Tuesday, March 20
4:50 am Life - Ballina, NSW, Australia
20 C forecast high 26 C with some showers
It is still dark outside. It is raining hard at the moment. It will take a day or two to get used to the tropical rain that just buckets down one minute and stops the next.
This morning we will head to a shopping mall called Ballina Fair to buy a few groceries. We are still looking forward to our first cappuccinos at the Pelican 189 just outside our hotel. I think we will drive to Shelly beach for breakfast (unless it is raining, hard) when we set out.
Here is the first picture I took on this trip, while parked at the lookout overlooking Shelly beach.
We really do love this part of the world.
6:00 am Technology
I have just exchanged my Roadmap chip for Alberta/BC for the City Navigator NT Aus & NZ map in my Garmin Montana 600 unit. It worked perfectly. The caches I downloaded to the Garmin appeared on the map and the automobile routing worked. It is still a bit of surprise to me when something works seamlessly the first time. I would like to find one cache today. I need one cache for each of the next 3 days in order to fill in the squares for those dates on the grid for all the days of the year. When I last looked at the map for these caches the Montana said they were about 13,000 km away. Now the device says they are about 5 km away. This is good.
10:00 am Geocaching
I have found my first geocache in Australia! I have also found my first cache for March 20. According to the statistics compiled automatically by the geocache website geocaching.com this find also became the furthest find from home (12,641.408 km), the furthest South (S 28 52.040), and the furthest east from the East from the prime meridian (E 153 35.592). Not bad for a single find.
- GC28QMW - Whale Watching
I think was the also the location where I first saw a whale - it was near the mouth of the Richmond River . I thought it was a dolphin but there was a local environmentalist at the lookout and he explained that it was a whale (we really could only see the spout as it exhaled). That was likely about 25 years ago.
Here are 2 photos of the cache site:
The dense vegetation makes for interesting searches.
4:00 PM Life
This is what life is all about. We drove up to a friend's home where we were treated to a home-made hearty soup with fresh multi-grain bread, plus fresh fruit (the pineapple was deliciously sweet). A perfect lunch - healthy food and great companionship. A Grey Butcherbird joined us on the veranda for a bit. The view over the valley made for a perfect setting. Lots of laughter and good fun for all.
5:00 PM Birding
Here is a list birds we saw today:
- Brahminy Kite (first for 2012)
- Masked Lapwing (first for 2012)
- Silver Gull
- Grey Butcherbird
- Little Button-quail (LIFER)
- Cattle Egret (first for 2012)
- Australian Magpie (first for 2012)
- Australian White Ibis (first for 2012)
- Currawong (first for 2012)
All of these birds were seen while driving to Lennox Head or Lismore or while walking in Ballina. We were not doing any serious bird watching. The Little Button-quail sighting took awhile to identify. About 6 - 8 of the little birds scuttled across the path in front of us as we were leaving Seven Mile Beach at Lennox Head.
5:30 PM Life
We are beginning to re-learn the rhythm of the local culture - most shops in Ballina are closing at either 4 or 5 PM. Restaurants and pubs begin serving dinner at 6 PM.
After walking to a new seafood restaurant near our hotel, we discovered it was closed on Tuesdays. We then returned to a place on River street (the main street) where we had bought fish & chips on previous visits to this area. We bought a couple of packages of fish & chips (with the fish being John Dory) and returned to our balcony where we had our first fish & chips, with a lovely bottle of Australian red wine (a very thoughtful gift when we arrived yesterday).
(The cans of coke were necessary as we were still dehydrated from the airplane journey.)