Our next stop was Port Macquarie which is only a few hours from Port Stephens. Here we stayed in a small YHA hostel which was clean and friendly. Once we arrived we took a walk to the Koala hospital, here there were around 15 Koalas which had either been injured or were recovering from infection. It was quite sad as some of the Koalas were quite ill, others were on the road to recovery and were so cute! We spent a few hours there learning about the Koalas and watching them being fed. Port Macquarie is a lovely little town and everything is within walking distance.
The following day we wandered down to the beach along the break wall. The rocks there are all painted with messages, jokes and drawings by people from all over the world who have visited - it was very colourful and gave the beach a different look, very arty! Unfortunately we left our paints at home so we didn't get to decorate a rock! We were walking along the break wall when we spotted a dolphin quite close, then another one and another one! Altogether we must have seen around 25 dolphins swimming in the waves - at this point I began to get very camera happy although most of the photos ended up being just the sea, they move so quickly! We stayed there sitting on a rock for 2.5 hours just watching the dolphins. The funniest thing was when Tracey was perched quite happily on a rock enjoying the view when a huge wave crashed against the rocks and soaked her! I couldn't stop laughing, it was so funny - I was on the rock behind her and the wave missed me, probably because it was all over Tracey! She saw it coming but couldn't get up fast enough. We left not long after that as it was pretty cold and Tracey was freezing by this point as she was soaked through.
I got up early the next day to go back dolphin watching, I stayed there for just over an hour and saw nothing apart from surfers, we must have been lucky the day before. It was an amazing sight. We left Port Macquarie later that day to go up to Byron Bay. Not much to write about Byron Bay as it rained the whole 4 days we were there! We managed to go down to have a look at the beach but the weather was so bad we didn't stay long. We were really looking forward to Byron Bay but the awful weather meant we didn't really leave the hostel! We did take a drive up to the Lighthouse one evening as one of the guys there had a car, that looked great all lit up in the pitch dark with the waves crashing below! The day we left Byron Bay (early doors) the sun was splitting the sky - just our luck!! That day Byron Bay looked lovely as we drove through it on the bus.
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