Bermagui

Today was full of bliss, although it did end on a bit of a damper. 

I woke up through the night with wombats foraging around my tent which was so cute. They are little beasts, a couple feet long and just dense and wide. They look like big cinder blocks covered in fur. My neighbors had a trailer and said that they woke up in the middle of the night to the trailer shaking cause a wombats decided to use the side of the trailer to scratch its bum! 

The morning was foggy, and pastures were still full of roos until the mid- morning when the fog cleared. I stayed long enough to let my tent dry out in the sun and made my way out of the campground back to the coast. 

By mid-afternoon I had made it to the small town of Bermagui (pronounced Berma, like the country, followed by gooey). A fellow camper last night told me it was a beautiful place to swim. I made it to the blue pools and it was magnificent. You park at the top of the cliffs and go down a long staircase towards the ocean. It’s a small rock cove in the steep cliffs. There are natural rock pools where the bright teal blue water is crashing ashore. In then further seals dive and forage for fish, and take respite on the rocks to warm. Between the natural rock pools and the cliff you walk down are two rock pools for people. There is one small, shallow entirely manmade pool set at the bottom of the cliff. It’s a rectangle, and only a foot or so deep. Clearly intended for children, unskilled swimmers, and sun bathers. Next to it is a partially manamde pool. One side has a wall and stairs, and it slowly grades into a natural pool and it’s blocked from the sea by a small concrete partition at the other end. In this pool there are nudibranches, starfish, fish, and other critters you would find in a deep tide pool. 

Now, the downside of the visit was the wind was ripping. I felt like I was going to get blown away, but nevertheless I persisted with the various other travelers, and braved the wind and the small waves in the pool. The ocean around us churned fiercely, with large waves breaking on the rocks between, but we were only threatened by the wind and not the currents or ocean waves and it was so refreshing. It was an incredible stop. 

Some intrepid travelers (read: idiots) decided to take find and snorkels out into the curbing ocean to snorkel with the fur seals. I’m not entirely sure why they thought snorkeling in a rough ocean breaking against rocks with wildlife that can be territorial in its natural element was a good idea, but I stayed long enough to see they made it back to the rocks safe before I left so I wouldn’t have a chance of witnessing any other potentially fatal activists they had in mind. 

I continued to my campground at Gillards Beach in Mimosa National Park, where I set up my tent overlooking the ocean, under the strict supervision of kangaroos. I cooked a delicious dinner of oyster mushrooms, sweet potato, zucchini and grilled green onions and ate my dinner which the roos munched on theirs in the grass around me. 

Following dinner I made my way down to the beach. The campground maybe has 20 campers in it, but during my sunset stroll a mile down the beach and back the only other bipeds I encountered were kangaroos. The beach is sandy and soft with occasional large rock structures cropping out of the ground making for some impressive contrast to the soft beach. As I walked I thought of little but the bliss of the day, and all the beauty I had experienced. 

I fell asleep early, tired from my full day, but was woken by the flushes of lightning in the distance around 11. Without cell service I couldn’t check to forecast, so I hunkered down in my tent and tightened the rain sheet hoping it would pass without incident. 

30 minutes later the rain started bucketing down and the sky was alight with dancing lightening. I decided to hunker down in my tent and see how well the tent withstands the rain and wind and was, so far pleasantly surprised by the stability. Now, around midnight as I type this note, the storm has passed and now just a gentle putter patter of rain remains. Hoping that things dry out the rest of the evening and will soon be back to sleep soon.