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!

Across the back passage...

From Port Augusta we headed down into the Gladstone wheat belt area on Sunday, through the picturesque Clare Valley, and across to our destination of Tanunda in the Barossa Valley. Along the way we had a "bit of a scare" when a truck carting a load of hay came around a "65 km/hr" corner at something closer to 100 - he barely took the corner crossing to the wrong side of the road with the trailer starting to lean over. We quickly pulled up to the side of the road fully expecting a face full of sliding hay truck but somehow he managed to stop it from toppling and passed us safely. Our hearts definitely skipped a few beats!!

Once settled in to Tanunda we tried out a few Barossa cellar doors and made some selections to keep us sated over the next week or so. It would take quite some time to explore the area properly, but the three wineries we visited were enough for us for this trip. This morning we stopped in town for a hot breakfast before heading on down through the Adelaide Hills, across Adelaide and then on to the ferry at Caper Jervis to take us to Kangaroo Island. We've decided to stay here at the Nepean Bay Caravan Park for six nights rather than exploring the Flinders Ranges and Broken Hill areas. We can always do that some other time as it is (relatively) close to Melbourne and is better suited to a trip with a 4WD.

Tomorrow we intend to simply relax and maybe go for a swim at the beach next to the park - exploring the island and taking a fishing charter can wait until later in the week.

This is an old sandstone shed in a recently harvested wheat field north of Clare. South Australia seems to be completely littered with old derilict sandstone buildings. This one is "in good nick":


This is one of the many vineyards in the Barossa (this one I think was Jacobs Creek's Cab Sav vineyard):


Here is the street in Narioopta (in the Barossa Valley) where Libby wants to live:


Here we are on the ferry on the way to Flinders Island. We found it rather amusing that you had to drive through "Myponga" before crossing the "Backstraight Passage". Perhaps we are just weird?


Until next time ...

On the road again

With the car repaired, we hit the road again at about 11:15 for the somewhat sureal drive from cobber Pedy down to Port Augusta. A great deal of the way the area that the highway passes through is prohibited for public entry by the commonwealth government. Some of this land has been used for nuclear testing and rocket testing, and I guess that the rest is reserved for future military use. There still seems to be a lot of cattle stations within the prohibited areas, but we didn't see a lot of cows - except for two dead ones about 100km apart, both being dealt with by Wedge Tailed Eagles. I *tried* to sneak up on the second one, but apparently a campervan doesn't fool our feathered friend and I only got within about 100 feet before it took flight


A little further along the road we started to see Salt Lakes, the first of which (but my no means the largest) is Lake Hart


The road then rises up a little onto a completely treeless plateau. No trees as far as the eye can see in all directions. Then you hit the turn off to Woomera. This is an aboriginal name for a "throwing stick" and is also where the British Military tested various rockets after world war II. We decided to have a look and to check out the camping ground. It wasn't long before I realised that "no way" was Libby going to be willing to stay there. It wasn't much of a camping ground, so I was keen to move on to Port Augusta myself anyway but the main reason we didn't stop was because of how spooked out Libby was. It was like a ghost town .... there was practically no-one around. We did see two kids on bikes and a few others in the local pool but aside from that only one car (driving slowly and suspiciously past us, with two huge pig dogs in the back of his ute) when we were stopped at the missile park. No other signs of life. The wind was quietly howling down the street and bits of tin were rattling in the breeze. It wasn't hard to visualise 100's of zombie eyes watching us from the quiet houses hoping we'd stay until sunset. It was eerily like a bad 50's B-grade horror movie! You have to ask yourself why the government prevented public access to this town for so long. It was the most bizzare town I have seen, largely because it looks normal but lifeless.

I assured her that I wouldn't make her stay awake all night in terror, and we drove on to Port Augusta and arrived around dinner time. Not sure where we are going tomorrow, but quite possibly the Barossa Valley or one of the other winery areas before we venture on to Kangaroo Island.

PS: This is our first evening feeling "a tad cool" in about 6 weeks. It would be pretty easy to turn around and head north again!!

Shafted!

Well to be more precise "stranded". After our wonderful night living as moles, we had brekky and then packed the van to start on our way to Port Augusta when we discovered that the battery was flat. Arrgghh! We got a jump start and headed into the main street to find a mechanic, and after a bit of a shuffle around different places an auto-electrician (working out of an underground workshop, of course) was helping us out. It wasn't long before we had the "good news" that the alternator was shot, and that if he couldn't repair it a replacement would take until Wednesday to arrive and be fitted!!! Arrgghh! Later next week the forecast is for the heat to exceed 50C, and there's nothing to do here but browse opal shops. Arrgghh!!

By an extremely good turn of luck, Vince managed to repair the alternator and will have it fitted again by mid-day tomorrow. Phew! So we are holed up in the local motel for the night, and will probably only get to Woomera tomorrow. Luckily we are in no real hurry...

The only photo taken today was one of me pretending (rather poorly) to be Vin Diesel in front of one of the left over spaceship props from the movie "Pitch Black", and I couldn't be bothered with that today. I hope the suspense doesn't kill you!! In the meantime here is the map of our travels since New Years Day to tide you over (click for a closer look):

PS: I totally refuse to pretend to be Mel Gibson on any of the left over sets from "Mad Max III" and don't even mention "Priscilla Queen of the Desert" - I assure you I don't look all that good frocked up (I imagine ... honest)

Of Camels, Kings and Gemstones...

We finished our visit to the Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park with a sunset camel ride and a sunrise viewing of the rock. The camel ride was an absolute hoot - Libby nearly fell off she was laughing so hard about the tackiness of it all once we were mounted on our camel (named "Killer"). They are actually much nicer to ride than you might imagine, and it was a really pleasant hour in the dessert as the sun went down over "big red". Definitely a "must do" experience. We loved it.


Yesterday morning there were at least 300 people up well before 6AM for the sunset viewing. It was pretty suprising to see park rangers directing traffic, especially as this is supposed to be the slow season!!!

After the show was over we hit the road again stopping at a road side truck stop along the way for brekky, and we were at Kings Canyon (about 300km away) by around 10AM. We found a nice shady spot (unlike Yulara!) and then headed off to the Canyon itself, which is pretty special. We didn't try the rim walk as it was already above 30C by the time we finished the canyon walk. Definitely that's something I'd do in the cool of the morning or in winter but it would have been a bit much in the heat of summer. One thing that did surprise me on the walk through the canyon was the number of paddy melons along the pathway to the canyon. I'm not sure if they are indemic to the area but I suspect that the rangers would clear them if they weren't. I was tempted to grab a fruit to try it but seeing that it's a national park I behaved myself :)

The rest of the day we spent swimming in the pool and playing pinball machines at the bar, as well as watching the dingo's snooping around the camp looking for food at dusk. A nice relaxing day!

Today we hit the road early again, packing up and on the road by 7:15 with an egg and bacon breakfast stop at the Kings Creek Station 30km back down the road. Almost 700km later we had left the NT and arrived at Coober Pedy in South Australia. What a totally incredible place! There are mine tailings everywhere .... almost from horizon to horizon!


We decided that we had no choice but to experience the place "properly", so we booked ourselves some mine tunnel space in Riba's Underground camping ground (apparently the only underground campsite in the world), and paid the few extra bucks for an Opal mine tour to boot. For $18 each this was too good to give up!