Fifty kilometres to Ulladulla, only to find out they don't allow skinny-dipping in the pool which is all I could have done as I'd left my swim trunks at home! Yes, they had some for sale at the entrance but they were of the budgie smuggler variety which I wouldn't be seen drowned in even if I were an ex-prime minister.
So I submerged myself in a book rather than water and what better book than Peter Carey's "30 Days in Sydney - A wildly distorted account". He writes: "If you can confidently say you know a city, you are probably talking about a town. A metropolis is, by definition, inexhaustible, and by the time I departed, thirty days later, Sydney was as unknowable to me as it had been on that clear April morning when I arrived." I can relate to that.
For a bit more armchair-travelling, I also picked up "The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow" about a whacky Australian who sailed a Mirror dinghy from the U.K. to the Black Sea; "Going Postal" about Nathan Millward who travelled the world on a postie bike; and Paul Theroux's "The Happy Isles of Oceania" which I'd read before but want to read again except that I'd given my earlier copy away to another 'islomaniac'. And finally "The Stranger in the Woods" in which Christopher Knight leaves home in 1986 at the age of twenty and disappears into the woods (shades of Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild"?). For three decades he speaks just one word, 'Hi', to a passing hitchhiker. I can relate to that too.
Old habits die hard and my pockets are always full with Smackos which meant I made friends with Archie, a German dachshund, and his owner as well as a stray brown bitzer who suddenly became very fond of me.
I leave you with a photo from outside our favourite Chinese restaurant in Ulludulla. It's literally bumper to bumper. I'm glad to be home again!
