Munched by a marsupial

So after Woolgoolga we drove south, planning to stop somewhere on the coast before reaching Sydney. It was Thursday, and we had arranged to pick up the key to the apartment that Arup had organised for me on the Friday. The plan was then to spend the weekend in the city buying clothes before starting work in the Sydney office on the Monday. Somehow I thought that the backpacker clobber I had been wearing since the 30th November probably wouldn't quite cut it in the office, no matter how relaxed the place seemed to be.

We had been tipped off by Naomi & co about 'Fredo's Pies', a pie shop on the main road south near a typical nowhere town called Kempsey. We got there less than two hours after Woolgoolga, just in time for lunch. The reason why we were so keen to stop here was because of the rare chance it offered to eat exotic species in the classic Australian pie format. Well, maybe not that exotic by Australian standards, but the 'croc' pie eaten by Hannah and the 'roo' pie favoured by me were pretty exotic for us.

(Just so you know, the crocodile meat in the pie looks and has the texture of chicken (doesn't all mystery meat?) but was quite fishy. I guess I might have been eating a 'salty'. The Kangaroo was minced and quite rich and tasted much better as a pie than as a 'kanga banga' sausage. Poor skippy.  Hannah)

Another few hours later and we stopped for a coffee at a small town called Bulahdelah. Hmmm, not much going on here. We realised then that although it would mean driving through the dark for an hour or two, we could actually make it to Sydney at not too unreasonable an hour. The freeway took us quickly to the suburbs and we directed the van towards Lane Cove National Park, and the campsite we had used when staying in Sydney previously. Since Woolgoolga we had driven 580km, not far off the distance from London to Edinburgh!

The wildlife at Lane Cove is pretty interesting, and we saw a tiny shy ring-tail possum in a tree, being dazzled by the torch of a park ranger. The bigger brush-tail possums were less shy, nosing around the camp kitchen while we ate our tea.

While sat outside the van playing cards (our favoured game is the traveller's standard - "shithead") another possum nosed around us looking for food scraps. For some reason our toes, poking out of our flip-flops, must have seemed particularly inviting - after sniffing around mine, this mischievous marsupial actually bit Hannah's toe. No blood, and tetanus jobs up to date, so no dramas, as they say here.

Robin

I really like possums, but I didn't  expect to be munched by a marsupial.

Hannah