Day: October 23, 2025

Up again bright and early at 5.00 am this morning in Jervis Bay, New South Wales, where I’ve come to watch whales. I was up at about the same time yesterday but only because I got up for a pee a bit earlier and couldn’t get back to sleep again thinking about the 5 hour road trip I had ahead of me. Today I awoke feeling much more rested having gone to bed very tired at 9.00 pm last night.

The drive was long but not too tiring in itself. The speed limit here is only 100 kmh and most drivers keep to it pretty well. The roads I’ve driven on have all been good or very good but many of the side roads in the open country are just dirt tracks. There are lots of Toyota Landcruisers and similar vehicles with snorkel tubes so they can go through deep water, the latter because although it’s dry now, many roads have signs on them saying they’re liable to flooding.

My Chinese built MG 5 hire car has proven to be excellent, trouble-free, fast (enough), quiet and comfortable. If this is the direction in which the Chinese motor industry is going the European manufacturers had better watch out. All that I’m missing is a built-in satnav but I prepared myself for that by buying a roll of duct tape as I was leaving Melbourne.

I use the tape to stick my phone running the Waze satnav app to the car’s dashboard and other than being a bit cock-eyed and difficult to view clearly because of the angle on which the phone is mounted, Waze has performed wonderfully just as it does in France. The biggest problem is that when the sun heats up the tape comes unstuck and if I’m not careful the phone could fall down. But so far, so good.

Some of the views coming north were gorgeous, but the roads besides being only 3-lane with preferential overtaking lanes every few kilometres, have very few areas where you can stop and take pictures. When on the higher ground the views swept off into the far distance with the low green rolling landscape peppered with homesteads each in its own land of several acres. Because land is so plentiful even the more modest country dwellings have plenty of space around them, often with a few cattle or sheep on them.

That’s not true of the houses in the townships, of course, many of which sit on tiny parcels of land and are incredibly scruffy with rubbish all around them and in front onto the road. Rubbish and graffiti seem to be big problems in the parts of Australia I’ve been to so far. Where my cousin lives and also here in Jervis Bay where pleasant ‘summery’ houses line the roads, rubbish sits in heaps in front of them on the roadside, apparently for days, presumably waiting to be collected by the local authority and disposed of. It’s mostly not a pretty sight.

Many of the houses here, it being a resort area, are two storey but where my cousin lives and in the countryside the homes seem to be predominantly low, single storey, many of the older ones with rusty, old-style metal rooves. I’ve been surprised by how small many of the houses are out in the country and I guess they comprise the bare minimum amount of living space for the people living in them. There are many contrasts. One minute you’re driving through scrubby open countryside with the occasional tiny house that looks as though it could fall to bits at any minute the next you’re passing an estate with a kilometer long access road, a luxurious homestead and fenced paddocks and horses.

I took only one shot of the countryside as I was driving here, when I’d stopped half-way for a snack and a cold drink. The view shown below was far from the best I had en-route.

I arrived at the motel I’d booked in Jervis Bay at around 3.00 pm. The weather wasn’t very nice and it was quite cool actually. This time there was a friendly, on-site reception office and shortly after arriving I received the key to my apartment, which although smaller than the one in Mallacoota and less well equipped without a cooker and washing machine (which I didn’t need anyway), is much brighter and more modern-looking. I like it.

After I’d got settled in I found my way up to Penguin Point where I took some shots of the bay and the sea. It was cold, windy, overcast and not very inviting and if you ignored the houses on each side overlooking the bay you could imagine what it must have been like all those years ago when those brave men had travelled for many months thousands of miles from home and set foot on these potentially hostile shores for the very first time.

There weren’t many people about – the season hasn’t properly started yet – but I got talking to a very pleasant Australian lady who was there with her husband (I guess) and grown-up son. She knew what she was looking for and to my amazement pointed out the occasional glorious sight of a whale’s tail breaking the surface only about 500 meters off shore and re-entering the water with a large white splash. I saw a few but not as many as she did.

I bumped into her later in the local fish and chip shop where I’d gone for a take-away. Just take a look at what I got for only just over Aus$14.

Amazing… I could hardly eat it all!