Wooyung

Just a quick camping post. We recently did a quick weekend trip to the coast, staying at Wooyung Beach, part of the Tweed Valley, Northern Rivers region. The Tweed Valley is not a very dog friendly location. Wooyung Beach Holiday Park being the only dog friendly campground I could find. It is a lovely bush setting creating an ideal combination of bush and beach, which is a positive. Dogs on leash are welcome, the beach is just across the road. It is a 10km beach with an off leash section for dogs just down the road a bit from the campground, closer to the black rocks end of the beach, which is also where the surf is best.

I did enjoy the bush setting and the preponderance of water dragons was enjoyable, they were quite friendly, happily lazying in our proximity, even Ada did not seem to bother them. I kept a close eye on her though, just in case she decided to get a bit to familiar with them. They were quite friendly coming into the camp site to see if they could scrounge a snack, obviously used to being hand fed. Scrub turkeys were the other local inhabitant. The turkeys were inclined to be careless and get a bit too close to Ada who dearly wanted to chase them, having to be on the chain in camp was frustrating for her but essential for the safety of the turkeys. The campground is surrounded by nature reserve so the area is a lovely relaxing green space. The campground provides fire pits, so it is nice to have the luxury of an open fire and with the recent rain and changing season, fire bans have been lifted.

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The beach itself was a good surf beach but unpatrolled and with so few people about it is worth noting that if you get into trouble you are on your own and there are rips and rough surf. I was looking forward to a couple of days of swimming but that was not to be, the area was inundated with stingers, the ever present blue bottle and they were present in high numbers, the highest density I have ever seen, so there was no way I was going into the water once I realised what I would be sharing it with, not a big fan of pain. Jellies seem to be the only thing that is flourishing in our oceans at the moment and from the evidence I saw on the weekend they are certainly flourishing, aside from the huge numbers of blue bottles I also saw a significant number of small blue blubber jellies. The weather was a bit rough and that might account for the large numbers washed in. The photo below was just taken on my phone but the whole shoreline was covered in the little monsters. The next day was even worse.

Just by way of an aside if you are curious about the rising tide of jelly fish in our oceans I can recommend Juli Berwald’s pop science memoir Spineless:The science of jellyfish and the art of growing a backbone, the emphasis is very much personal memoir but it does contain enough science to satisfy the non specialist. There is also an element of travel memoir to the book adding an additional element of interest.

The campground itself was a bit world weary, with few powered spots and facilities that could use a revamp but you had hot showers and flushing toilets so the basics for comfort were available. No camp kitchen, but the laundry also had a microwave and an electric jug if you needed it. Don’t come looking for luxury but if a beach/bush campground with the basics is all you need this place will do nicely. It is a lot quieter than its glitzy neighbours to the north; Tweed Heads and the Gold Coast. A small creek ran through the site but it was heavily silted and a little on the nose. It was a fairly wet weekend and the rain seemed to improve the odour from the creek. the creek can’t have been too bad as it had a significant insect population, dragon flies and the eternal menace mozzies. The water dragons were making use of the creek with regularly splashing in and out. The campground is popular with dog owners, since there are few options for dogs in the Tweed Heads/Gold Coast region.

Pottsville is just down the road, if you need groceries, or a takeaway, we got a really nice fish and chips at Hooked on Seafood, the calamari was particularly good.

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