Apollo Bay - Portland - Halls Gap

Yesterday was an amazing day.

We left Apollo Bay and headed west, north west into the hills to a place called the Otway Fly Treetop Adventures. The Otway is an ancient rainforest much like Vancouver Island. We took the walking path and treetop walk. It was almost like being at home on the island or in any rainforest on our coasts. There were a few plants that we don't have of course, but I felt just like I was at home on the island.

The 12 Apostles were so incredible to see. The weather cleared up a bit for us and it got quite warm for a while. The road along the Apostles is maybe 20 - miles long and we stopped 5 or 6 times at viewing areas to catch all we could of this majestically beautiful World Heritage Site. Fantastic. We made our way from there through a few small towns, off and on the coast. Some are the same old same old, one was very nice and I could even imagine living there, Warnambool, or Warnabull as the locals call it. Can't seem to understand how they can drop so many letters of a word and still make it sound interesting. lol.

From Warnambool we continued on to Portland. Portland is sort of dirty and small and it has a huge beach but the tide was in and it was windy so we chose a caravan park away from the water as it was really getting cool. The park was ok I guess. It is set in and amongst the Eucalyptus trees and the smell was very relaxing. Tons and tons of birds around and they all chittered and chattered and squaked and screeched nicely in the morning to help wake us up.

We left Portland this morning and it was my turn to drive. Finally!!!  Mark has been doing all the driving in the major centers as it's just to harrowing for me. Good thing we brought some Adavan. Anyway, I drove us here to Halls Gap (use your Google Earth), it's a lovely drive from the ocean landscape into the Grampian Mountains. We are really 'in the bush' now for sure. So many gum trees. So lovely. We are just taking it easy today and with the wifi I bought, I am now taking the opportunity to catch up with the blog and just relax and plan the next few parks we plan to stay at for the upcoming week or so.

The parks here are used pretty much 24/7/365 so they have a very good system set up. They all have toilets and showers and camp kitchens and tv rooms and most have games/internet rooms. They have slab bbq's heated with gas and you just wait until one is free and you fire it up, cook your meal, clean it and either eat at the picnic tables provided under the shelter, or like us, take your meal back to your unit and eat in private. It's a great scheme.

Everyone we have encountered here in this country so far has been amazing. All or at least most have been very helpful and really friendly. It's been great. We have met a lot of Canadians down here and all sorts of people are interested in our journey. We both feel very safe as it seems every other person is a tourist too.

We are glad to be out of the cities, they are beautiful but we came to see the bush and the outback. We are just aching to get into the outback and see the desert. We are hoping to get some escorted bush walks and hopefully we can get an airplane tour from Coober Pedy of Lake Eyre (Google Earth) with the water in it this year and all the Pelicans. Here's hoping!!!

Oh ya, we have not seen any spiders or snakes other than at the Melbourne zoo. We feel very safe and have not started bagging our shoes. We do like to live on the edge!!  ;-P

Tomorrow it's off to Horsham for 18 holes of golf hopefully, then on to Mildura and a ride on the river on a steam driven paddle boat, and then the next day Broken Hill NSW for a couple nights. (Google Earth)

Ok, so that's about all for now. It's good to have the internet back with us.
Take care and hope you are enjoying our stories.
Cheers  xoxo

The Twelve Apostles

Words alone can not describe the beauty and wonder of this place. The Twelve Apostles... Miles upon miles of stops to turn off the highway to see these incredible land formations that have broken away from the mainland. The setting is beyond compare. Sunny skies, the most lovely blue waters crashing in on high cliffs slowly being eroded by time and nature. Stunning, absolutely stunning. There are so many pictures, we can't share them all.

 

We end our day in a holiday park in Portland. With this awesome WiFi connection, we have been able to catch up on our blogging. Tomorrow (Monday) we are off to Horsham and then Mildura Victoria. Keep your Google Earth working to see where we are.

Again, thanks for following, and we hope you enjoy the pictures.

xoxo

The Great Ocean Road

There are so many things in this country that are called great. The Great Barrier Reef, the Great Dividing Range, the Great Red Center, and the Great Ocean Road......

risking life and limb for a great picture

    Well the road (Great Ocean Road) is a twisted narrow undulating mess of cracking fallen pavement. 100 km speed limit on a road you are challenged to do 80 km on. Awesome for a motorcycle but insane for an RV.
    We left Melbourne and found our way to the M1 south through Geelong and on to the coast road. Being a Saturday and this being Australia there was a bicycle rally of sorts going on and we had to share this narrow road with hundreds of these cyclists from Anglesea to Skenes Creek.

   The coastline is spectacular. The water is an indescribable blue. Pounding surf and rosy sand, WOW.
   We danced and slipped through small towns on our way to Apollo Bay for a night's rest in the Pisces Big 4 Holiday Park.
   The next morning we journey on to the Twelve Apostles on this twisty ocean highway.

Melbourne

Melbourne - what can I say?  Lovely city. But again, just a city. Lot's of life and sounds and smells. We got rained on severely the first day. Totally drenched. Our bank cards had not arrived but were promised in two days, that was on Tuesday. We walked around and saw what sites we could and then headed back to our caravan park in Coburg on the tram.
The public transit is awesome in this city. It cost us $7.50 each from the caravan park to downtown and any where on any system (bus, tram or train) for the entire day, not too shabby. On day two we went to the Melbourne Zoo. It was only the second zoo for me and I was amazed at all the animals and how well they are kept here. It was a great long day.

Mark cooking dinner in the caravan park kitchen in Coburg - Melbourne

Magpie looking for Mark to drop something yummy

our pool at the Big 4 caravan park in Coburg

Day three was our last day in Melbourne. It started out well enough, but soon got a bit stressful at the bank when we went to collect our bank cards that were to have been delivered from Sydney. After waiting what seemed like an eternity, the customer service fellow finally found our bank cards in an envelope in the mail room. Well, I almost blew a gasket!! We were handed our new bank cards, but were told that they were mostly useless to withdraw cash with as the PIN numbers still had to arrive from Sydney the next day. Well we were not going to be here the next day!!... My head was almost exploding with anger and disbelief.... To make a long story short, after about 15 minutes the guy who found the cards in that morning's mail went back to the mail room and found the envelopes with the PIN numbers, and we were set to go... I was surely red in the face with disgust and it took some time to calm down and let the stress go...(with a delicious cup of chai from a very charming little coffee shop we found in a lane off of Collins street) .  What crap.. The way things are done down here are really different from the way they are done at home...

Again I must comment on the smells of the people and how much it reminds me of England. It's not just the people, but maybe it is. It is the smell of the products used, ie, shampoo, conditioner, body sprays - hair sprays, colognes and perfumes, perhaps even the laundry detergent they use. For me it is so familiar, and reminds me of my time with my daughter Heather in London. Lovely.

Melbourne is a great and beautiful city. The public transit is excellent and you can get around this very large city quite nicely and quickly. I also want to emphasize how British this country is. People in the parks will come and talk to us randomly and I have said once or twice to them how British it is here and I get a look of either dismay or shock. But it is true. This country is very British, the good and the bad.

view of city core from Eureka Skydeck 88 (tallest building in Australia) on the south side of the Yarra river looking north.

Crown Casino and the river front.

St Kilda beach view. East side of Port Phillip  

Australian Parliament House - Canberra

Rose Parrots - Canberra

Tanning in Albury

Murray River within its banks again - Albury, NSW

Canberra

So we left Katoomba..... Sorry to say goodbye to it... It was a lovely place to decompress after the flight and Sydney.
     It has been a few days since we have posted due to internet inaccessibility. The wifi in Canberra required a credit card number, but even then it was too dodgy to use, and the wifi in Albury only worked in the common area which closed at 8pm and we were too slow on the up take to get there before it closed. So it is catch up time.
     We/Mark drove the 300 km to Canberra from Katoomba without much difficulty. The park (South Canberra Motor Park) was huge! And full of full time residents, the city itself was a great big YAWN.....

      The city is a cold and distant government city, uninspiring and oddly devoid of life. It's hard to explain how unwelcoming this city seemed. No outdoor cafe/pub lunch feel at all. Not worth the cost of the cab fare downtown.

      We left at 7 am heading for Albury [Awl-brie], a trek over the great dividing range. Absolutely gorgeous country! Rolling hills and grasslands. Absolutely enchanting... It could be northern California or Idaho or Oregon.... But still no Kangaroos or any other wild life, lots of road kill though, unfortunately.

     Albury is a warm comfortable town (roughly 50,000 people) situated in the Murray River valley. One of the famous wine growing regions of Australia. We finally found some sunshine. It was hot and we treated ourselves to the pool, not once, but twice. It was very exotic and so delicious. It was all very much a part of the vacation we hoped to find in this land down under.

     We are in Melbourne now. Will post some pictures when we can get a better connection. The wifi is a struggle.  Thanks for reading along.

Jenolan Caves

Sometime in the night it began to rain. Not much and not too heavy, but it lasted for a few hours and everything is wet and refreshed in this land of common drought. We packed up the van as we had to move our site due to the late request to stay another night. We were put right behind where we had just been, only on the other side of the road, perfect.
  We got up early and waited at the bus stop in front of the park for our tour bus to the Jenolan Caves. It took us an hour or so and we went deeper into the Blue Mountains. It was a drizzly dull day but we knew it would be dry in the caves. The end of the road was a treacherous 8 km along a mostly one lane road hugging the side of the mountainside, pretty scary at times.
  We chose the second of two cave tours and spent our spare two hours walking along the Blue Lake. It is actually a smallish pond fed by a fast moving creek. Typical glacial colouring and so beautiful. We saw at least six lizards but no platypuses. Apparently there are 13 living in the lake. After that we did a self-guided tour of another cave and were mostly uninspired by it.. What do you expect for the price of free?  lol...

We joined the Orient Cave tour ( one of several cave tours available) a 90 minute guided tour through the mountain. I won't waste words but let the pictures speak for themselves, except to say that we had a Steve Irwin clone doing the tour. He was great and hilarious.

We returned to our site around 5p.m. then promptly called a cab and headed off to the pub for wifi for a dollar and Saint Patty's dinner. It's an early night tonight as it's off to Canberra in the morning.
Ta for now....  xo

The Blue Mountains

   What a beautiful morning. 7 a.m, and the sun is just touching the tree tops. The Magpies are chortling, the Parrots chattering and the Cockatoos are scolding. Amazing sounds!

    So exotic and surreal. I am still somewhat in disbelief that we are actually here and doing this. WOW!!
The heat is great. Lovely weather, hot and humid...
     Directly across the road from our campground is the starting point for all of the escarpment walking trails. We used this to begin our walkabout. We went down the paths being very mindful of any spiders or snakes that we might encounter. Thankfully there were none of either. The views were stunning as the sun was shining at our end of the escarpment. The rest of the valley below was totally engulfed in fog. Beautiful to see for sure.

The trail led into the forest at the head of Katoomba Falls then up to the tram you see in the pic.

We crossed the valley on that tram to ride the worlds steepest railway. SERIOUSLY!!  A 52* drop off the side of the escarpment. An absolute blast!. 

The railway leads to a 50 minute walk through the valley forest floor.

 Eventually to a cable car back to the top. 

 We caught this cable car to the top and walked a further 5 km (on top of the 10 km we have already done) to get into Katoomba for our shopping.
Tomorrow it's off to Jenolan Caves.