Boat Harbour Point

Well that all ended with a bit of a damp squib, which is probably best. The firies were up even earlier at about 6am. By the time we stuck our head out of Bertha the place was like a ghost town, The wind had turned to the west, but the weather was cold - unpack the fleece!

We took our time clearing up and decided to try Mystery Bay again and found the road was no longer closed so we went down to see what we could find.

Mystery Bay (https://www.southcoasttravelguide.com.au/myster…) obviously has a mystery, but we weren’t going to attempt to solve that. It also has a very large natural campsite, one of the few remaining on the east coast of NSW, but we didn’t need to camp. The reason for going was to find the beach of souls, a place I had been told about at a previous campsite. The beach is a sacred place for the local aborigines, some of whom still camp permanently at the Mystery Bay Campsite. There is a mound of blue stones and no one knows where they have come from. If you sit near the stones then you feel closer to your ancestors. Well it has to be worth a try.

We found the bay and the stones without too many difficulties, although the campsite has an eeriness about it that made us a little uncomfortable.

Well I tried, I did my best mindfulness experience but I didn’t feel any closer to my ancestors. But I gave it a go.

We went over the next headland but there wasn’t much to see so we wandered back to Bertha, drove down the road a bit further, looked at another bay and then decided to find out if it was safe to make the journey to Canberra.

The Narooma information centre was open and said everything was fine, but things can change. We looked around the museum about the local lighthouse before going to find a coffee to plan our route.

As we sat deciding whether to go north or south to Canberra, the skies opened and it poured with rain. That was probably a relief for a lot of people.

We took the road north, via Batemans Bay. When we had driven south, we had taken the tourist routes that went closer to the coast. The route we took today was the A1 that was more direct but went through a great deal of burnt forest.

Later we went through the town of Mogo, full of boutique shops, rather hippie and Asian. Several houses/shops in the high street had been burnt down. One shopkeeper said that Mogo used to be a tourist town in the middle of a forest, now it’s just a town in the middle of a burnt forest.

The road from there was very steep and made Bertha puff a lot. Second gear at 40km/h was not fun. The problem was that some of the bends were hairpin and signposted for 25km/h. From that speed, on a steep gradient, I couldn’t get Bertha into third .... well I could, but she just slowed down. Fortunately there are plenty of overtaking lanes and, for the longest stretch, there wasn’t anyone behind us. We came across more burnt out forest and a small patch of smoking forest, but the rain continued to fall so we guess all but the largest fires would be dowsed “naturally”.

We arrived in Canberra, found the campsite, went for a swim ( they have a pool), made dinner and have worked out all of the sights we will need to see. The weather is set for warm with a chance of rain - all adds to the adventure!Read more