I've just realized that I never did a blog on Batemans Bay, where we've been living for the last year! So here it is. Batemans Bay is a town of about 16,000 on the south coast of New South Wales, 4 hours' drive south of Sydney, with Canberra a 2 hour drive inland. It is located on the mouth of the Clyde River, one of the last rivers in Australia not to have been altered upstream with dams and such. Much of the area of the river and coastline is protected as the Batemans Marine Reserve. http://www.mpa.nsw.gov.au/bmp.html There is an opening bridge on the river in town, as you've seen in a couple of previous blogs, and here the river really widens out to form Batemans Bay, and then opens out into the ocean, still a few km down the river past Catalina to Batehaven. http://www.southcoast.com.au/batemansbay/Like Barry's Bay, Ontario, Batemans Bay is a holiday town, with the population swelling during the summer time and on weekends, when Canberrans and Sydneysiders and others escape the daily grind to come to the coast. This has changed the town in the last decade, from what we've been told, and building and improvements continue. While we were here this year, the council was working on redeveloping part of the foreshore, getting rid of a parking lot and putting in more greenspace, it looks great.
Here are some pictures of the town:
There is a small shopping mall, plus lots of other stores on the main streets in town. There are hotels, restaurants, and lots of cafes (coffee is one thing that Australia does really, really well.) There are a few primary schools and one high school, a hospital, library and sports complexes (tennis courts, lots of playing fields, 50m pool, squash courts, marinas.) And lets not forget all the beaches!
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