South Coast NYE

Amazing display of fireworks - or waste of millions of dollars... you decide!

New Year's Eve in Sydney is something to behold. If you haven't joined the millions of people who cram the foreshore every year to see the New Year brought in with the most expensive and elaborate display of pyrotechnics, then you are missing out! You need to do it - at least once, and once is probably enough. I have done it a few times, and although the human congestion is relieved slight after the kids display at 9pm, it only gets drunker and crazier at midnight... then there is getting home! The trip home at this hour is filled with adventure (so it seems when you're drunk and high on NYE kisses), glass bottles and rubbish everywhere, 2 million other drunk revellers trying to get home, and of course the Old Bill desperately trying to keep some sort of order.

Packed up and ready to go! An old Morgan in Bowral.

As I have done in the past, I sought to get away from the city and it's millions firework-watchers. Sometimes up the coast, sometimes at friend's places with a few people. This time it was down the South Coast. We snuck away on the 30th, as the days following Christmas are a nightmare on any road leading out of Sydney. We headed down towards Mittagong and Bowral for lunch, before staying in the country town of Goulburn for a Jazz concert.

The fire rating system in the country - starting at Low, then jumping to High!

Marry Poppins.

Bowral Oval - home of Sir Donald Bradman.

Country New South Wales is beautiful and vast. Paddocks, rolling hills, eucalypt and quiet country towns are what you get here. Bowral is one such town. Founded in 1861, it served mainly as a rural retreat for Sydneysiders. Now is it quite a busy place, with 12,000 inhabitants. Cafes and cake shops, parks and antique shops, Bowral is a lovely little town to stop for lunch, enjoy a coffee on the main drag and watch the weekend traffic go by. But, if you're a cricket buff, Bowral was where the greatest cricket player of all time was born and raised - Sir Don Bradman. Boral oval is a 5 minute walk from the main road, and boasts the Don Bradman museum, his childhood home (just a short boundry away... sorry!), as well as a white-picketed cricket pitch which is lovingly maintained. Bowral is also famous (for a small town in the country) for the author of Mary Poppins. That's right, P.L. Travers (pen name), lived in Bowral from 1907 till 1917. She migrated to England in 1924, and eventually wrote the first of the Marry Poppins series of books (7 books, the last one published in 1989) in 1934.

Look out for those curves!

Can you tell what it is yet?

Noteworthy on the trip is Wombeyan Caves. Only 170kms south of Sydney, they are close yet far away due to the 30kms of dusty unpaved roads that takes an hour to do. When I say 'cave,' I'm not talking about a small opening in the rock, just large enough for a few Neanderthals to hang out, but a huge network of underground stalagmites and stalactites. There are a few caves you can visit, but we chose the self-guided tour of Fig Tree Cave. The caves were discovered in 1828 by the famous explorers John Oxley and John McArthur, by accident on the search for good grazing land for cattle. The commentary during the tour is quite cool - set off by motion as you move along the path, lights come on, and the voice describes the history and geography of the cave, and points out the shapes that you can see. I didn't see any that he described, but I saw one of my own!

Hampden Bridge in Kangaroo Valley, completed in 1899.

"I'm the only pub in the village!"

The Pub's fireworks display.

After the caves, we headed down towards to coast but decided to drop into Kangaroo Valley for New Years Eve. We had some family staying there at the campsite, and while visiting, discovered that the pub in town (the ONLY pub in town) was putting on a firework display. Awesome! Although nowhere near the money spent as Sydney, the size couldn't compare, and there was no harbour, the atmosphere was bigger than the sum of the people there! The back paddock of the pub was packed with adults, kids and even a few dogs, all settled in with their drinks and glow sticks at 9pm to watch the fireworks supervised by the NSW Rural Fire Service. After all that excitement, I watched the Sydney fireworks at Midnight on the box, finished off the bottle of wine I had been sipping on for the last 3 hours, and hit the hay. The pub kept going till 3am, but not me.

Kiama harbour.

Beautiful Kiama!

Last stop on our little 3-day getaway was Kiama. 120kms south of Sydney, it's a wonderful stop along the coast for a few hours. A nice walk along the coast, take a couple of pics of the Blowhole (that always waits till your finger is off the button to blow!), or even feed the always-hungry pelicans at the harbour take-away chippie. If you've never been before, it is worth it - and you can see that on the weekend when all the Sydneysiders pop down for the day. Apart from the occasional crowds, it is a pleasant place. Just north of Kiama there is the the Nan Tien Buddhist temple, which is the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere - quite a beautiful sight! From Kiama we headed back to Sydney along the Scenic Drive, a road that comes out over the Pacific Ocean and follows the cliff from 50 metres out. A definite favourite of mine is the South Coast, right up there with the Blue Mountains.

Oh well, it's back to reality!