blinnov’s blog

Part 1.

I love traveling. Especially in a car. And it gets best when there is no any time constraints, no appointments, and, especially, no strict timetables of a kind “2pm-3pm- Muesum, then 30 minutes – group photos at a fountain, then lunch and accommodation in the hotel”. Yes, the latter acts as even better torture than compulsory study of something epic like “War and Peace” or complete works of Shakespeare on literature classes in high school, which usually develop untreatable allergy to all classic literature in persons being tortured. I am not talking about not having a plan for the trip at all, indeed it is good to have rough schedule on paper or at least in your head, but it should be something pretty abstract like “We have 5 days, want to get to that nice place and visit this museum, that park and a nice little cafe. And, if have spare time, climb that bridge”.

This was my first vacation since we moved to Down Under. I felt very tired at work and decided to take one week off, turn the computer off and escape. Just to get that nice feeling of being tourist again.

Our plan was as simple as it gets. We wanted to spend from four to six days away from Sydney and, ideally, get to Victoria, stopping everywhere where we see anything interesting as hidden gems appear much often than we usually imagine. For example, consider this spectacular view from Camgewarra lookout (it is not that far from Berry or Nowra, I will write about these little towns in a next few posts). Note – large panorama opens in a new window.

This lookout alight a little bit aside from busy roads and someone who has just to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible have very little chances to enjoy this view in real (picture above can only reflect a little fraction of landscape magnificence that is visible from 678 meters above sea level), which definitely deserves special mentioning.

Well, it happened so we could not make all way down to Victoria because number of interesting places on the way exceeded all our expectation. History of Australia as a country now hardly counts 200 years when any given road stone in Europe can tell almost thousand-years long tale (which could be about civilized ways of redrawing borders, I presume. Or about five hundred years old brewery, which I must go one day), but indeed it offers enough sights for experienced travelers and those who pretend to be one of them.

Of course, I am not the first one who ever written about all of these things. I just wanted to try to escape “the great encounter syndrome” when someone shot gigs of photos and filmed hours of raw video is trying to pour them all on his or hers online friends. I cannot recall many things that would be worse than a five kilo photo album (often stuffed with photos of same style “Me and there is a strange thing behind me, but it is too dark/too bright because it was midnight or midday”) given to you or, which is even worse, a three-hour cassette with something filmed in mode “take everything until cassette is over or battery is dead” without any traces of editing. Hope someone will find my expressions I put here and below more interesting than that.

Anyway, we did not manage to go to Victoria this time. But we have seen enough to keep me busy writing about our experiences for more that two weeks – we visited:

1. Berry,
2. Kangaroo Valley,
3. Batesmans Bay,
4. Moruya,
5. Mogo (Mogo Zoo and Mogo Old Town),
6. Pebbly beach,
7. Tilba Tilba,
8. Cobargo,
9. Bega,
10. Merimbula,
11. Pambula,
12. Eden
13. and finally Ben Boyd national park.

I will write about any of those separately in following posts, until then, here is one more picture taken from Cambewarra lookout which is 678 meters above sea level and overlooks more than 140 km of landscape.

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