My new favourite place

I’ve never thought of Australia as a beautiful place, mostly because of the yellowing look of most of the trees that I saw there on all my previous trips abroad, however, this last trip I was happily proven wrong.

I planned a trip over to see my friend Hollie for her 30th birthday, but I told her I didn’t really like Sydney, even though I did want to see her. She said, well that’s alright, we’ll just go up to my parents house, they live at Smiths Lake near Forster-Tuncurry.

It is one of the loveliest places I have seen in Australia so far (greenery-wise). I just like the bush. Australian bush is very different to the one at home but I liked it (which surprised me, but there you go). The house was surrounded by trees and we were 5 minutes from the beach and 5 minutes from the lake. I had cicadas outside the window at night and birdsong waking me up every morning, it was awesome. The first night I was there I had a dream that there were monkeys outside my window but when I heard a kookaburra for the first time its laugh could definitely pass for a monkey cackle.

Apparently Smiths Lake is named after Joseph Smith as a bunch of his descendants settled in that area, and it’s a stronghold of the Reorganized Church now the Community of Christ. They were telling me about a person up in Queensland that one of her brothers met on his mission. They must be a really close descendant of Joseph Smith as they had an 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon with Joseph Smith’s name in it (whether his signature or not I’ve no doubt that book would be worth a lot of money, if they ever wanted to sell it).

I got to see a kookaburra in the wild for the first time, rosellas, bats flying overhead at nighttime, a lizard, wallabies and goats. Theres apparently koalas that live there as well but I didn’t get to see any. We were about 4 or so hours out of Sydney although it took ages to get back into the city. Sydney is my least favourite city in the world so far, but Lakes district NSW is my new favourite place in Oz