I got wet but I could cope. The flies could not and so dispersed.
This was my second visit to the Royal National Park but this time I took the private ferry from Cronulla to Bundeena. Despite being private (ie you can't use an Opal card) the ferry was quite jolly and to my British eyes exceedingly cheap (though possibly not quite as cheap as the Opal card network). They even let me pay the concessionary fare though I had no Australian documentation to prove I was a pensioner.
Bundeena is quite a small place but you can buy fruit and a hat and get a decent cup of coffee. What more could anyone want?
Away from the town the beach is quite a change from Manly where I was the other day. There must have been thousands there. At Bundeena, which has a beach that is about the same size as one of the Manly ones, there were no more than half a dozen and they all came off the same ferry as me.
A sign said the water was very deep and I guess you can't surf in deep water. The upside of this is that they occasionally get visited by large aquatic mammals. But there were none today.
I walked along Jibbon beach, a remarkably beautiful area; round the head and along the clearly marked trail back to the town. It was a nice walk but all around were signs of devastation caused by fire. I thought this would not be a great place to be on a hot, dry summer's day, but it is spring here now and it was a rather damp afternoon.
The vegetation that remained was a lot more like the sort of thing you see on a Crocodile Dundee film (my reference standard). Green, exotic and quite strange. But there was little more evidence of wild life than there had been at the other end of the park (Waterfall). Just some extraordinarily large ants, butterflies, may flies (or are they october flies here?) and the odd bird. Quite weird.
Earlier in the day the Noisy Miners (who I am coming to love) made up for it. I saw about 20 of them harassing and driving off a huge grey bird of prey. Then there was one chasing after a crow in flight and another buzzing an Ibis on a roof. They are described as the gangsters of the bird world but really they are the kamikaze pilots.
All the Noisy Miner activity took place outside the park. I didn't see a single one inside.
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Jonathan Brind