Ahh Australia - you shouldn't have

Australia has a bunch of national parks between Sydney and Melbourne.  We set out to check one out yesterday as well as to explore the country and hopefully see some Australian wild life.  Plus we wanted to flee the coastal Sharknado zone.

A few side notes on the previous day's shark sightings:

• No local beaches were closed yesterday and apparently the large sharks had moved off.  We saw something on TV the other night that there are 2 million surfers in Australia (2,000,003 while we are in the country) so I guess they take their beach monitoring seriously by regularly using satellite imagery.
• The shark attack statistics for all of Australia show 1 or 2 fatalities per year which isn't very many with 2 million surfers and countless ocean frolickers.  By comparison, we lose one to two 61 Days of Togetherness readers annually to choking on a piece of toast while reading the blog.  Be careful out there!
• The large school of salmon that enticed the sharks relocated yesterday.  They were swimming right in front of our cabin.  Smaller reef sharks were feeding on them according to our holiday park manager, who saw some fins, but we never saw any fins.  The salmon were out of casting range or I would have strung up the fly rod.

Back to the topic of national parks.  One park caught our eye on the map - Morton National Park.  We assumed Australia was excited about our visit and would want to commemorate it somehow, but a national park seemed like a little much.  We were thinking something  a little more low key named in our honor - maybe a cul-de-sac.  It turns out the park was named for old uncle Mark, who was a member of parliament in 1938.

Our trip to the park took us through the falsely named Kangaroo Valley.  There were no kangaroos there.  We took a nice bush walk in Morton NP at Fitzroy Falls.  The topography and flora were similar to Blue Mountain NP, but the bush walk was much less crowded which was nice.

Shark attacks are the least of our worries...

 

 

Fitzroy Falls...

 

Horsing around in our park...

 

No kangaroos, so we were reduced to photographing a roadkill wombat...

 

Sunrise this morning at our beach...

 

Saying goodbye today to our beach front cabin and heading south...