Jill’s directions have been impeccable on this trip. Despite the fact that we drove across over 6,000 km of Australia’s south coast, we never got lost once and it was all down to Jill’s superb navigating skills. One thing that did go wrong however was a little dirt road detour we took enroute to Wollongong. We were on a road that we thought had a few unsealed dirt sections. The map we were using made it look like the dirt sections of the road were at most a few kilometres long but it turned out that the whole 40km road was like that. Since the rough dirt road was so tough on our camper van we were limited to a speed of around 20km/h and we’d already been on it for half an hour when we realised we couldn’t continue. With the time it took us turning around and getting back to the highway we came from, that little detour had cost us over an hour in Kiama. We got there in the end though.

The last of the towns we stopped at on Australia’s south coast, Kiama was quite possibly the nicest, most beautiful town I saw in all of Australia. Just like my other two south coast favourites, Esperance and Port Lincoln, Kiama is a coastal town that features fantastic views of the water with some amazing rock and cliff formations. The weather was just gorgeous as we parked up and went for a walk towards the lighthouse right on the coast. There was a great ‘blowhole’ too; a large rock formation with an opening where the surging tide can rush through. This creates impressively violent displays of water being sprayed upward through the opening. Our campsite in Kiama was also one of the best I saw in Australia (along with Ceduna, Port Lincoln and the Pisces park in Apollo Bay).

When we arrived at the defacto capital city of Sydney, we had less time to explore than I would have liked, it wasn’t Jill’s fault this time so I can’t complain too much. It wasn’t a big deal anyway, we knew we’d be back for a week around New Year’s. My first taste of this place was really cool; walking around the city, especially the area right outside the Opera House was great. (It took a minute to figure out why there were so many people in formal attire around that area). The parks were just as lovely as I’ve come to expect and it felt suitably busy compared to the rest of Australia. I won’t write about Sydney here too much, like I said, we’ll be back at the end of the month, you can hear about it all then! Also, my next post about Port Douglas will be a bumper one so I don’t want to take up too much time with this one.