This is what happened during our 6 nights in and around Melbourne.
We spent our time whilst in the city staying with our friend Toby, whose name will be strangely familiar to some of you! It was lovely to be able to relax in a 'normal' home and watch a bit of TV. After so much time in various youth hostels and guesthouses, the different rooms, bathrooms and keys blur into one and it all gets a bit tiring. We were able to recharge our batteries, which was much needed.
Melbourne city centre has a quieter and more sophisticated feel than Sydney with huge Botanic Gardens containing lakes, bridges, gazebos and large areas of grass dotted with big mature trees, making it a wonderful place to sit and rest our feet at the end of our day walking around the streets. The park has a resident colony of 8000 Flying Foxes (fruit bats) which are huge, noisy and boisterous and hang from the palm trees stripping them of their leaves - it is for that reason that the gardens are trying to get rid of the colony at the moment - they make an interesting sight though.
For 3 nights we hired a lovely little camper van that was pretty old and had a staggering number of ks on the clock, but did very well for us! We drove along the Great Ocean Road, passing the surf coast with its sandy beaches, followed by the most dramatic part of the route - where the road winds in incredibly tight snaking bends in and out of the gorges and headlands. It is pretty impressive - you have steep cliffs, forest and waterfalls on one side and crashing surf and rocky coast along the other. Then the road goes inland through one of the many national parks where we stopped at two elevated (cool temperate) rainforest walks which take you through lush fern gullies and past huge ancient eucalyptus trees - the biggest one we saw was 300 years old with a diameter of 27m!
When the road meets the coast again, it takes you along the most famous part of the route which runs along the top of limestone cliffs that have eroded to form loads of caves, arches and stacks on the headlands - classic geography text book stuff!
We visited the 12 Apostles, Loch Ard Gorge (site of a famous ship wreck), Thunder cave, London Bridge (which collapsed famously about 10 years ago leaving a group of visitors stranded on the remaining stack out at sea - how unlucky is that!), the blow hole, bay of islands.... you get the idea! The sea is pretty rough around here, accounting for the dramatic features and we had great fun watching the waves slam into the gorges and caves creating huge plumes of spray. In some areas, the water was so turbulent it looked like it was boiling.
We spent our second night in a campsite almost at the end of the Great Ocean Road and then returned over the following two days. Up until now we hadn't seen any Australian animals apart from in Sydney zoo, and we were desperate to see something in the wild! We were rewarded on the next day when we followed one road up into the mountains and saw sleepy koalas sitting in the top branches of the eucalyptus trees, a wallaby in the forest on the way to a waterfall, loads of kangaroos that are residents on a golf course (!) and kookaburras (in our final and perfect campsite - having everything you could possibly ask for - large grassy areas, trees, a river, the beach 100m away, steep cliffs on either side and campfire areas) that we fed cooked tubes of pasta to (which they diligently wacked on the ground to make sure they were dead!).
The journey in the camper van was so enjoyable - we loved the freedom of being able to travel with everything we needed - like being a tortoise!
On our return to Melbourne we spent the last night with Toby and watched a beautiful sunset from St Kilda beach - to our amusement, a guy who had been swimming in his underpants near us, took them off to wash them whilst standing directly in front of us, at the most poignant moment of the sunset. We giggled a lot!! Then we went to the more conventional place to be amused - the amusement park - and enjoyed the rickety and deceptively scary wooden rollercoaster.
Until the next time...
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