How to get to Mallacoota? Fairly easy, just toss a coin! :-) Well, that is what we did when we had a weekend to spare, wanted to get out of Canberra and didn’t know where to go. We would let the coin decide where to take us. So we looked on the map and decided to either go North or South and then toss the coin and every big split of the highway to determine our further course. Worse case we would toss ourselves in a circle and end up in Canberra again, but what were the odds of that happening?

First toss of the coin was at home in Canberra. Heads for North, tails for South. Toss. Tail. South it was. Next toss was a the first mayor split of the highway at Cooma. Here the road went West or East, and so our next toss was there! This way we tossed our way through Australia and finally ended up in the most South-Eastern corner of Australia, in Mallacoota.

The drive down there was a lot of fun because of the tossing and not knowing where we would end up, but also the endless quiet roads surrounded by the emptiness of the land, made it quite impressive. The last stretch of the trip turned out a bit stressful though. Because even though there is not many cars, there is a lot of kangaroo’s! Especially around dawn… And judging by the number of dead kangaroo’s we saw on our journey along the roads, that wasn’t something we would like to experience… But we nearly did…

To get to Mallacoota we had to turn off the Princess Highway and follow a smaller, quite bendy road for 25km to get to Mallacoota. The bush was quite close to the road and dawn was there so we had to be very sharp on possible kangaroo’s sitting on the side, or just right on the middle of the road. And so it happened. Little hill. Soft right turn. “KANGAROO!”. Breaking. Kangaroo hopping onto the road, probably scared by the sound or lights of the car. More breaking. Peeping tires and a sliding car. Relief. The car stopped about 5 cm in front of the kangaroo. I looked him straight in his scared eyes and off he went, hopping back very quickly into the bush! Pfffff… we got lucky! Thanks to some amazing breaking and car handling from Sal, we avoided impact and let the kangaroo, which after close eye contact turned out to actually be a wallaby, live to fight another day. Adrenaline was pumping and with our hearts in our throats we continued the last bit of the trip. Luckily we didn’t have any more of those close encounters…

The toss that let us to our accommodation in Mallacoota turned out to be a brilliant one! The toss brought us to the Karbeethong Lodge. A very cute little B&B in an old wooden house, with a great view on the bay and run by very friendly people. Breakfast included and with very reasonable rates. A clean and nice room, and a lovely big fireplace in the common area to drink wine and play Stratego at! :-) Definitely worth a visit!

Besides the weather, the weekend turned out to be great! Even the rainy days didn’t bother us so much. Went up the coast for a drive to Eden, a walk and a nice lunch. Furthermore we just relaxed and enjoyed our weekend. The drive back was long and it turned out nearly impossible to find a place for lunch, but we had fun as well. Although I do promise not to scare Sally anymore with my improvised car-haka when she starts overtaking! ;-)

This entry was posted on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 10:36 and is filed under Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.