I arrived in Forster after a long bus journey. Overnight trips always seem like a good idea - saving on accommodation, not wasting days on a bus - until you actually do them, and find yourself scrunched up on the seat trying to find somewhere to rest your head that won't make it bounce around like a pinball when you hit bumps in the road. I envy all the petite people who can fully lie down on two seats - I have to decide which half of me gets to be horizontal and which half hangs off. On this particular journey, I was assigned a front seat, which meant good views of the road ahead (actually, just cats' eyes) and some decent leg room, but every time we stopped the lights at the front would go on and I'd be squinting and squirming like some poor nocturnal creature thrust into daylight. The worst is when the bus stops at 3 or 4 in the morning at a pokey petrol station and you have to amble around or just sit there for half an hour, in that limbo between being asleep and awake.

So I was feeling cranky, tired and cold when I got off the bus at Foster, a tiny town that had nothing remotely open at 6.30 in the morning as the sun was coming up. Duncan picked me up an hour later in a taxi and took me back to the apartment he was renting near Boomerang Beach. The place was gorgeous and the beach was very pretty. I went for a walk and Duncan surfed, then we lounged around for a bit and I had a disco nap before we wandered into town and had lunch. Duncan's mate Andy drove up from Sydney and we watched the Tour de France and I nodded off. I'm great company, really.

The next day, we drove up to Hat Head, where Andy's friend Adam had a family holiday house. It's right on the beach, next to a national reserve, and the scenery is beautiful and unspoilt. They cooked us a lovely barbecue and we sat on the beach and gazed at the stars. You could see the Milky Way stretching on across the sky and all the faint tiny stars-behind-stars that you can't normally pick out, as well as some shooting stars.

We walked around the headland the following morning and saw a pod of humpback whales making their way up the coast, spouting water from their blowholes and diving down so you could see their tails and fins. Duncan turned out to be Whale Spotter Extraordinaire and saw a couple breach full out of the water, but my eyeballs are obviously not so quick. We also saw albatrosses, sea eagles, a kangaroo with a joey, and a boat drift out to sea. It was all pretty eventful.

In the afternoon, we had a round of lawn bowls, and then after dinner Duncan dropped me off at the bus stop in Kempsey to catch the overnight Greyhound down to Sydney. Another overnight bus journey... I know. It's like a love-hate thing.