Word of the day: billabong – water hole left when a creek or stream is nearly dried out.
This will be a long post, but it means that I’ll finally get up to date, making up for the days of “silence” while I was in the outback.
On the 5th we left Adelaide heading southeast. We had rented a car and were beginning our road trip from Adelaide to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road, which follows the twisting south coast and offers spectacular views of the pounding ocean. I’m getting ahead of myself though, as our destination for the day was a town called Mt. Gambier, and we would not reach the Road for a few more days.
The town’s distinguishing feature, apart from being built on top of a dormant volcano, was an amazingly blue lake which, with the typical Australian knack for naming things, was called Blue Lake.
When we arrived we explored the town a little, but since we had spent most of the day in a car there’s not really a lot to blog about. And though I’m sure that I’ve long since lost any readers with all but the longest of attention spans, I hope you enjoy the change of pace in the narrative all the same :)
The next day (the 6th) we headed further inland again to a national park called The Grampians and our motel in a town with the name Halls Gap. By now it has finally dawned on me that the Australians don’t use apostrophe for possessives (genitiv/ejefald) – so it’s Halls Gap and not Hall’s Gap – which puts them at odds with British and US English, but nicely in sync with Danish – you go brothas!
The day was overcast – it’s cold for summer down here, even considering it’s this far South – but the weather was good for traveling all the same. Between entering the park and driving to our motel we managed to spot three kangaroos/wallabies and one emu – and we would soon loose count of the number of kangaroos we had seen. After checking in we headed towards the McKenzie Falls, which my Lonely Planet said was a 10 kilometer drive. It turned out to be more like 20 kilometers of twists and hairpin turns around the mountains, confusing even the GPS. Aided by the fog that obscured the mountaintops it was getting dark by the time we arrived. Dad and I wouldn’t be completely deterred, so we took the 5 minute walk to the Broken Falls, but left the longer routes for the following day. Still, going through the forest in the approaching darkness with the smell of the damp eucalyptus trees all around speaks to my sense of adventure.
The following day dawned clear and bright, and although there would be clouds and the intermittent drizzle of light rain, it was one of the prettiest days on the road trip. The unpredictable weather, by the way, is apparently quite common in Victoria (i.e. the state which we had passed into from South Australia the previous day). We went to the McKenzie falls again and had much more of a look around. There were quite a lot of kangaroos about, and while not tame by any means, they seemed to be rather unfazed by the presence of tourists.
We spent the first half of the day there, looking around. It’s hard to describe in words, but think Yellowstone Park, only with eucalyptus instead of firs, and kangaroos in stead of grizzlies – have a look at the photos or just take my word for it. One thing to note though is the obvious scorch marks on all the vegetation from what must be a relatively recent forest fire – remarkably the trees just seem to go on as if nothing had happened.
After that we headed to Warrnambool, the city at the western end of the Great Ocean Road. The cloud cover had thickened somewhat, but this only added to the drama of the vistas that the coastline presented. Lookout areas were spaced with only a few kilometers between them, offering views of rock formation with names like The Arch and The 12 Apostles.
We kept clicking away with our cameras trying to do the impossible and capture the grandeur of the scenes before us. Even as the road left the main strip of coastline the clouds burst with sunlight, trying to entice us back to the ocean – and our cameras.
We finally arrived late at our motel in Apollo Bay, and managed to find a Thai restaurant, that was still open for takeaway.
Yesterday (the 8th) we ate breakfast at a nice seaside cafe named La Bimba, where I renewed my acquaintance with chai latte, and afterward we drove the last stretch of the Great Ocean Road. While still impressive by any standard, the highlights were definitely the sights yesterday.
By now I’m starting to feel a certain numbness from experience overload, which suggests that it would be smart to stay in the same place for a few days. Luckily, that is exactly what we are doing here in Melbourne. After navigating the daunting crosstown traffic (I don’t want to know what rush hour would be like) we arrived at the hotel, and I went to the reception, acquiring access to the carpark while my parents circled the block in the rented car. Today we celebrate Dad’s birthday and then tomorrow my parents head to Tasmania and I fly back to Sydney for the orientation at the start of the semester at UTS.
