Wedding anniversary
Trip Start
Jul 03, 2007
1
3
8
Trip End
Jul 10, 2007
Lord Howe Island,
Australia
Thursday, July 5, 2007
G:
Woke at the start of a wild storm with thunder and lightning as well as torrential rain - that is what it sounded like on our tin roof. All I could think of was 'shot' noise from all of my recent reading. It abated and we went back to sleep. I lay there for some moments of bliss thinking 'I can lay here not needing to cough'.
M:
Took a fierce codral so slept OK. There was a big storm in the night but the morning was beautiful - such a pity I still feel too lousy to enjoy it.
G:
Woke finally at 7am on our anniversary day - 27 years! The sun was shining, what a glorious day. Mandi didn't look too great, but that could just be a night after one of those cold mutis
01 Tree trunk
.M:
After a cup of coffee and an aspirin, I started to feel fairly human and we set off to walk the short track down to Ned's Beach. It is an attractive path through woodland quite unlike the mainland, with spectacular views of the sea and the Admiralty Islets.
When we got down to the water, still puzzling about exactly where to find the fish, we saw a little hut effort (containing wetsuits and other gear for hire) and a single set of booted footprints going straight down to the sea. So we followed them, and soon noticed some pretty silver fish about 25cm long in the shallows - aha! that must be them! But as soon as we got into the water up to our knees, we saw that the BIG shadows were not rocks but fish!! These were, we later learned, the kingfish. They are a metre or more long with yellow fins and tails and swim right into the shallows - it's quite frightening, having one's little toes in their space! They gobbled up our bread voraciously and would have followed us along the beach if we'd had more.
G:
After a cup of coffee we made our slow way down to Ned's beach. I was a bit sceptical about feeding the fish, but as we stood with the little waves just running over our feet, we could see thrashings of large King Fish, some more that a metre long as well as schools of smaller sand coloured species. The thrashing turned to a frenzy as we started to throw bread into the water. It was more dramatic than the scenes at Abraham's Pool at Sanli Urfa. Mandi was quite concerned about getting her toes bitten, as the fish came right into the shallows, so she stepped back. It was quite amazing to watch.
02 Feeding frenzy
M:We walked both ways along the beach, and at one end, where there were rocks and rock pools, we saw in amongst the fairly ubiquitous little silver fish, two absolutely magnificent parrotfish - about 30-35 cm but quite a solid fish, absolutely bejewelled in blue and purple and red and green. Stunning.
G:
When we had run out of bread, we walked to the end of the beach and back. At the near end, we again came across shoals of the smaller fish and a pair of gaudy parrot fish. They are so unlikely.
A man came down with buckets of food - bread and fish pellets that unleashed such a frenzy. He said that they are no longer allowed to use fish guts as it attracts sharks.
M:
We got back to the hut and sat in the sun to dry my wet shorts, and soon noticed a man getting out of a vehicle carrying two buckets. Clearly he was the official fish feeder. Soon a number of old barleys arrived, some to snorkel and some to watch the fish feeding. But suddenly it started dripping from a big grey cloud coming over the headland and before we knew it, we were all sheltering from quite a downpour. Very picturesque!
03 Ned's beach
G:The rain squalled in, but that wasn't sufficient to stop a couple of the old folk who had joined us, from donning wet suits and heading out into the water.
M:
When it eased, the fish feeders went back to their buckets, the snorkellers went into the water and we set off up the track. Of course it started raining again but we were pretty well sheltered once we were in amongst the trees. We stopped at a bench on the headland to admire the wonderful light on the sea and saw a waterspout! It only lasted a couple of minutes and we were just fiddling about deciding that it was much clearer through my polarised sunglasses when suddenly it just wasn't there anymore. It must have slurped itself up in a matter of seconds.
G:
We walked back up to Ebb Tide but stopped at the bench at the top of the cliffs. The rain had stopped but we could see some other squalls out beyond the Admiralty Islands, and there was a water spout. I called Mandi to look, and we watched as it fizzled out after a few minutes.
M:
Back to our cottage for tea and toast and now Gray's gone on a walk and I'm going to take it quietly until it's time to go down for our glass-bottomed boat trip.
G:
I had a coffee and then set out to climb up to Malabar. The path starts out on the Ned's beach road, so I took the short cut. The path started to climb through saturated meadows, so my new shoes now look properly used. Here you enter reserve and low forest as the path leads up the spine of the ridge
04 Feeding the fish at Ned's beach
. It is pretty hard going, but the views back across the island become more and more spectacular. At the top, one can look down the cliffs that fall 200m sheer into the sea. A few tiny specks of gulls wheeling on the updrafts are visible. The peak is 209m in about 1km, so the climb is about the same as yesterday's.I didn't stay too long having frightened a pair of middle aged women by coming up behind them unannounced. The next stage along the cliffs to Kim's lookout was another kilometre or so was slightly easier, though some of the rocks are quite slippery and going down is hard on the knees. Kim was a boy who died at age 20 and apparently loved the hills, according to his plaque. The view across into the unpopulated North Bay was spectacular, as was that straight down the lagoon.
It was down hill all the way from here on those wooden log packed-with-rock stairs. Chatted briefly to a man who had just come up from the beach - a serious climb he said, so I decided to do that another day even though I was pretty early. I took the left fork down to Old Settlement beach and walked back home through the village. I was home just after 1pm, having walked for about two hours.
M:
We went down to "town" a bit early so I could buy a cossie! To go snorkelling in
05 Storm clouds
. I did so at Larrups, the local "boutique" which sells all sorts of clothes and had an interesting ten minutes trying on while listening to the shop assistant and a customer (or perhaps just dropper-in) gossiping about the experience of the daughter of one of them who was cyber-bullied at boarding school. First the whole concept of cyber-bullying had to be explained to the amazed listener and then they agreed that, while hard for the kid, it was probably good for her to learn to stand up to bullies, she'd learn resilience and resourcefulness and the main advantage was that it would make her appreciate her island friends. Quite a change from the kind of crap we get from the mummies of our precious princesses!!G:
We had some lunch, tuna and avo mix on left-over boiled potatoes, before walking down to the shops for Mandi to buy a cozzie. I sat in the sun next to the post office while she was shopping. We then walked down to environmental tours to wait for 3pm. Unfortunately the wind was getting stronger and a group arrived with five noisy children. Because they were unable to explore some of the choppier areas, we had an excuse to postpone.
M:
Then a long wait around (with a herd of noisy and unpleasant kids) at the boat-shed for a decision to be made as to whether the wind allowed us to go or not
06 View from Kim's Place
. Eventually the skipper said that he'd go, but the wind wouldn't allow him to go too close to the reef so if we wanted to move to another day, we could. We took the opportunity to bale largely to avoid the kids and went instead to walk in Stevenson's Reserve in the middle of the island. Its trees are labelled and it's a pleasant walk for an old crock like me.Home via Joy's which wasn't so pleasant - I have huge difficulty even climbing four steps so the steep hill on Middle Beach Rd is killing. The silver lining was that I stopped to puff on a bench halfway up the hill and we discovered a path through the woods that cut off the steepest corner of the road.
G:
Stopped off at Joy's shop for provisions and then battled up the hill. We did find a short cut across the corner that saved Mandi some slog.
M:
We had been booked into the Bowlo for their fish 'n' chips night so were all dressed and ready at 6:30 for Julie's husband (who never told us his name) to drive us down. As a romantic Anniversary Dinner, it left a lot to be desired, but as a good feed and observe-the-locals-in-their-natural-habitat, it was quite fun. We ate upstairs in an overflow dining room with (despite Gray's entreaties to the barman) the TV tuned (quite quietly fortunately) to Wimbledon and all the tragic couples sitting side-by-side on the same side of their tables so they could stuff their faces while gawking
08 The lagoon
. The food was good, though, and at about 7:30 when we'd just had time for a very expensive Cointreau at the bar, the fish lady came and drove a big group of us home in her minibus.G:
At 6:30 Julie's partner drove us down to the Bowling Club for our anniversary dinner. This involved standing in line to place an order for fish and chips, before buying drinks from the bar and retiring to the dining room upstairs. Here we came across a curious sight, about five couples sitting at individual tables, but not sitting facing each other, but sitting next to each other watching TV.
We sat as far away as possible, facing each other. The beer was good, cascade, and the fish wasn't bad, so we had a good celebration. There was just enough time to have a nightcap before the bus took a group of us home to our various accommodations.
