North from Sydney

Emboldened by our success in dirt camping in Torquay and Canberra, we decided we could probably score another free night in Sydney. Centennial Park sits in the middle of the city, and we pulled up to the curb on a street bordering the park at dusk around 10 in the evening. We got out our two tents and trekked into the trees looking for a place that wouldn't be easily seen from the road. Setting up the tents, we were startled to hear rustling in all the trees around us. Looking up, we could make out what we finally realized were bats winging through the dark. They were about the size of ravens, and while they were nearly soundless as they flew, getting in and out of the trees seemed not to require the same sort of stealthy approach as hunting through the air did, and this was the cracking and rustling we heard from the ground.

The rain came down hard during the night, and I woke in the morning with my feet in a puddle at one end of the tent. The rain must have come down in the middle of the night, because I had fairly well-developed dishpan feet, if there is such a thing. We broke camp at dawn, getting up before six to minimize the chance of someone reporting us. We headed north, getting into Newcastle in the evening, making one stop along the way. The rain didn't let up all day, at some times coming down in sheets, and visibility would have been poor even if the inside the car wasn't continually fogging up from our sopping camping gear. We did stop for a few hours in Dee Why where Jordache got himself a surfboard, hitting the surf as the rain beat down on the waves. We had limited success as the surf was quite choppy, but it was pretty exciting to be finally out in some serious water.

We pulled into Newcastle and got a hotel room at the infamous Formule1. Only $69, but you get what you pay for. A tiny room with a queen-size bed that only one person can walk around at a time, and four feet above the bed, running along the wall, is a cot. We had gotten the same room in Melbourne (Formule1 is a national budget chain), and were pretty disgusted with it. It is amazing what two nights in the woods will do to change your perspective, and after sleeping in a faulty tent in the rain, the hotel room looked pretty good to me. We hung our wet gear wherever we could, and then headed out in the morning with a renewed sense of purpose and slightly drier gear.

The last three nights we have been camping at a no-frills campground just outside of Crescent Head, paying $5 apiece a night and surfing as much as possible. There were bathrooms and two open-air showers and nothing other than that. We got used to being less than clean, but swimming in the sea twice a day leaves a film of salt, significantly better than a film of dirt.