Port Macquarie Trip 2018, Days 7 to 9: Last days in Port

As my Mum used to say when we’d all come here together, the time here goes so fast. You arrive, looking forward to a lovely week in a lovely place, and suddenly three or four days have passed and you are planning your last days. And so it is. Suddenly it was Tuesday night with just two full days left. How to spend them? Well, one was …

Favourite walk and restaurant

Len felt by Wednesday that he would be up for the Coastal Walk (which we’ve done about ten times now) but we had a Plan B if he felt that he couldn’t complete it, which was to head out at one of the many road access points along the walk and call a taxi. Fortunately, we didn’t need it, though Len’s cold had freshened by the end of the day!

The way we do the walk is to park opposite our favourite restaurant in town – the (still) one-hat The Stunned Mullet – and taxi out to Tacking Point Lighthouse, the designated start or end point of the walk, depending on which direction you do it. We then walk the 7.5kms back to the restaurant, stopping for a cool drink at Flynn’s Beach en route. The walk does continue another 2kms to the other side of the township, but this does us very nicely.

It’s a beautiful walk – along beaches (there’s always firm sand to walk on down near the water to keep me relatively sand-free!), through the edge of the Sea Acres Nature Reserve, and over Windmill Hill. Some beaches were empty save for the odd walkers like us, while others had various activities going on – such as dogs at the dog-allowed beach (we always love this one – it’s so joyful) and more nudists than we’ve ever seen at the unofficial nudist beach. We did see a pod of dolphins, and a couple of whales way out. I was sad though not to see the large goanna on our path until I’d scared it. That’s what you get for looking at your feet rather than the path ahead. We got a good look at it under the bushes but it was too dark there to photograph it. Oh well.

And all too soon – well, just over 2 hours after the start – we were back at our car and, after a change of shoes and a quick comb of the hair, across the road at The Stunned Mullet. We enjoyed some chats with the (original) owner who was doing front of house. We talked windows (he’s renovating his home) and stemware (the return of the coupe glass for sparkling wines), and we enjoyed delicious-as-usual food. For mains, I had the venison, as I usually do here albeit done each year with different flavours and accompaniments, while Len had Wagyu flank steak.  Entrees and desserts were wonderful too. We like the delicate fusion of influences here – such as Japanese with Mediterranean, classic European and Aussie. Len’s dessert, for example, was Japanese cotton cake with fresh julienned nashi, dried apple/nashi crisps, lemon myrtle gelato.

After that it was a quiet afternoon – funnily!

Koalas – and other bits and pieces

If yesterday involved treading familiar ground, this day saw us doing something a little different – after, that is, catching up on the washing, trying an interesting new coffee shop called Black Fish, and playing our usual round or two of mini-golf. (The mini-golf hasn’t improved, but at least the holes had been cleaned up a bit since the day before resulting in fewer unintended obstacles in our paths!)

The new thing related to koalas. Port Macquarie has, for a long time, been associated with koalas, which is why the Hello Koalas Sculpture Trail is so appropriate (and why it was developed in the first place, having been inspired, apparently, by the UK Hull’s Larkin with Toads project!) However, it’s not the Hello Koalas trail that we did today – though we did see four more at what we did do, which was to visit the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital. I’m not sure why we’ve never done this before, because it has been operating since 1973 (though perhaps not always as a tourist site). It started with two local residents, Jean and Max Starr, looking after sick or injured koalas at their own home. According to the Koala Hospital website, they established the not-for-profit Koala Preservation Society to run the Koala Hospital. The first hospital was built on the current site in 1975 by the local Apex Club, and was replaced by more substantial buildings in 1985. It’s only government support is, apparently, the land on which the building stands, for which they pay a peppercorn rent.

The Koala Hospital is free to visit, and they offer free guided tours at 3pm (run by, of course, volunteers.) It was fascinating and inspiring – and, although we know quite a bit about koalas, we learnt more. The hospital’s goal is three-pronged – rescue, rehabilitate and release – but they have a number of permanent residents whose injuries and/or health are too poor for them to ever return to the wild. These koalas may be blind, or have lost a limb, or have had, for example, their feet severely burnt in fires. We saw several of these permanent resident koalas during the tour. The hospital also carries out research into koalas, and is involved in koala conservation.

We ended our day by dining at the Boathouse restaurant at Sails (the revamped Pelican Shores.) It was fine. I did enjoy the grilled half-scampi that came with my salmon. Why, though do some restaurants feel they have to provide music with an insistent beat but not much else to it? No music would be better than that.

South to Cessnock

And then, too soon, the week – our Windy Week, as it turned out – was over. It was a less active one than usual, owing to Len’s cold, but was a great break, nonetheless. We are planning a slow trip home via the Blue Mountains, with the first stop being Cessnock in the Hunter Valley. It was a smooth, uneventful drive, with a stop for a cuppa at Unearthed, which we discovered last year, on the highway at the tricky-to-spell Coolongolook. Tiny, tiny Coolongolook is buzzing with at least four cafes, but this one with its healthy take, and outdoor tables is special. I had a delicious g-f date and walnut banana bread.

We lunched at the simple Log Press cafe at Draytons Winery in Pokolbin – cheery, with light tasty food – and then dined at the smart but friendly 221 Restaurant at the Royal Oak Hotel in Cessnock in the evening. My, the five or six people in that kitchen worked hard (as did the short-of-staff servers), catering for the restaurant, the bar and lounge area, and the beer garden too – with restaurant-style dishes in the restaurant (as you’ll see in the pics below) and more traditional pub-style food (pizza, schnitzels, pies, battered fish, in the other areas.) Our restaurant food was delicious and we were very pleased to have got in – as I think we were the only walk-ins who did. That is, we saw several turned away. Pays to be early!

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