Melbourne to Sydney

Though it would have been much (much!) cheaper to have flown directly from Melbourne to Sydney, driving the east coast of Australia is one of those bucket-list experiences – like Route 66 in the US, but with beaches instead of desert.  Being the two most populous cities in Australia, there is – inevitably – a motorway, and it’s possible to complete the journey in just 12 hours.  The scenic route is a lot more meandering, and our journey took five days to complete.

We spent our first night on the Mornington Peninsula, just one hour’s drive south-east of Melbourne.  Mornington is a weekend destination for Melbournians, so the tourist attractions are aimed more towards locals than those found in the city.  We spent a couple of hours indulging at the Peninsula Hot Springs – they have 20 different pools arranged on a hillside (some hot, some very hot, and some freezing, for cooling down after a few minutes in the sauna), with the hilltop pool offering stunning ocean views.

Mornington was also our first experience of “rural” Australia.  Ok, so it’s not exactly the outback, but it’s not a cosmopolitan city either.  We had dinner at a Italian restaurant full of locals and it felt just like a North American diner, complete with a team of slightly haggard, but hugely-friendly waitresses… and lots of tattoos!

Before leaving the peninsula the next morning, we paid a brief visit to another of its tourist attractions: the Enchanted Adventure Garden, home to hedge mazes, treetop walkways and lots of weird and wonderful sculptures and statues.

At the end of a long and not especially remarkable day of driving, our second night was spent at Lakes Entrance – a small town 200 miles east of Melbourne.  The last couple of miles heading into Lakes Entrance are quite spectacular – the road snakes down from ‘Jemmy’s Point’ with views across the Gippsland Lakes and the Bass Strait (the sea, in other words!) as you enter what has become a popular holiday destination for Melbournians.

For whatever reason, Airbnb options in Lakes Entrance were quite limited, so we spent the night in a motel.  I’m sure Kit has stayed in a motel dozens of times before, but this was only the second time for me.  Maybe it’s my love of old-school Americana, or just the fact that I’ve read one too many Jack Reacher novels, but I like the concept of having your own parking bay in front of your own numbered front door – no elevators or electronic door cards here.

The highlight of day three was a visit to the town of Eden.  Set in the magnificent Twofold Bay, Eden began as a whaling community, and the boardwalk where we spent a good part of the afternoon has information boards and tributes to the various sailors and their vessels who once plied their trade here.

Eden’s Aslings Beach is as stunning as the weather was hot that day.  At the end of the beach, we found two swimmers in an outdoor pool, and a couple of fishermen but – despite there being several lifeguards on duty – we saw more people in the pub at the top of the hill than we did down by the water.  Maybe the weather was too hot even for the locals.

Fast-forward 24 hours and we found ourselves in the town of Bermagui.  In fact, we didn’t see much of the town, and I’m not that sure there was that much to see, but the coastline here is a mix of small sand beaches, cliffs, and lots of rocks, perfect for scrambling.  We walked / climbed our around the headland for a couple of hours, without seeing a soul… unless you are counting the numerous crabs and seabirds whose indignance at our intrusion was clear to see!

The chance to spend quite as long as we did in Bermagui only came about because of bad weather.  Our original plan had been to take a boat tour out to a local beauty spot, Montague Island.  But owing to thunderstorms, that sailing was cancelled, and so we only briefly visited the town of Narooma where the boat would have sailed from.

That night was spent in the small gold mining village of Mogo.

Although the main coastal highway passes directly through it, Mogo is a small village with most of its buildings appearing to be straight out of the gold rush era.  There are no hotels, no bars or restaurants, and no supermarket, just a general store, several souvenir shops and art galleries, and a cafe.  Very bohemian!

In over a hundred nights we’ve booked through Airbnb over recent years, our stay in Mogo with our host, Jo, was certainly the most memorable to date.  Not because the room was spectacular, or because of the location, but because Jo had thought of absolutely everything, and gave us the most amazing welcome!

We had three different types of pillow to choose from, 12 different types of tea, Nespresso coffee, chocolates, fresh eggs from her “girls”, the most enormous bath towels, CDs to listen to, DVDs to watch and a barbeque to cook on.  And as we had arrived late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, we were indulged with a delicious roast lamb dinner at no charge, and endless apologies for not being invited to eat in the main house (all of Jo’s children and grand children were visiting for Christmas, so things were a little crowded!).  We left the next morning with a hug from Jo – another Airbnb first for us!

With no particular check out time, we took our time the next morning… well it was Christmas day after all.  When we did finally leave Jo’s place shortly before midday, we had five hours of driving ahead of us.

Our first stop for this final leg of our drive to Sydney was at Pebbly Beach in the Murramarang National Park, just a short drive from Mogo.  It being Christmas day, I was expecting the beach to the deserted, but in fact, the car park was almost full, and on the beach we found a couple of hundred sun-seekers, largely Chinese tourists who were were obviously making the most of the good weather while all the Aussies were home opening presents and cooking the Christmas turkey.

We remain somewhat bemused by its name, since this was yet another glorious sandy beach, with not a pebble in sight.

Later in the day, and now just an hour short of Sydney, we visited the beautiful town of Kiama (key-arma).  Kiama’s big tourist attraction is its blowhole: a huge spout of water created when large tidal waves are forced through a hole in the coastal rocks.  Apparently, this is the largest blowhole in the world, but as we approached, it became obvious that December 25th was not the best day to be visiting it: the area around the blowhole was teeming thousands of mostly Indian and Chinese tourists.

We decided to give the blowhole a miss, but did find a space to park and took a wander around the town instead.  It’s a really attractive town with plenty of hills on which houses and apartments have been built to take advantage of the fantastic ocean views.  Being on a direct train line into Sydney, I imagine house prices here must be astronomical.

After leaving Kiama, we put our foot down, heading directly for the hotel at Sydney airport where we would drop off our hire car and spend the night.  Although there was a giant Christmas tree in the hotel reception, and we were met with three very cheerful “merry Christmas” welcomes by the check-in team, it really didn’t feel like Christmas, and we bypassed the festive menu in favour of burgers and hotdogs for dinner!

While checking out the next morning, we came across this pair in the hotel lobby.  They look remarkably similar to a statue that we encountered during our Cafe Culture tour in Melbourne, so I suspect there could be a famous Aussie artist at work here:

Although not every kilometre of the journey offered sea views or spectacular scenery, we certainly enjoyed the five days we spent on the road between Melbourne and Sydney.  The roads were excellent throughout (not a pothole in sight – presumably the result of there being no snow and very little ice in this part of the world), we encountered almost no roadworks, and the traffic was consistently light.  In fact, we saw almost no HGVs throughout the entire journey – they must have been on the motorway, or perhaps freight trains are used more extensively in Australia than they are in the UK.

Generally-speaking, the bigger towns that we passed through were fairly soulless places, while many of the smaller towns and villages ooze character and charm.  Of course, not the picture-postcard Norman-church-and-thatched-cottage look of traditional English villages, but we saw numerous other examples of the gold rush era buildings that we photographed in Mogo and Kiama.

One of the strangest things encountered during our journey was the varying price of fuel.  As luck would have it, we happened to stop at the gas station with the cheapest prices we’ve yet seen – 99.9c / litre.  Elsewhere (and even just a few miles down the road), we saw the same fuel being sold for 122.9c, or sometimes as much as 139.9c.  Considering even a couple of pennies difference is significant when buying petrol in the UK, a 40% difference seemed crazy.  I wonder why the Aussies don’t shop around more.

Also noteworthy were some of the road signs we saw during the journey.  Both the Victoria and New South Wales governments seem very keen to dissuade people from driving whilst tired, and there were at least 10 different signs passing on this message, ranging from the quite poetic “Rest, Revive, Survive” to the more blunt “Yawning? A Microsleep can kill.”, to the vaguely ridiculous:

Of course, local wildlife featured in many of the other most noteworthy signs:

And while we’re on the subject of wildlife: