Bart Bear's Blog

Whenever we are traveling near the coast, we try to check out as many beaches as time allows. Here are some from our trip down to see Unka Mark and Aunty Vicki. The first photo is across the mouth of Bateman's Bay. Canberrans just call it "The Bay". It is just 1.5 hours drive from Canberra. There are lots of beaches around the bay, some shallow and calm, just great for kids. The second photo is Wimbie beach. The islands in the background are the Tollgates. These mark the entry to the bay, and have colonies of Little Penguins, shearwaters and petrels living on them. Third is the lagoon at the southern end of Narooma Surf Beach. This beach has good surf and spectacular rock formations at each end. The lagoon usually has lots of seabirds in it, but they mush have known I was coming and flew away. We stayed at the Seahorse Inn in Boydtown. This inn was built in the 1840s to service whalers, but was abandoned when the owner went bankrupt. It was renovated in the 1930s and the 50s and is a great place to stay. It is right on the beachfront and the beach is long and wide. Milkshake, Scruffy and I spent hours on this beach. We found a small shrub where we could hide and watch for whales and birds. We also hunted along the tide line for pretty shells and any interesting flotsam that the waves had bought in. A sharp lookout for monster crabs was kept, but none were sighted. I love our beaches, they are bigger and better than any I have seen during my travels around the Pacific islands.

Labels: beach, Eden, New South Wales, south coast

Wondering where I've been for the last couple of weeks? Well, winter has hit Canberra in a big way. It's sub-zero Celcius when we get up to take Mum to work and it hasn't got above 10 degrees C for weeks. What do bears do when the temperature drops that far? Big bears hibernate and that's what I've been trying to do too. However, when the Oldies decided to visit Unka Mark and Aunty Vicki ( M and V) to see how work on their block down near Eden was progressing I had to go too. No small bear would ever pass up the chance of a road trip. You can see that there has been a bulldozer at work, getting the foundation for a big shed ready. Actually, the concrete floor was poured on Tuesday so there should be a barn there when we next visit. The night sky is really dark there because the nearest towns are around 30 kilometers away. We tried out our new telescope and it worked fine. On Saturday Unka Mark drove us all out to Green Cape lighthouse, one of my favourites. The last time the Oldies drove there the road was an absolute nightmare but this time M and V's big 4-wheel drive had no problem with it. We spent some time looking for seals and whales but they were somewhere else. And it was almost as cold down there as it is here. I'm not sure that I like winter.

Labels: Eden, family, lighthouse, south coast

One thing I like about travelling is that the Oldies usually find interesting places to have lunch. Sometimes it is a picnic spot with a spectacular view and sometimes it is in interesting old buildings. This spot had a bit of both. I am sitting on a small table in one of the dining rooms in the old historic Seahorse Inn at Boydtown, near Eden in southern NSW. This place was built by convicts in 1843 for Ben Boyd. Boyd went broke soon after and the Inn gradually fell into ruin. It was restored in 1936 as Boydtown started to come back to life as a holiday place, and was renovated completely in 2006. Not many places provide seats for small bears to sit and watch boats, sea-eagles, wrens and lizards while their Oldies fill up on hamburgers and prawns (you can guess which one had what, can't you?), so I really do recommend it if you are ever travelling that way.

Labels: Eden, New South Wales, south coast

I like playing at the beach, provided it it crab-free. I like the way that sand can be wet and hard or dry and slithery. The slithery stuff is fun because no matter how hard you try to walk up a slope of it, you end up sliding backwards. Down on the beach at Eden I found this sand cliff, almost a metre high, which is really high for a small bear. The game was to climb to the top without sliding back down or getting buried in a sand slide. Mum gets a bit cranky if I get dirty or sandy. The trick is to use the grass roots to haul yourself up the vertical cliff. Once you are high enough to be in the tangle of exposed roots it is easy to make it to the top. The first stretch is the hard one. You can see how much I had to stretch to get onto those first root. Isn't climbing fun?

Labels: beach, climbing, crabs, Eden, New South Wales, south coast

Last weekend we went down to Eden on the south coast of NSW for what the Oldies call a "lost weekend". I don't understand why they call it that because we were never lost at all. The Oldies found a great place to stay. it is called "Eagle Heights" and the cabin we had was right on the cliff edge. We could see ocean all the way round half the horizon. Dad took his binoculars and we spent some time looking for whales but didn't see any. Later on in the year would be better, when the whales are swimming back to Antarctica and stopping in the bay here for a rest. We did see lots of boats and people trying to catch fish. The balcony had this nice wide rail all around it and Scruff and I wanted to walk along it but we weren't allowed to go there by ourselves. I don't think Dad was worried about the 30 metre fall to the bottom of the cliff, although Mum would go ballistic if we got wet. What worried them was that one of them would have to climb down and retrieve us. What we all really liked was drifting off to sleep with the sound of the waves breaking on the rocks of the cliff.

Labels: Eden, New South Wales, south coast

It was a cold, drizzly afternoon when this photo was taken. We had gone down to Merimbula for the Jazz Festival in June 2005 and the weather turned bad. I had to wear my cold-weather gear that Auntie Vicki made for me. We went for a drive down to Eden and up to one of our favorite lookout spots where you can see boats and sometimes even whales. While the others were looking out to sea I climbed over the safety fence to see how deep the inlet was on the other side. Mum was not happy.

Labels: climbing, Eden, New South Wales, trouble