I almost found Eden last week.

Eden is a smallish town on the southern coast of New South Wales, somewhere on the Princes Highway between the coastal resort of Ulladulla, and Nowa Nowa, where you turn off to scale Victoria’s Great Alpine Road.

Ulladulla reminded me of a movie back lot where they are filming episodes for Home and Away. This sunny coastal town appeared to have a disproportionate number of teenage mums pushing prams and laidback young men who probably should have been at work.

Further south, Eden isn’t much of a town to talk about but it has snared for itself a magnificent position overlooking Twofold Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

They once used to slaughter whales here, now they encourage them as a tourist attraction.

Across the bay from the township, at a place called Boyd Town, the historic Sea Horse Inn, built by convict labour in 1843 and recently extended and refurbished to provide first class accommodation, is close to Eden in more ways than one.

The inn’s lawns, shaded by huge palm trees, stretch down to a sandy, protected beach, from where you can walk 9km along the Blazed Trail to the Greencape Lighthouse and Disaster Bay.

It is a magical part of the world, as is much of the area between Sydney and Melbourne that takes in the southern highlands, the coastal towns of the Princes Highway and the Great Alpine Road to the peaks of Dinner Plain and Mt Hotham.

But while the quality of overall experience was outstanding, we had some unusual experiences at regional Australia restaurants along the way.

At Berrima in New South Wales, six of us sat down to dinner and five ordered entrees. Half an hour later the hostess apologised that due to an error with the machine that despatches the orders to the kitchen (“the paper in the machine ran out”) the entrees had not been prepared.

Would we mind just having the mains, and the wine and the water was on the house, she explained.

It seemed an odd explanation, but the food when it arrived was delicious.

At the Sea Horse Inn, we waited an hour for our meal before making an enquiry with the waitress. “Awfully sorry,” she said, “Your order was put by mistake on the same ticket as the mains of another table. It won’t be long now though.”

While we waited at a table overlooking the gardens and the beach, now in darkness - a man twice walked out of the hotel bar to relieve himself against a date palm.

It brought to my mind the lyrics of the Ganggajang hit, This is Australia.

“Out on the patio we’d sit,

“And the humidity we’d breathe,

“We’d watch the lightning crack over canefields

“Laugh and think, this is Australia.”


Then at Bright, in the Victorian High Country, 92 on Gavin, a restaurant which advertised itself as specialising in fresh local produce, admitted that all the fish on the menu was from New Zealand.

Nothing wrong with that if fresh is not available, but the piece of curled up whiting that arrived should only have left New Zealand as cat food.

The waitress who removed the plate didn’t ask why the fish had barely been touched. In fact, she didn’t say a word, possibly because she was embarrassed by fishy business in the kitchen.

Still, let’s not finish like a grumpy traveller because during 10 days on the road, for every challenging dining experience there was a good one.

So special mention to a Japanese restaurant in Sydney, whose name I have forgotten; Tho, a Vietnamese restaurant in Richmond, Melbourne; and the Roti Man, an Indian/Malay establishment in Middle Park, Melbourne.

This is Australia but Asian restaurants are kicking the goals.