Next Port of call

Trip Start Apr 01, 2008
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Flag of Australia  , New South Wales,
Saturday, May 10, 2008

So it was finally time to bid farewell to Sydney. We travelled about six hours up the Coast to Port Macquarie. Our hostel was the smallest one we've stayed in so far as only had about seven rooms. It pretty much just looked like a house; a blinding bright yellow house. With that said, it did have quite a homely feel (with a kind of beach shack feel) and is one of the friendliest ones we've been to and strangely enough one of the most social.
We had been up since 6am and were pretty shattered by the time we got in but we still managed an amble around town and one of the beaches called Town Beach. It was kind of strange to us the way a beach could just be so blandly labelled 'Town Beach' and yet be so far superior to any of our beaches back home. I mean, how many of our beaches have real powdery white sand and a gorgeous blue ocean? The next day we went back to the beach but this time had a paddle in the sea and dried off by leisurely laying on the rocks.
When visiting a place if they claim to have 'The one and only' of something, it is always a good idea to see it, Port Macquarie has the one and only koala hospital in Australia, so we saw it. The Koala Hospital itself was located behind the historical Rota House and located within the Macquarie Nature Reserve. Rota House is a restored National Trust house built in 1890 by James Condon for John Edmund Flynn, a land surveyor who settled in Port Macquarie in 1885. We got to the Hospital just in time for the guided tour where they take you around to watch the koala's being fed and hear all their stories. Most of the koala's were in there because they had chlamydia which is apparently very common. There were a few sadder stories of ones who had been in road accidents, one had been in two and was now left completely blind so could never be released back into the wild. There were also a few koala graves which was kind of sad and kind of weird especially as some guy who had been a good supporter of the hospital got buried by one of his favourite koala's, but hey each to their own. We also saw the intensive care unit and operating theatre but only through glass. They had a slide show going of some of the injuries that have been brought in, that was kind of disgusting and again quite sad. All in all it was worth going to see, especially as it was free and in the end the koala's were adorable. On the way back we had a walk to the marina, timing again was good as we got there just in time to see the sun begin to set which was just so pretty.
After the unpredictable weather we'd had so far we were not going to let the gorgeous weather in Port Macquarie go to waste so the next day we had our first proper beach day. This time we walked along a couple of the beaches, starting at Town we then went to Oxley Beach, Rocky Beach and finally settled on the popular Flynn's Beach. There began the start of our sun tans.
 
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