable number of vegetarian options, which are rare in this fishing port. We decided to lash out and have a treat meal there, but to save it for our last night.

 Back at the house I left Lee-Anne and Bethy doing some baking, and strolled the dogs back to the beach. The roos were now keeping the camp site cropped, and some, surprisingly, were down at the beach enjoying relaxing in the dunes. I took the dogs rock climbing at the end of the beach, and Millie had fun and Barnum fell off the rocks. Millie is about as well built for rock climbing as I am for… well just about anything really, she being short and stumpy. But she loves rock climbing, absolutely adores it. There are times when the scale of a cliff will get the better of her though, and she does need a little carrying every so often. Bless.

 Back at the house, Helen the owner had arrived, bearing logs for the woodstove. Oh boy, fab! We discussed her open house on the Saturday, and agreed to clean the house in the morning, and bugger off out with the dogs for the hour it was open.

 We carried a bunch of logs in, and lit the fire. The lawn outside was now getting trimmed by three roos, sweet. These we found were hand tame, and, once they knew we were a soft touch for treats, came round every morning and evening to get fed. I got several great snaps of the inside of a roos nostril they got so close.

 So upstairs the girls watched TV, while I sat downstairs read a book, and watched the logs burn. I was thinking to myself; “This is the life, the sea outside, a good book, a roaring log fire, and a good glass of wine, what more could a man want?” The answer wasn’t long in coming. From upstairs a voice shouted down; “Any of that wine left?”

 Errrmm…. oops… nope.

 I was let off lightly this time, as Le-Anne was knacked and wanted to go to bed in any case. I stayed up and watched “Blade II” with Bethy. She held my hand during the scary bits. It’s not my fault I scare easily!!

 Up in the morning, and the first job of the day is to feed the mob of roos now assembled on our lawn. Funny buggers don’t like apples or anything healthy offered, and turned their noses up at it, but loved any crap. Typical seaside louts.

We all stroll down the beach, them two get ahead of me, and start screaming and yelling, I run over just in time to see the last of a pod of dolphins surfing inside a wave, turn and leave. Oh bollocks!  “You should have seen them, there was about ten of them all surfing on the waves at once, it’d have made a brilliant photo!!”

Another opportunity of a lifetime lost.

 Anyway we follow the pod, now barely visible in the distance, around the headland, and did some more rock climbing so that Millie can have fun, and Barnum could fall off. At one point Millie was running down a high sided, “V” shaped, gully in some steep rocks. She hadn’t really worked out her route properly, and as she built up speed she found she it was too steep to stop. Not only that, but the further down it she got the more the gully got narrower and narrower.  Eventually she ended up firmly wedged into the bottom end of it. She did make a pitiful sight, so once I’d finished pissing myself with laughter I pulled her out.

 We left the dogs at home, and went of for a proper hike. Normally we’d take the dogs with us, but the good walks hereabouts are all in national parks, and dogs are verboten in them.

 We called into the tourist office at Eden. Or at least we would have called into the tourist office if it hadn’t been shut due to a gas leak. A sign in the window instructed us to go to the local hotel for tourist information, so we did. The girl behind the counter, a pretty little thing whose youthful beauty was almost eradicated by a ton of make up, didn’t have a clue what we were talking about. So she called some of the other staff, who were equally mystified. The best they could offer was; “Go to the forestry office down the road, they will be able to help.”

 So we went there, and they were equally mystified and tried sending us back to the Tourist Information office. Eventually one guy who “did a bit of walking” himself, vaguely pointed out on a map where he would go today if he were so inclined.

 We took him at his word, and went off to find the “Old Whaling Station,” which he had assured us had a nice walk to a tower, or some such thing. We found the whaling station without too much problem, and had a look about. This occupied a two whole minutes, so we strolled off down the beach looking for the route to the “Whale spotters tower”. On turning a bend in the rocks we came across a thing so startling it made me exclaim “Fuck me pink!” in a very loud voice. It wasn’t a whaling a tower unfortunately, but the “Port of Eden”.

 More surprised than me were the family who were just around the corner, although I think they were more surprised at my shout than anything else.

 But then things got even more weird. The people I had just surprised, a husband, wife and two young sons, turned out to be our next door neighbours from our old place in Aranda. We exchanged pleasantries and caught up on things.

 We then decided, seeing as we couldn’t find the whaling tower anywhere, to drive to the next recommendation we had, the “Green Cape lighthouse”. On the way there we passed a “lookout” sign, so we stopped. The view over “Disaster Bay” was phenomenal, unfortunately due to the lack of sun at that point, my photos don’t do it justice.

 We drove down to Green Cape, a rather spectacular lighthouse, and got there just in time to be too late to do one tour, and far too early to do the next. I wasn’t bothered in any case; lighthouse tours aren’t really that exciting. I did however get some (I think) really dramatic shots of the lighthouse, which I’m rather pleased with. We found some walking tracks to a place called “pulpit rocks”, which took us past a rather sad cemetery to the victims of a sunken ship. (sad as in “crap”) Along the walk we noticed that the path must be a motorway for the local wombat population, as it was paved with solid wombat shit.

 On reaching pulpit rock we were rather disappointed to find that there wasn’t anything there. Nothing that is apart from a memorial to some old boy who used to fish there. I was thinking how well thought of he must be to have such fresh flowers on his favourite fishing spot, when I realised they were artificial.

 So we drove back, and I took the dogs to the beach. Again. It was a lovely moonlight night and I passed some time chatting with an old boy who was fishing there. He told me of the huge fish you pull from the sea here with ease, and I told him of the total lack of fish I used to catch off Llanelli beach. He was a true fisherman though, as although he told me about all these leviathans, each big enough to feed a small village, which virtually leap from the sea into his bag, at that point he had fuck all examples of them which he could show me. And he’d been there most of the fucking day, as I’d said hello to him that morning. The twat.

 I wandered off down the beach and saw a loving couple walking hand in hand along, stopping to kiss and cuddle every so often. I gave them a cheery “Hello boys”, and they waved me a happy salute. 

 When I got home I resolved my thoughts of the previous night, and decided; “This is the life, the sea outside, a roaring log fire, and twenty eight Aussie rugby players on the box punching seven shades of shit out of each other, what more could a man want?”

 Oh, all of that, and two spare bottles of wine in case the missus wants a glass.

 The next morning dawned the day of the “Open House”. We diligently cleaned up, and made sure the place was spotless for inspection. We then drove off on our jaunt of the day. We stopped in Merimbula for me to buy batteries for the camera, and I found a convenient “Retravision” store. I find the batteries I need and head to the only cash desk open.

There’s a little old lady in front of me buying an electric toothbrush, bugger!

 So she starts yakking, and the nice lady at the counter diligently answers her. “Has this one got sonic three dimensional brushes, like the other one I brought to the counter not twenty minutes ago? Can it produce more brush strokes per minute than other oscillating or rotating brushes? Does the three dimensional ultrahigh vibration technique of the brush heads dislodge plaque from places that are not reachable by manual brushing? Are water and toothpaste directed beneath the gum line to help clean away plaque? Is it water proof and use a dry cell battery? Does it need expensive replacement heads?”

 I could feel my will to live ebbing. “It’s a fucking toothbrush you batty old twat, not a Star-Wars light sabre” I wanted to add, but out of politeness declined. Anyway, she eventually decided that she wanted one with contra-rotating bi-directional, anti gravity spoke shaves or some such crap and toddled off. I bet she had false fucking gnashers in any bloody case. I get to the counter and the bird behind there, whose name tag read “Misty”, tells me; “Oh no, I’m not batteries, why did you bring them here, that counter over there is batteries.” “But there’s no one behind that counter, and you’re sat here in front of the bloody till!” “Yes, but I’m not batteries, Brian is batteries, I’m small goods.” I was so gobsmacked by the stupidity of this, I even let such an easy feed line go to waste. Eventually Brian came back from his fag break and deigned to serve me. 

 Bloody hell fire, that’s the last time I shop in one of those places!

 We drive to Tathra, where Lee-Anne informs me that by taking the turning next to the graveyard we’d find the road to Cuttagee Bay, our destination. We get to the graveyard, and the only turning there, well there isn’t actually one there. Bethy reminds Lee-Anne that it was Bermagui where we turn by the graveyard, not Tathra. Right turning, wrong town. A mistake easily made.

 We find Cuttagee Bay, and it’s everything I was promised, a golden beach with a crystal clear mountain stream and rocky headlands at both edges. The trick, apparently,  is to ride an inflatable down the stream to where it reaches the surf, which then swirls you around for an hour or two before pushing you gently back to shore. But we didn’t have any inflatables with us so we didn’t bother. The main road crosses the stream on a wonderful wooden bridge, and all told it’s rather idyllic. We walk the dogs, romp in the surf and collect shells, and generally do the seaside bit.

 We then drive back to Bermagui. We go to the famous “Man who sued god” chippy who sell the best chips on the south coast. I avoid the vegeburger, due to past experience, and have a pineapple fritter. The girls have fish which they declare; “wonderful”. We stroll along the pier, and watch the pelicans being dive bombed by the shitehawks hereabouts. The harbour waters are crystal clear, and the harbour is full of fish. Bethy spots a huge (manta?) ray on the bottom, feeding, and I get there just in time for it to sod off out of camera range. Then we spot a seal playing games in the harbour water. I get a picture of it, just. Barnum finds all this contact with wildlife so exciting he takes a huge dump in the middle of the pier. I don’t take a picture of that.

 We drive back to the beach house. I drop them two off and head into Pambula as I’d run out of things to read, and no holiday is complete without a good book or twelve. I was hoping to find a charity shop, or “Opp Shop” as the Aussies call them, in order to get a second hand paperback or two. Instead I find a second hand bookshop. Fatal.

 I got back and told Lee-Anne I’d found a second hand bookshop. She's well aware of my tendencies in these.

"And?”

“I went a little bit mad there.” I had to admit.

I took the dogs to the “Panboola wetland reserve”. An amazing piece of community endeavour. They’ve taken a disused local racecourse, an old swamp, and several acres of unused paddock, and turned it into a well laid out, and carefully tended, wetland reserve. I got some good photos, and yet still somehow managed to avoid seeing any wildlife whatsoever. I don’t know how I do it.

That night we drove into Merimbula, and called into The Zanzibar café. We were the first customers of the evening, and were fussed over good and properly by Alby the owner. He informed us of some of the eating places he had established in Canberra before moving to the coast. Lee-Anne was suitably impressed as she knew them to be high class eateries. I’d never heard of them, but that’s nothing new.

Well the food was glorious, so good we had three courses each. The wines, which Alby recommended, were good and well compatible with the meals, the service was excellent, and it all cost a bloody fortune. But it was worth it. A fitting finale to the holiday.

We got back to the car to find something on the windscreen. At first I thought I’d got a parking ticket. It wasn’t. It was hand written note sarcastically thanking me for blocking access to the car park. I wanted to find the writer and point out to him that you could have got an articulated lorry past my car with ease. It’s not my fault whoever wrote the note is such a rotten driver! Honestly, some people.

The last morning I got up early, as the mornings so far had been sparklingly clear and I wanted photos of the sunrise. The last time I tried this stunt, when we came down to Bermagui, there were clouds in the way. And guess what? The dogs enjoyed the final walk on the beach in any case.

When I got back to the house, Lee-Anne told me; “That ravioli I had for starters last night, I think it had goats cheese in it.” Oh shit! (Litterally)

Lee-Anne is allergic to goats cheese, it has unfortunate consequences for her. At both ends. Luckily the effects didn’t kick in until we got back to Canberra. Luckily for all of us that is.

So there you go, a short tale on our hols. I hope you enjoyed it. If not, well I really couldn’t give a toss.