(11/3/07) Pt 158 Red Rock (Pictures)

Nice little Caravan Park behind the barrier dune and Red Rock with private paths, beaches, shower, laundry, store… Found a spot with shade and a tree full of lorikeets, black backed magpies and mynah birds, with red-eyed tufted pigeons and plovers, a yellow-billed shore bird with long legs walking around camp. The surf constantly roars in the background just over the sand dune. The beach there stretches for many uninterrupted kilometers. (It’s best to walk the beach when there is a strong wind so the midges don’t bother you.) Red Rock itself is a magnificently gnarled rock headland that looms about 100 feet above the beach. It was the site of an aboriginal massacre around 1890. Some men escaped by swimming into a cave under the rock that extends almost a mile back to come out at a traditional Aboriginal trading place, Jewfish Point. On the north side of Red Rock is a river inlet and salty water lagoon where we took a dip, swam out to a sand bar and floated around. Across the river is Yuraygir National Park which is mostly an unroaded nature reserve on this end. When we arrived on a Sunday, the little park next to the campground was busy and people were swimming across the river to walk and play on the beach on the other side. As I mentioned, we joined them for awhile. Monday the park was vacant.

This was the first spot where Joe had organized stories and pictures to post on the website. We found a place (after a hint from the guy at the bottle store) called Working PC in Woolgoolga (Woopi for short). Woopi is a great little town, not too snooty as some beach communities get. It has a large population of Sikhs and a prominent white Sikh Temple. Lee and Rebecca at Working PC were great. We really liked the feel of this town. (I didn’t like the feel of Windows Vista as it constantly crashed Windows Frontpage 2003.) We ate out at a Thai Restaurant and stocked up on food for our trip.

Tuesday we stopped by The Yarrawarra Aboriginal Culture Center. We had good talk with the artist tending the gallery/store for the day (another Joe) and bought a t-shirt, cards, a book etc. The book was full of stories from oral histories of elders. It gives you a feel for the dialect and personality of the people without academic overtones. The artwork was better than anything at Nimbi or anywhere we have been.

Overnight I thought of some ways to outmaneuver Vista. They resulted in the separate verbal and picture style in this travelogue. It is easy to compose offline and post quickly. Back in Woopi again, we split a “Super Works Burger”. While we were chowing down on that delectable treat, we saw another café worker folding up his shop’s outside tables and wondered why, since our watch said 2 o’clock and most Aussie businesses stay open until 3:00. (Ah, the lifestyle, eh?) Larry had mentioned a possible time difference, but we’d forgotten that NSW was on daylight savings time.

Then we headed out on the Pacific Highway getting in at dusk to Crowdy Bay NP after taking a wrong turn into a “tidy town” suburb.