World Australia New South Wales Byron Bay

AUSSIE TRAVELERS Travel with Mike & Lois

Byron Bay 28 Apr 2009

Byron Bay: April 28 it's goodbye to the Sunshine Coast and Queensland and off to Byron Bay in the state of New South Wales. Because of our time constraint and the fact that we would have to travel too far inland to pick up some secondary south bound roads, we take the main highways toward Brisbane. Shortly after entering the Bruce Highway (now the M1)we pass the small town of Palmview and the amusement park of Aussie World and the famous Ettamogah Pub. The original creator of the Ettamogah Pub was Ken Maynard who started drawing the Ettamogah Pub in 1959. It was made famous through his regular cartoons in The Australasian Post. The Aussie World Ettamogah Pub was built in 1989 and the word "ettamogah" is Aboriginal for "place of good drink!" It stands 18m in height and is a leading tourist attraction. It was opened on 24th November 1989 with most of the furniture inside the pub built from trees cleared from the actual site. There's a 1927 Chevy truck on top of the bright red roof of the Ettamogah Pub. In the cartoon the theory is the truck was washed up there in the floods of 1946 and none of the regulars could be bothered to get it down.

It is another beautiful autumn day and we are now seeing pine tree plantations for many kilometres on both side of the highway. As we approach the Brisbane River the roads and bridges are being upgraded making for slow going much of the way on the Gateway Motorway(the Brisbane multi-lane by-pass). As we continue along and reach the part of the motorway approaching the Gold Coast the construction has been completed and we travel on a high-speed multi-lane motorway. Shortly we cross the border into New South Wales and see lots of sugar cane growing as well as bananas. This is very green, rolling countryside with mountain ranges inland as we bypass Murwillumbah, Pottsville, Mooball, Mullumbimby. We were amazed to see so many beautiful arched bridges on this highway.

As we approach Byron Bay, we're now high on a mountain with wonderful views to the ocean on the easterly side and valleys on the westerly side. We overshot our exit and so continued to Bangalow, a quaint little town with its surrounding farmland. As we continued along toward Byron Bay we were now on a very narrow road which took us up another mountain. In hind-sight we were pleased we had missed our turnoff because when we reached the top of Hatters Hill as it was signed, we were able to pull off the road and enjoy glorious views of the ocean and lighthouse at Cape Byron, the most easterly point of the Australian continent. We travelled onto Byron Bay on this winding road and took a drive through the very busy but laid back beach town before ending this leg of our journey at the Beaches of Byron Tourist Park which is set on 28 acres of parkland opposite the golf course, 3 kilometres to town and only 7 minutes walk to Tallow beach on there private walk way.