Down the Princes Highway to Melbourne

On Thursday 13th March we left Sydney and continued our journey south along the Princes Highway, which follows the coast of New South Wales and Victoria and leads to Melbourne and beyond. We'd heard that the southern coast of NSW was less touristed than the northern coast and so we were keen to see exactly how sleepy the coast towns down here would be (given the sleepiness of places further north, the answer is: extremely! The photo below of Tilba Tilba's Post Office / Petrol Station / Tourist Information Centre / Internet Cafe pretty much sums this up).

In keeping with our experience further north, we found the coastal towns to be all quite similar, with the coast itself and the beaches being pretty in an almost monotonous way. This might sound terrible, but one of the biggest problems we faced on the coast was deciding where to stop, when every town was as good/bad a place to stop as the next! However as we moved south and round into Victoria the sea was definitely becoming progressively cooler and rougher.

So I'll spare the roll call of places visited, but point out some highlights. One interesting incident occurred when we drove off from our campsite in Ulladulla with the rear side door of the van open. 50km down the road in Bateman's Bay we stopped for a coffee, when a friendly local informed us of said 'open-door' problem. After a few cross words between us (the understatement of the century) we worked out just about what had fallen out, and drove back towards Ulladulla. Fortunately the beach bag and Hannah's jeans had fallen out while we were still on the campsite, and had been retrieved - unfortunately I had lost a washing bag containing half my underpants, a T-shirt, and a shirt that I had bought in Buenos Aires. Amazingly, I did not even realise I'd lost the shirt and T-shirt until we reached Melbourne!

My 30th birthday came around on the 15th March (the timing of this trip was in no way coincidental) and we woke up that day on a campsite in Merimbula, a small beach town where we had an awesome brunch breakfast (with eggs benedict rivalling even the Camden Kitchen, no less) and moved on a short way round the coast to Eden. Eden proved to be less interesting than our guide book would have us believe, so we crossed the border with Victoria and drove to Mallacoota, where we camped up on the shore of a beautiful coastal inlet, and ate posh fish & chips for supper at the only restaurant in town.

After Mallacoota we stopped once again for a couple of nights at a place called Lakes Entrance before driving on to Melbourne, where we would meet some people that we actually knew for the first time since leaving the UK on the 30th November - at last we would have someone else to talk to other than each other!

Robin