East Coast Travels - Port Macquarie

3rd - 4th May

We left Sydney on the 3rd of May at 7 in the morning. In was a dark, cold rainy morning so it was the perfect time to move on from Sydney. We’re traveling along the coast using the Greyhound busses. We bought a hop on hop off ticket from Sydney to Cairns for $464.10. You can hop of and hop off the bus as many times as you want between the two places, but you can only travel in one direction, which isn’t really a problem! We pre-booked all our busses before we left and our e-ticket showed all of our trips, times and locations.

The bus was really organised, the large bags are put in the hold and sorted by where people are getting off the bus. There was a section for Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Byron Bay etc. We then showed our tickets and ID and got on the bus. We has USB chargers so we were able to charge our phones during the drive - thankfully because it was a7 hour drive and my phone battery is rubbish! After about 3 hours, just after Newcastle, the bus stopped for a food break of about 40 minutes and then continued on to Port Macquarie. The bus itself is great! It’s really clean and comfortable, and you get the chance to see a bit more of Australia. We drove through Foster which looked like a beautiful place.

We arrived in Port Macquarie at 14.20. As soon as we got off the bus, there were tons of people asking us about accommodation. These were hostel representatives. Port Macquarie is the only place where we’re staying in a hostel so when we found the representative we were driven to the hostel (which was only about a 2 minute drive). It’s a great service because although it’s only a short drive, we large heavy bags.

We stayed in YHA Ozzie Pozzie hostel. I have never been in a hostel before, and I didn’t have the best idea of what hostels would be like, but this place as amazing!! It was almost a teeny village, the rooms have 6 beds and are like a little house of their own. It was really cute, colourful and clean. There was a TV room with tons of VHS tapes, a game room with a pool table, air hockey table, foosball table in the main area there was a table tennis table and just behind there was a pool. They had huge lockers where the large rucksacks could be stored and in the room there were small lockers for any valuables.

After check in we decided to walk around Port Macquarie. The Iron Man even was in the process of being set up in the town which was really exciting. Young kids were drawing all over the paths saying things like “go dad” and other supportive writings.

We walked from the hostel on Waugh Street along the beach to Town Beach. The highlight of Port Macquarie are the painted stones along the path. There are hundreds of rocks painted with all sorts of sentimental images and dates. We saw paintings from 2008 all the way up to 2014. 

We also found out that Port Macquarie is the official Bodyboarding capital of Australia! After walking along the water we sat down on Town Beach. It’s a really lovely beach with very soft sand.

We then made our way back to the hostel and had some pizza from domino’s using the Ozzie Pozzie deal for only $5.50 for a large pizza!

The next morning we walked through the town centre and and bought some food from Coles. We then used the bus service from the hostel to be dropped off at the Greyhound bus. We were only in Port Macquarie for 24 hours, but I think that was long enough. Now on to Byron Bay!!