In my first post, I left off at MT and I arriving in Mallacoota, discovering we could no longer go into New South Wales for Christmas as planned. The next morning, we considered our options; I certainly didn’t want to just turn around and go back home. MT was amenable to finding someplace between Mallacoota and home to stay, and it seemed to me there was no place better than where we’d just been – Buchan Caves Reserve. Buchan’s population is about 385, so accommodation options are limited, to say the least. Luck was with us in this regard, as the Caves House on the park grounds was available and I quickly snatched it up for two nights.
Plans sufficiently re-arranged, we went off to explore Mallacoota, where birds were everywhere. Almost all of them new to me.
This was the good news. The less-than-good news is that the national park that surrounds Mallacoota and reaches into New South Wales still has a way to go in terms of bushfire recovery. While I was impressed with how quickly all the Eucalyptus trees had greened themselves back up, looking like furry sticks reaching into the sky, the underbrush was still devastated, and the walking paths were largely closed, still awaiting their turn for repairs. A large part of the coastal ecosystem is tea-tree scrub, and it doesn’t grow back after a fire, so the coast line will likely take decades before it looks healthy again. But still, eerily beautiful.
When our two nights in Mallacoota were over, we packed up the car again, and instead of heading north as originally planned we turned back around and headed back to Buchan Caves Preserve, and in a lot of ways, this was where our holiday got adventurous.
Oh, I thought you were caught in a quarantine net. Glad that was not the case.
No – if we’d driven over the state line, we would have – and we were only about 30 minutes from the state line when we got the text messages. Fortunately, my need to run around the woods stalking the woodland creatures slowed us down enough that we hadn’t planned on driving straight though. If we had, we’d have been either stuck in NSW or quarantine.
Well, thank goodness you love nature so much then 😉