Roomer

“A cicada shell, perfectly intact, is glued to the welcome sign like a brooch nobody asked for.”

The turn off Jerrara Road is easy to miss if you're watching the GPS instead of the fence posts. You pass a dairy farm with black-and-white Friesians standing in that suspicious stillness cows reserve for strangers, then a corrugated iron shed with a hand-painted sign advertising firewood, and then — nothing, for a bit. Just the road narrowing and the canopy thickening until the light changes from coastal glare to something greener and softer, like someone turned the brightness down two notches. Kiama is fifteen minutes behind you but it already feels like a rumor. This is the hinterland, and the hinterland doesn't care that the blowhole exists.

You pull up to Cicada Luxury Camping and the first thing you register isn't the tent — it's the sound. Not silence, exactly. More like silence's opposite: a wall of insect noise so dense and layered it feels architectural. Cicadas, obviously, but also something clicking in the undergrowth, and a bird doing a three-note phrase on repeat like it's workshopping a melody. The owners have cleared just enough bush to fit a handful of glamping setups without making the place feel like a resort. The rest is eucalyptus and fern gully and whatever else is making all that noise.

Canvas walls and cold mornings

The tent — and it is a tent, however many times the word "luxury" appears on the website — is a large canvas bell structure on a raised timber platform. Inside, there's a proper queen bed with linen that feels genuinely good, a couple of bedside tables made from what looks like reclaimed timber, and a small seating area with cushions thick enough to justify the word "lounging." Fairy lights are strung along the ridge pole. A portable speaker sits on a shelf, though you'd be competing with the bush orchestra outside and you'd lose.

Waking up here is a specific experience. Around five-thirty, the kookaburras start, and they are not subtle about it. The canvas glows with early light in a way that hotel curtains are specifically designed to prevent. The air is cold — properly cold, even in the warmer months — and there's a moment where you have to decide between the warmth of the duvet and the need for coffee. The camp kitchen is a short walk across dewy grass, and someone has left a French press and ground beans from a Kiama roaster called The Hungry Monkey. It's good coffee. Strong, slightly bitter, the kind that makes you forgive the kookaburras.

The bathroom situation is a composting toilet and an outdoor shower enclosed by timber screens. The shower has decent pressure and the water gets hot fast, which matters more than you think when you're standing barefoot on wooden slats at six in the morning with mist still sitting in the gully. There's something genuinely good about showering with the canopy above you, though — I'll give the glamping industry that one. You can hear bellbirds while you wash your hair. That's not nothing.

“Kiama's blowhole gets the tourists. The hinterland gets the quiet, the cold mornings, and the birds that sound like they're laughing at you.”

There's no Wi-Fi, and phone signal is patchy at best — one bar of Telstra if you stand near the gate, nothing from Optus. This is either a dealbreaker or the entire point, depending on who you are. I found myself reading an actual book for the first time in months, which felt both virtuous and slightly embarrassing. The property has a fire pit with Adirondack chairs arranged around it, and the firewood is included. By evening, the cicadas have handed the shift over to frogs, and the sky is dark enough to see the Milky Way without squinting.

For food, you're self-catering unless you drive back into Kiama. The camp kitchen has a gas burner, basic pots, and an esky you can fill with ice from the general store on Terralong Street. If you want someone else to cook, The Hungry Monkey does solid breakfast — their corn fritters are the right kind of messy — and Silica on Manning Street does a surprisingly ambitious dinner menu for a town that still leads with the blowhole. Stock up before you head out to the property. Jerrara Road after dark is kangaroo territory, and they don't look both ways.

The honest bit

The tent doesn't fully zip at the bottom corner near the platform edge. A gap of maybe three centimeters lets in cold air and, on one occasion, a very small spider that seemed as surprised as I was. The bedding is warm enough to compensate, but if you run cold, bring a sleeping bag liner. Also: the path from the tent to the kitchen is unlit. Bring a headlamp or use your phone torch and accept that you'll look like a confused miner stumbling through the bush at midnight because you wanted a glass of water.

Driving out on the last morning, the road feels different. You notice things you missed arriving — a letterbox shaped like a tractor, a dam with two black swans sitting on it like lawn ornaments, the way the escarpment drops off to the east and you can just see the ocean as a thin bright line through the trees. The Friesians are in a different paddock now. One of them watches you pass with the same expression your cat gives you when you come home late. You're back on the Princes Highway in twelve minutes. The cicadas are still going. They were going before you arrived and they'll keep going after. That's the thing about this stretch of coast — the best parts aren't performing for anyone.

A night at Cicada Luxury Camping starts around ‏178 US$ for the bell tent, which buys you the bed, the fire pit, the kitchen, the outdoor shower, and approximately ten thousand cicadas who don't charge extra.