Port Stephens

Here are the latest link for pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/gp/16718975@N00/9D37jv

After the Sunshine Coast we flew to Newcastle for our second home swap in Port Stephens. Port Stephens is a residential, but also a holiday and weekend get-a-way area for Syndeysiders, which is about a 3-hour drive north of Sydney. Port Stephens is a huge harbor, which is about 8 times the size of the one of Sydney. Like Sydney’s, Port Stephens has is rugged with numerous bays and coves. Our home is an apartment on the second floor at the tip of a peninsula, thus we have stunning views of the bay. Indeed it is a very beautiful area.

Port Stephens has the largest concentration of bottle-nose dolphins in the world. We took a cruise on catamaran to see them. About 15-20 dolphins approached our catamaran, including a baby dolphin. They were jumping….amazing to see. Two of them swam under the front of the catamaran. Check out the pictures…

Although this area is inhabited by koalas; in fact every street has a koala warning sign. Some signs indicate the number of koala deaths due to car traffic…this year only 10 have been killed so far, compared to 35 last year. So on one hike we looked through every eucalyptus tree to see if we could spot one…the only thing we got were stiff necks. I guess if anyone goes to Australia to see koalas, the best place to do it is to go to a koala sanctuary!

We spent some time examining the area. There are also some wineries in the area. Our home swap family is friends with the owners of one and we visited it: It is on a hill overlooking one of the arms of the bay and also has a restaurant on a deck. We also went to the beaches of each cove and hiked through Tamaree National Forest, including climbing up Tamaree Head for a view of the complete area.

We also drove to Hunter Valley, which is about 1.5-hour drive from Port Stephens and visited a couple of boutique wineries for tasting and purchases. At one vineyard we saw some kangaroos in the wild! At every winery I asked about Australian wines having screw-caps instead of corks. I always got different answers, but the general conclusion is that cork quality has decreased over the years and a lot develop a bacterium which can affect 10% of the wines. Screw caps have several advantages: no loss of production, wine can be stored upright, no need for a cork screw, etc. In fact even top Australian wines now have screw caps...presumably the wine can still age well, since the wine producer can control the amount of air trapped in the bottle. So definitely Australian wine producers are switching over to screw caps…at one winery we visited all production from 2004 onwards was only with screw caps. Question is: will the French catch on?

Now we are heading off to Melbourne….Georges’ hometown!