Kuring-Gai National Park

As you can notice, I´m falling a bit behind on my blog postings again. But if you just knew how much undone uni stuff I´ve been putting aside... I should be doing my week 4 readings now but instead I still haven´t gotten started with week 3 :/

On Saturday Carla, Shinae, Moy and I got up rather early in the morning to go to Kuring-Gai National Park. We took a train to Wynyard to catch a bus to Palm Beach. We sat in the bus for over an hour and half before we finally got there! We even managed to miss our stop, so we were dropped off at the final stop, where we had to wait for some 10min to catch the bus coming back to take us to the right stop. At that point I was getting frustrated and had serious doupts of ever making it to the park. But we catched a ferry - after waiting for another 50min - to Bason, where we started our walk. I think we walked some 8-9km altogether. The walk started with a rather deep hill, which was worth climbing since the views were beautiful. We went to see some Aboriginal engravings. It´s not possible to take good pictures of them, but they´re these about 1cm deep gravings on stone, forming a shape: fish, kangaroo, people, bird etc. We saw 2 engravings places before having our pickic lunch (sandwitches and fruit salad) sitting on a stone sheltered by bushes. Our trip back to the ferry was the coolest part of the walk! First we climbed up to this amazing lookout - unfortunately it had already started to rain a bit so our pictures didn´t turn out that great - and then we took this small, deep and rocky path down. It was some real hiking! We were lucky it was low tide when we reached the end of the path so we could walk along the beach shore to the ferry. If it had been high tide we would´ve had to go all the way back up to take another road. It started raining more before we got to the ferry shelter. Fortunately we had good weather and sunshine for the most of the time, though. After taking the ferry back to Palm Beach we sprinted after a bus trying to catch it but it didn´t stop. So we had to wait for 20min, sit in the bus for almost 2hours and take the train before we got back home. Even though we spent a lot of time traveling the walk in the park was worth it! Carla and I are planning on going back there and taking this another walk to see some Aboriginal paintings.

A lizard

Trees ruined by bush fires

A view from the highest lookout

After coming home and taking a shower Tim joined us for a pizza dinner at the Broadway Shopping Centre. We walked past the Chinese restaurant where Ningnign works and she generously gave us a lot of left overs to take home. So now we´ve got our fridges full of free Chinese food :) Pizza was good. I misunderstood the concept of BYO (=bring your own; meaning you can drink your own drinks at a restaurant) and went to buy a bottle of Coke from Coles. Apparently they only let you drink your own wine there so we got some complaints. After finishing our pizzas Tim, Carla and I walked to this pub to have one drink each. I was so proud of myself: Tim couldn´t persuade me to start drinking with him no matter how hard he tried :) I only had one drink of Baileys, milk and coffee (love it!) at home before going to bed.