Driving North and Mad Lizards
Trip Start
Dec 25, 2006
1
15
26
Trip End
Jan 30, 2007
The Gold Coast,
Australia
Saturday, January 6, 2007
Setting off with Hotdog as company, I bumbled along well as you do if the roads are kind to you over here. I hadn't travelled far only around an hour I think only to see a couple of suicidal lizards; they were much too large to be Geckos. These stupid pea brained lizards had decided to sun themselves on the hard shoulder. Front feet planted out wide, with their heads raised towards the sun in total worshiping mode. Ok, I know that black top is a good heat source for these animals, but surely they should have realised that being all of 50cms away from traffic zooming past at 110 km's is a good route to being squashed to death.
(photo)After awhile fed up with the driving, a trip off the pacific highway was called, I try to at least one a day when doing a long haul up this road. This time I went into a place called Yamba as I had been following the Clarence River from sometime and the villages or probably towns for Australia, which was really pretty and this looked like the likely source of it disappearing into the Pacific Ocean. Turning off I wended my way into Yamba to be a little disappointed it certainly wasn't as pretty as many of the little places that I have driven through.
Lennox Head
And I did see one of my most loathed creatures, a jelly fish. Back on the Pacific Highway I passed lots of banana plantations and the banana trees do look funny with their protuberances of bananas encased in silver bags, tied at the base of the bananas next to the trunk of the tree. Each tree had one of these silver bags. At first I thought they were for helping the bananas to ripen, but apparently it's to stop the greedy cockatoos and other birds from helping themselves to a very tasty lunch.
Carrying on wards and upwards, my next stop was to be Byron Bay, but the need for the toilet meant I stopped in Lennox Head. Which on reflection I was very pleased to have done and not just for the obvious reason. Lennox Head is a lovely small town just south of Byron Bay. The beach as you can see is beautiful (photo) for surfing, stopping in the town and searching like a woman possessed I found what I needed. This allowed me to then wander around the small high street for lunch as I decided to have some food and a drink here as it was rather nice. Choosing a little Café half way along and opposite a surf shop, and yes again Alex can't remember what the Café was called. But the Watermelon crush was beautiful, watermelon juice, pineapple juice, coconut milk and a dash a lime so wonderful. I slurped the first one down so fast I needed a second one when the not so shabby salad sandwich came out. I will be attempting, probably without much success to make that when I get home.
Setting off clutching some wine for my hosts, I went to Byron Bay (photo). This was pretty, but I found it to large, nothing was sign posted very well and generally annoying. It's a pretty bay, no doubting it and when you walk on the sand it squeaks and frankly that's about it for Byron Bay. Pleased to have been, but I wouldn't go back there.
Now zooming up the road to get to Surfers Paradise, I thought I was running late. But unknown to me is that when you cross the boarder from New South Wales into Queensland, you go back an hour. As NSW has daylight saving but QSL doesn't. So I actually arrived at Lillian's at approx the stated time. I thought I had lingered too long at Byron's Bay Lighthouse but I hadn't.
It was nice that Lillian said she would put me up and after brief hello's I jumped into the shower, wearing factor 30+ is great for the protection of the skin, but by the end of the day you feel very sticky and it's a real pain to get off your skin as it seemingly welds itself to it.
