Port Stephens Day Adventure: Dolphins, Koalas & Stockton Sand Dunes

The bus peels away from Sydney before dawn and the city’s glass recedes into hinterland. By midmorning the salt turns the air colder, and Port Stephens opens like a wide, blue bruise on the coast — an estuary of islands, headlands and beaches that refuse to sit still. A dolphin arc breaks the surface beside the boat, playful and precise, as if testing the rhythm of the hull; later, a koala blinks from a paperbark tree, unhurried and exacting in its appetite for leaves. The final act is a different kind of motion: an ocean of sand moving inland, the Stockton dunes, where gravity and wind collaborate in endless re-sculpting and sandboarding makes anyone look briefly like they belong in timber-framed surf culture.