To Port Maquarie

It was suitable that I sat down at lunch the other day in the middle of a heated discussion about banana prices. Because our weekend trip was taking us to Coffs Harbour, the only place in NSW that can grow bananas and, and only one of the few growing regions undamaged by last season's cyclones. View Larger Map Seeing as plans are firming up to leave Oz for good soon (gasp!) we thought it would be good to get in another driving trip. This turned out to be our longest by far and my first 1000km+ journey with me behind the wheel. The first day consisted of a drive up to Port Maquarie, a small seaside resort six hours up the coast. This would normally have been quite scenic but we managed to choose one of the worst weekends to do it. We drove through countless bursts of torrential rain (heavy enough so that we could barely see 10 metres in front of the car) and not much sunshine. Port Maquarie didn't look it's best in winter either, and arriving in the rain, in the evening, looking for something to eat and only finding a few signs written in a classic 1970's style wedge-shaped font promising "Chinese" food was a bit discouraging. We did find a Thai place that looked ok but was a little surprised to find, for the first time, not to see a single Asian person (staff or customers) in a place that serves Australia's favourite takeaway. But maybe that was just a sign we'd left Sydney.