We get to Port Macquarie late at night and find a nice spot in Town Beach car park to sleep in. We get up at about 8 am and go for a morning swim in the sea to revitalise and then had some breakfast on the beach. We haven’t started up Sandy since the battery problem yesterday so we start her up and see what happens…she starts like a beauty! We assume that problem is fixed for now and tackle our next problem which is the car speakers. We can barely hear them and we need music for long journeys. There are a pair of 6″9 inch speakers with the van don’t work. So we drive to a place called “Super Cheap Autos” to get them to test it out. To our surprise, they work so we spend about an hour re-wiring them to our van. We hear music loud and clear for the first time and we start to enjoy the road trip again!

We had to remind ourselves that we were in Port Macquarie to sight see and not fixing the van which was on our minds for the past 24 hours. We make a lunch of tuna and sweetcorn sandwiches and then drive to see Roto House which is one of Australia’s oldest European settlements to get a bit of history on the area. Next to Roto house is a Macquarie Nature Reserve which is home to Australia’s oldest Koala hospital.

This place is worth a visit, not only because it is free, but they put in a lot of work to save the lives of koalas that have been run over, been in bush fires or house the homeless. We spend the rest of the afternoon walking around Kooloonbung nature park situated next to the CBD. We find a night spot on Lighthouse beach to cook a meal on our camping stove before we drove to Coffs Harbour to sleep for the night.

We wake up in Park Beach, Coffs Harbour in a massive car park by the surf club. There were clearly a lot of other camper vans who slept here the same night as everyone as out on the camping chairs have a bowl of cereal. No morning swim today, instead we find a YHA where we have a shower and do some of our laundry as it’s getting a bit smelly in the van. It is here that we bump into Dave who we met in Sydney and is staying in this exact hostel.

In the afternoon, we got our first taste of the “Big Things” in Australia. We went to see the Big Banana which was actually smaller than we thought it would be.

We then went to the Botanic Gardens and Muttonbird Island Nature Reserve which is part of the Solitary Island Marine Reserve and had fantastic views of Coffs Habour. But the weather was great with lots of cloud and a little rain. We met up with Dave back at the YHA hostel and cook a meal together and have a few beers for the first time since having the van.