Game Over

After a peaceful three day at Princetown, we decided to skip the next stop (some random location closer to Melbourne along the Great Ocean Road) as it felt like it was time to go home. We stopped for Lunch and a walk at the Otway Fly on the way, and arrived home at about 4PM to be greeted by Mason, Bal and Mat.

It has been an incredible two months that we will never forget, worth every cent we spent. Next week it's time to start looking for work, and just as soon as that is sorted out I reckon it might be time to start planning the next trip... the wanderlust has definitely taken hold!

So here's the map of the tail end of our trip... until next time!

The Great Ocean Road - West of Cape Otway

Yesterday we drove from Nelson through Portland, Port Fairy and Warnambool to the Great Ocean Road. Surprisingly I've not been past Apollo Bay from the Melbourne Side (though have been to Warnambool and Port Fairy), so this was a drive I was quite looking forward to. We stopped at all the typical locations such as Bay of Islands:

... then after lunch at Peterborough we continued to London Bridge (now named London Arch after the collapse in the 1990's):

... we skipped The Grotto but visited The Arch:

... and the Thunder Cave, Blow Hole and Loch Ard Gorge:


We didn't stop in Port Campbell (though we did drive through to have a gander), continuing on to the Twelve Apostles (now 8 since #9 collapsed in 2005) and Gibson's Steps:


It was a great afternoon of sight seeing, as I'm sure the few 1000 others we encountered at the Apostles would agree! We are now stopping for a few days at the quiet hamlet of Princetown, just a few kilometers up the road. Probably just one more stop before home...

Blue

In fact it's very blue: Blue Lake at Mt Gambier. It's quite a sight to see. With the day being so overcast I thought maybe it wouldn't be quite so brilliant but it was. For those who don't know, Blue Lake is one of four lakes (two of which are now dry) in an old volcano on the border of SA and Vic. The other large one "Valley Lake" is quite pretty too with lots of parkland around it but it's not blue at all. Sort of weird.

Anyway, today we only travelled a little over 100km to Nelson on the SW coast of Victoria (yup, almost home again!). It's a small fishing village right on the border on the Glenelg River. We're only staying overnight before we head across to stay on the shipwreck coast near the twelve apostles for a few days and celebrate the Australia Day weekend. The trip seems to be winding down now, and we are taking it pretty easy and just relaxing. This time next week we'll be home and I'll have a campervan to clean (and boy does it need it!!)

Naracoorte

Despite the temptation to head West to have a quick look at the other half of the country (as per Shauno's suggestion), we continued East yesterday for the short drive from Robe to Penola. We quickly decided that we didn't feel inclined to stay there or at Coonawarra, so we drove by all the wonderful vineyards and Cellar Doors and stayed at Naracoorte for a few days instead. Yesterday was spent quietly visiting the stores in this country town, and swimming in the largest public swimming pool we think we have ever seen, and finally enjoyed a really nice Bistro meal at the local.


This morning we explored the main reason for being here: the World Heritage listed Naracoorte Caves. These are a series of limestone caves formed about 500,000 years ago through the action of water dissolving the limestone and have been tourist attractions for about 100 years. In 1969 however they discovered a huge collection of fossils (something like 50,000 skeletons) of marsupial megafauna which had fallen through an opening and died over a period of about 250,000 years before the hole closed over. It has become one of the most important fossil sites in Australia so was heritage listed along with Riversleigh in Queensland (which has fossils from about 20 million years back). It was pretty amazing, and of course the photo's don't do it justice (the guided tours are way too quick to consider taking a tripod). Well worth the entry price though.

The rest of the day has been spent sheltering from the rather strong winds, watching some old Schwarzenegger movies on the laptop :)

Tomorrow we'll pop by Mt Gambier to check out the Blue Lake, and then we will most likely wander on down to Nelson to hide away from the next few cool days forecast. Just one more week and we are home...

Robe (not famous for Robes)

We've spent the last two days at Robe on the South Eastern coast of South Australia. It's a small-ish but popular fishing village which is a little "commercial" for our tastes but does have a very beautiful beach with crystal clear waters (in which of course we swam this afternoon). I haven' taken a lot of photo's recently but here's a shot of part of the town from the nearby "Beacon Hill Lookout" as well as a late afternoon shot of "The Obelisk", which was a day time "beacon" for the fishing fleet back in the late 1800's but due to erosion of the headland on which it was constructed is just about to fall into the sea.


The drive here from Kangaroo Island started out pleasant enough - through the Fleurieu Peninsular across to Victor Harbour and Goowla (on the mouth of the Murray River), both of which are rather picturesque. After crossing the Murray at the Wellington ferry though our moods for the rest of the trip soured a bit. The road skirts around Lake Alexandrina and heads south towards the Coorong. I'd read and heard a lot about the damage to this area but to experience it was a whole different thing. At first you see large areas of former wetlands that have simply dried out. A little further down the road and you come close to the shores of one of the lakes at Meningie, and you can see that the level has dropped quite a bit ... there are a number of jetties that are a long way from the start of the water. The water level however has probably only dropped about 10cm or so.
Further along you start to drive along the Coorong proper and you start to smell the real damage. Mile upon mile of wetland and lakes that are practically devoid of bird life thanks to the dropped water level. I've seen dry waterways before but this is different. The exposed silt and rotting vegetation is reacting with the soil and producing sulphuric acid. Apparently in the volume of 10's of thousands of litres now, but rising sharply towards millions of litres per year in the very near future. The entire ecosystem is dying, and you can smell the decay as you drive by. It was rather depressing!

There is a whole lot of debate going on about how to fix this ... the Murray's water level is continuing to drop thanks not only to drought (which has accelerated but not caused this problem), but also to increasing populatiion and agriculture in it's upper reaches. The SA governent is currently allocatiing $30m just to buy back enough water to stop the death of the Coorong from accelerating, but that will not fix the problem. How ridiculous is it that they need to pay to have water released from dams and weirs back into the river it was meant to flow down in the first place?? The levels will continue to drop as the growth in Victoria and New South Wales continues. When the new Goulbourn River pipeline sucks more water out of the system for Melbourne it will only get worse. Without actively killing off a town or an agricultural industry upstream (and we know that won't be allowed to happen!) the Coorong is doomed. The goverrnment have also been talking about breaking the artifical barrier to the ocean created at the start of last century and flooding it with sea water, so that at least the sulphuric acids will be washed away and it will not die. Most of the people living and depending on the Coorong are dead against this saying that it will be destroyed as a result, but surely returning it to as near to it's natural state (sans fresh water from the Murray) is better than allowing it to die? I think they are somewhat naive with their continued demands to release more water from upstream - it simply isn't going to happen.

If only the Australian government had listened to the protesters in the 70's who claimed we were heading for overpopulation, then we wouldn't be in this situation where 1000's of square kilometers of a unique ecosystem is being wiped out?

Anyway, now that we are somewhere that doesn't seem to be too severely damaged by man my mood has improved somewhat :)

Tomorrow we are heading just 100km or so up the road to Penola in the Coonawarra wine region, and while we are in the area we'll also check out the Narracoorte caves.

In the meantime here's a few more pics from KI (Kangaroo Island) taken at American River and the Bay of Shoals Winery

Fishing

We landed 7 good sized King George Whiting (and lost one really good sized one each), as well as a red mullet (which was thrown back). It was a fun day in beautiful surrounds, and dinner was exceptional last night :)

No photo's because we ate the best fish before we thought about taking a snapshot. You'll just have to believe us :)

Flinders Chase and Seal Bay

After a day of doing nothing at all, we decided to go for a bit of a drive yesterday to the other end of the Island for a look at Flinders Chase National Park. Most of the bushland was burnt away in the December 2007 fires, so for most of the drive all we could see was dead shrubbery but with plenty of regrowth. It'll be a few years yet before it is "pretty" again I think. The landscape didn't detract from our destination at all though, as what we had come to see was Admiral's Arch, a cave/tunnel through the cape sheltering a colony of Australian and New Zealand Fur Seals. Quite a pretty place.

A few kilometers along the coast was our other destination: Remarkable Rocks. This is a collection of large boulders atop a dome of rock at the sea's edge which have been sculpted by years of weather. They are remarkably well named :)

After a lunch stop along the road we hit our final destination for the day: Seal Bay. This is a consveration park set aside for a colony of Sea Lions. We went on a guided tour which took us down onto the beach where we sat just 10m away from part of the colony. It is the breeding season so there was a good mix of males, females and juveniles on the beach, and they were quite active as well. The 45 minutes went by in a flash. We could easily have stayed there the whole day. That was $14 very well spent!


This afternoon we are off on a fishing charter from the American River wharf. Hopefully we'll have a nice feed tonight!