Flashback: Yamba, November '08

I never did get around to posting photos of our trip to Yamba last year. My Mum bought some kind of package deal where you paid $80 and got to stay 3 nights at 'Moby Dick Waterfront Resort Motel' in Yamba for $120. She got two and paid for one of the 3 night stays for us as a present for my birthday.

We stopped at Coolangatta so we (I) could get turkish pizza at Adana's Palace; we also went to a second-hand bookshop down the road. That was just as well, given that the weather took a turn for the downright crappy. I picked up a second-hand copy of The Playboy Reader, a tome published in 1960-something and filled with a selection of interviews, fiction and the like published in Playboy. It caught my eye because it contained the Playboy Interview with Martin Luther King, among other things.



Our expectations for our accommodation were minimal, but we were very surprised by how nice our room was at Moby Dick (odd name for a motel?). That was just as well given that we had to spend the entire first day inside because a) it was raining and b) I was laid up with the worst period pain I think I've ever experienced and was popping Panadeine Forte and Nurofen all day (to little effect). Our room was extremely neat and well-kept, even if somewhat dated. That matters little to me, as long as there's a comfortable bed and everything is nice and clean- which was exactly the case. The shower was nice and big. If a couch mattered then I would have been disappointed- it was well past its take-it-to-the-tip date, but I prefer bed for everything but eating, so it was tolerable.






Best of all was the beautiful view (thanks to a wall-to-wall window overlooking the river), but a close second was the fact there was a stovetop in the room upon which I could make coffee- and I had just happened to bring our Bodum stovetop espresso-maker thingummy and had ground up some beans just before we left. So there was none of the ordeal of bad coffee we went through when we stayed in Coolangatta, and thank god for that.




On the second day (my birthday, I think?) the weather hadn't exactly cleared but it stopped raining long enough for us to go for a walk in the morning, head into 'town' to buy some food and go for a drive in the afternoon. Still, I think we spent a fair portion of the day tucked up in bed reading our books.

Even with the pretty awful, grey weather it was easy to see what a nice place Yamba is for a holiday. Driving around, we saw lots of advertising for 'pet-friendly' holiday rentals- it definitely looks like the primary market is families, many of whom must own dogs. As with most of the towns along the east coast of NSW that I've been to, there was a real sense of familiarity. Certainly a world of difference from the tacky horrors of the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast in Queensland.



















On the third day we went for a bike ride out onto the breakwall and around the beach there. Saw an awful lot of crabs, including a very pretty dead one.









Later we took the 10-15 minute drive to Maclean. We bought snacks at a bakery and had a brief look around but didn't really do much. It's a pretty little town that looks largely geared towards tourists of retirement age; it was incredibly tidy and well-preserved for country town... I just don't think I'd want to live there.








That afternoon we went for a drive out to Angourie Blue Pool- that was really pretty, and if the weather was warmer it would have been a great place to swim. It's a freshwater pool right next to the beach. It was created, I think, when there was some kind of quarrying operation carried out.












For dinner on that final night we went to 'Sassafras', a pizza and pasta restaurant in Yamba. We'd received a $10 voucher upon check-in at Moby Dick, and as we were leaving the motel to head into town we spotted a Sassafras delivery car pulling up to deliver a pizza to someone at the motel. We asked the delivery girl (Swedish? There were a lot of Scandinavian girls in Yamba, for whatever reason!) for directions and she said we could follow her back, so we did.



We decided to do take-away rather than eat in, a decision swayed by the presence of at least one family with noisy children eating in the restaurant. Gam chose the meatiest pizza on the menu and I chose some kind of pasta dish. I can't remember what it was, but it was really nice, with probably enough food to do me for two dinners!




The next day we made our way home in pouring rain and near-zero visibility... that was when we stopped at the Logan Pound and adopted Xiaoxiao, who we brought home the next day. No wonder Yamba didn't rate a mention!