We had to keep pushing further south and crossed the state border to New South Wales and therefore only had a brief stop in Byron Bay which reminded me of Noosa. I was getting a bit bored of the beach-small-backpacker/tourist towns at this point because they all began to look like each other. It was over-run by run down campervans and tanned people in slinky clothing. I didn’t mind only spending a few hours there and moving on. A little further was the town of Ballina. There’s nothing there so they built a restaurant right next to the main road but to attract patrons they built a giant shrimp on top of it. This big thing was sadly one of the more impressive ones.

We stayed at Lennox Head that night and then continued south towards Coffs Harbour, but we didn’t quite make it there since we stopped at a campsite before Coffs Harbour.  We spent the rest of the day skipping rocks on the beach, jumping on the jumping pillow, and trying to make friends with a few resident wallabies who were less friendly than the ones at the zoo.

Jumping pillow

Coff’s Harbour is home to the first of Australia’s big things, the big banana. It’s located next to a banana plantation and also now an amusement centre which contain an artificial ski slope, an ice skating rink, tobogganing and a monorail tour of the banana plantations. We didn’t do any of the activities or buy any really tacky souvenirs shaped like bananas, and you name it they had it in banana shape and color.

The Harbour itself is really pretty and there is an island, called Muttonbird Island, which is connected to the harbour by a manmade breakwater so everyone walks to the island and has a short hike around it, which is well worth doing. A real-scale model of Captain Cook’s ship the ‘Endeavour’ made the scenery even more beautiful and ironically we had seen the same ship in Sydney in Darling Harbour. It is a museum and we wanted to go in because we didn’t visit it in Sydney but the exhibit only opened the next day and we had to be in Port Macquarie by then.

I insisted on at least driving through 1770 because it is the site of the second landing by James Cook and the crew of HM Bark Endeavour in May 1770. Obviously for this reason alone 1770 deserved at least a photo. Though once we got there we were pleasantly surprised how nice it was and stayed a bit longer. There were, beautiful beaches and hiking paths, and of course the sculpture commemorating Cook and his efforts. We found a nice beach with waves to finally use our boogie board that we had been schlepping around and went for a swim. It’s definitely a nice place to spend some time in.

The marker for Cook's landing spot and our van

Then we were off to Bundaberg. Bundaberg is most famous for its rum distillery which is called Bundaberg and Bundy for short since the Aussies (Another shortening from Australians) can’t be bothers to say names with more than two syllables. The ever present mascot is a polar bear because they wanted the drink to appeal to people in colder climates down south, because Rum is a tropical stereotype.

The other reason the town is famous is the Ginger Beer factory which I have to say I like more than the rum. It’s non alcoholic but it’s really good, so I was excited about going on their factory tour more.

We arrived in Bundaberg in the evening and decided to try to have a meal out again since we had failed yesterday. I had a craving for Chinese since I hadn’t had Chinese the whole trip and I missed it. Of course there was a Chinese restaurant in the town, which was much cuter than Rockhampton. We were the only patrons at the restaurant the whole time, it smelled of mildew, and the wallpaper and rugs didn’t match and the colors were overwhelming, but we decided to stay anyway even though we felt uneasy about it. We would have rather just taken the food out but then we had no where to go besides eating takeout in the van which was less appealing than eating in the mismatched soggy restaurant. When the food came, though, I have to admit that it was the best Chinese food I’ve had in AU. The problem is that there are so many Asian people here, that the food is actually properly Chinese and not the Americanized version which I’m used to. But in Bundaberg I had proper westernized Chinese food which was so yummy, or maybe it was because I’d been eating ramen for days before that but it was lovely.