We went to the Buddhist temple near Wollongong the next morning which was pretty and the workers were enthusiastic to talk to us and explain all there is to know about the temple. We ate lunch in their restaurant which I enjoyed especially since it was vegetarian.

Then we headed a bit further south to Kiama. We weren’t planning on spending too much time there but Kiama was adorable, so we spent the night there. It was a cute little town with pretty nature around it, the most touristy being the blowhole. A blowhole is a hole in the rocks by the sea that when the waves crash water blows through the hole creating the impression of a blowhole. We went to see it, but it wasn’t spraying too high, which I was disappointed in. At most it sprayed about 5 feet. We went to the information centre where all the brochures showed the water from the blowhole towering over people’s heads. I asked the lady in charge how often the blow hole looked like that. She said, “Almost every day, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it like this.” Great. There were two blowholes in Kiama and the second one was smaller and we went to see it as well with equal success.

We left Lake Macquarie early since we had a lot to do the next day. We wanted to go surfing in Manley, since we knew there was usually good surfing there and we hadn’t yet been able to surf on the trip. Miraculously, we made it to the beach without a hindrance through Sydney morning rush hour, but when we arrive there, there were hardly any waves. A few waves would come every 20 minutes. We decided to go for it anyway since we had come all the way out to Manly and we saw others trying too. It wasn’t a warm day and we rented wet suits as well as surfboards and therefore we didn’t get to use our new rash shirts which still had their tags attached. It was a very slow surfing day, and I only caught about 3 waves but never managed to stand. We had to leave Manley by noon and go to the opposite end of Sydney to Kingsgrove because there we had the rest of our stuff in storage.

Sydney

We had to take apart the whole van and luckily there was a lot of storage space under the bed which we utilized to the fullest and we were able to fit at least three times as many belongings than we had currently with us. We thought we would be even slower than we had been previously which was about 100km/h. We always joked that even if we wanted to speed we couldn’t. We could drive with the pedal to the medal and the van would not go faster. It was like cruse control. Going uphill was terrible because it would slow down drastically and we had to down shift so it wouldn’t stall. The engine would growl and the speedometer would slowly decrease and if there was a passing lane, cars would be passing us. Sometimes on rare occasions the van would have its good days and it would get up to 130 km/h which was even above speed limit. We kept trying to figure out what cased the sudden surge of speed, opening the water tank, full gas tank, air conditioning, but nothing seemed to do the trick. And now when we were so heavy the van had a good day. We drove down to Wollongong and briefly walked around the town, beach, and lighthouse.