Perfleshing

My goodness, winter is crap! I mean, all these cold nights and uncharacteristically grey days we’ve been having, it’s just like England in early October. It makes you pine for the coast, tropical North Queensland preferably, but if that’s a bit out of reach, then South Coast NSW will do. Perfect for reflection and refreshment, or Perfleshing as they say.

For the second coast trip in a row I based my travel mostly around eating opportunities, arriving in Bateman’s Bay for brunch at this little place by the water. After the big breakfast I was keen to walk it off and waddled a little north of here at Maloney’s Beach, the first of several beaches on the beach part of the tour.

With the first sand broken, I whizzed south down the Princes Highway to a place called Mystery Bay, the only mystery being how somewhere so beautiful can be so empty and pristine, so refreshing and perfect, so pleasingly mild for midwinter, so suitably designed for a little read propped up against a rock.



We have perfect and refreshing then, so where’s the reflection bit I don’t really hear you ask? Courtesy of the many inlets and lakes of course, both at Beauty Point (another one of those acutely accurate Australian place names) and, my spot for the night, Narooma.





I’m still reflecting on the rather fine fish and chips beside Wallaga Lake from Saturday evening! (By the way, you may notice I talked about brunch and dinner, but not lunch, which I am happy to say was non-existent, in case you though I was a fat b*%$”^!).

After a breakfast of fruit salad and bacon, scrambled eggs, mushrooms, beans and toast (ahem, ok ignore that last paragraph) on my little veranda at Anchors Aweigh, it was off to the green green grass of (almost, kind of a bit like) home. Fuelled with a large flat white in the village of Tilba Tilba, I meandered along a little lane in the foothills of Gulaga (Mount Dromedary). Cows = cheese = ABC Cheese Factory tastings.



Given I didn’t really eat that much free cheese, I stopped for a reasonably late lunch overlooking the beach just north of Narooma, a customary last stop and farewell to the perfect sands and seas of the South Coast. The drama of the trip home was heightened by a red fuel warning light and, for the first time ever, relief at reaching Queanbeyan’s bogan petrol precinct, only a couple of hundred of kilometres but in many ways a million miles from the perfleshing Pacific.