2002 Day 11-15 - Tasmania so far

I'm now in Hobart, having come through a lot of places.

I had to rush into Melb to get a backpack and on impulse I also got for myself an aromatherapy calming candle and back of paper notepads from a place called "The Reject Shop" (what a cool name for a discount store!) both turned out to be useful later.

Flight to Launceston was uneventful - but I was surprised to note it has a bigger airport than Adelaide. Not bad for a city of 70,000... Got a ride into the city on one of the freeways which was quite scenic and the next surprise was my room at North Lodge Motel. It was HUGE! For $60.50 I'd managed to score a double ensuite room with a central room bigger than my games room, a fully operational kitchen, an ensuite bedroom which was equally large and a considerably nice balcony.

Launceston for a city of its size was the next surprise. It is a real city, not like Bunbury or somewhere. City centre was quite happening if a bit slow and it took ages to walk around it all. I even got a nice iced chocolate at a Viennese coffee shop. Just 2 minutes after leaving the west end of the CBD, I reached Cataract Gorge - a 150ft high cliff face with forests all over it, majestic rocks and a river flowing down the bottom. Stopping and listening you'd never believe it was 500m from the heart of a city. Dinner was local salmon and vegies, cooked by yours truly :P

Link to my photos for the Tasmania trip

I've spent the last 4 days in the west and north west of Tasmania and have been amazed by both how green it is and how large - from seeing it on a map you wouldn't think hours in a bus just going a little way along the coast would be possible. However I will add I am so over a number of things:

* Van Morrison
* Bob Marley
* Smokers spoiling my airspace
* Roads with tight windy bends every 100m for over 40km at a time
* My joints playing up

Oh and seeing signs all over the island in front of opium poppy farms saying "WARNING! Trespassers prosecuted. Illegal use of crops may cause death." is quite amusing.

This is being written from a dodgy Net terminal in Hobart, and I'm out of cash. Bye. :)

2002 Day 8-10 - Melbourne

Not much to update so I'll do it all in one post. By the way, I stayed at Miami Motor Inn during my stay in Melbourne - close to the city, convenient to public transport, and probably the best consistent service standard I've seen anywhere in a motel. I've been there three times now and have sent friends there, without any complaints.

Friday - Went to Mornington Peninsula (a southern coastal extension of the Melbourne metropolitan area) via Frankston. Frankston is psycho city central :) Basically mix retirement village type scene with lots of young unemployed people and a few families thrown into the mix, with narrow streets and lots of cars. End result? The old people hold everyone else up and there's a lot of aggro and horns honking :P It was funny to watch but I wouldn't want to live there.

Photo 1 - Wells Street, Frankston.
Photo 2 - Canal near Nepean Highway, Frankston.

This visit was more of a "get to see and know the area so when I come next time I know which are the good bits". The original plan had been to visit Rosebud because I once knew of someone from there, but it turned out to be quite ordinary - just a big shopping centre. A surprisingly high number of attractive people living there though :P The stopping points ended up being Dromana and Sorrento. Both nice places, got to walk around them a bit.

Photo 3 - Dromana Beach.
Photo 4 - Beach huts at Dromana Beach (you find these all along the Port Phillip Bay).

I wanted to do Arthur's Seat (a chairlift going right up a mountain) but I was literally 2 minutes too late by the time I got there. (EDIT: This chairlift collapsed in January 2003.) On coming back to Melbourne and after a sumptuous meal at the motel, I went down and saw Chris the busker (refer to entries from Dec 2001) - he recognised me immediately and he now seems to have a band - they look quite odd but sound amazingly good (they were doing Cat Stevens covers).

Yesterday I thought I was doing a tour of Melbourne and when I looked at my notes it turned out I was doing Phillip Island, where thousands of penguins run up the beach at sunset to their burrows every night. It was an APT tour, which was a bit dry for my liking although we had a good and knowledgeable driver. This time, I didn't get eaten alive at the koala conservation park, and the Seal Rocks exhibition centre I visited last year had been destroyed by a tornado 3 months ago - it was kind of eerie going in there and just seeing the souvenir shop (pretty much as it was last year) with nothing behind it. At the actual penguin parade (which was better than last year's) I met a guide called Damon who I was able to ask for information. I think I'll do his tour next year - it sounds somewhat more fun than the one I was on :)

(Edit: I found an even better one in Dec 2003 - Duck Truck Tours, run by a local company from Phillip Island, for $70.)

On coming back to Melbourne, the fun wasn't over. My friend Lucas had insisted on my doing the Lucas Tour of Melbourne (sadly without a webpage), and even a late start courtesy of the penguins didn't dampen his enthusiasm :P I wasn't really dressed for the occasion, but we saw plenty of pubs and cafes and I got to meet his housemate Carlos, who was a very friendly host. At some unearthly hour of the morning I returned back to my motel.

After breakfast this morning I basically walked around the city all day - I'm trying to lose the weight I've put on and have been living on the hotel breakfasts + fresh filtered water + sushi (which is available at O-Bento sushi bar in Melbourne Central for $2 per hand roll - so one *can* live on it affordably :)

Tomorrow I leave for Launceston. I'm not getting the whole odd "missing Melbourne" feeling I usually get at this point in its fullest strength because I will be back in just over a week. I wish I could spend a lot more time here.

2002 Day 6-7 - Great Ocean Road to Melbourne

(Refer here for someone's photos. I hope to have my own up shortly.)

Day 6 can be summed up as Great Ocean Road in dreadful weather. After an initial good start at Tower Hill, a national park inside a volcano crater with all sorts of native wildlife (mostly koalas, emus and small cute birds) which is not on any of the tourist itineraries except Wayward's, the really bad weather kicked in. Most people (even the English amongst us) got sick of horizontal rainfall and high winds and decided to throw it in at Port Campbell, where we stopped for what ended up being a 1.5 hour lunch at the local pub. While the wind didn't abate, the rain did, and we got to see Loch Ard Gorge and the surrounding area, and the 12 Apostles. This time I took the western pathway before visiting the gorge (in 2001 I did the eastern pathway). Lots of magnificent scenery, made all the more impressive by the high winds stirring up the oceans. All I can say is no wonder it's nicknamed "The Shipwreck Coast". The 12 Apostles was just too much wind and package tourism for most of us to handle (a lot of people, tourist buses etc) and we only stayed there about 20 mins.

Photo 1 - London Bridge
Photo 2 - The Blowhole at Loch Ard

(Better photos to come when I can get them scanned...)

The better part of the trip was our visit to the Otway Ranges. In 2001 the AAT Kings/Gray Line tour driver literally speeded through this and there's something really unromantic about seeing dense eucalypt forests at 100km/h from a coach-style bus. Wayward took it slower and we stopped for a rainforest walk at a place called Mait's Rest, which has to be one of the highlights of this whole tour. Massive trees and creeks covered in vegetation with a density that is just freaky just has to be seen to be believed. Unfortunately, my poor little Kodak disposable had no chance whatsoever in the poor light conditions.

Now I hear you asking "rainforest? in Victoria, at 39°S?!" There's only 14km² of it in the Otway Ranges, but it is there. It's a cool, temperate rainforest and meets all of the criteria needed to describe rainforests.

We stopped at Apollo Bay overnight. From this point on, I think it hit most of us that we were in our last 17 hours together, and between collaborating to buy group dinner, playing pool, listening to Dutch and Croatian music and talking about relatively normal "home" things like work and families and stuff kind of did bring us closer together. My motel for the night, Coastal Motel, was right on the coast, and had a sliding door leading out to it - all very nice :) I made sure I got to savour and enjoy the room this time.

We left Apollo Bay at 7:30am this morning. It was pelting with rain both there and the whole drive winding tightly around the twists and turns of the Great Ocean Road until we got to Lorne - having seen it in fine weather in 2001, it gave a bit of contrast for me, I guess. At Anglesea we stopped at a golf course and pissed off a load of golfers while acting like typical tourists and photographing kangaroos which were all over the place (including on and next to the holes). On the bus we did a massive email exchange project so we all have each others' email addresses, and at Bells Beach, a famous surfing beach near Torquay where events are regularly held, we stopped for a group photo.

Photo 1 - Kangaroos at Anglesea Golf Course
Photo 2 - The sign greeting visitors to the Great Ocean Road.
Photo 3 - Bells Beach.
Photo 4 - Melbourne from the bus, 10 minutes before arrival.

Arriving in Melbourne was both sad and happy - I am quite tired after 4 days of full on activity and am welcoming the solitude of getting around by myself in a big yet friendly city (any of you who have heard me talk about Melbourne know how much I like the place) but at the same time it meant parting with the group who had become my friends. The goodbyes weren't tearful, but they were emotional and warm.

Photo 5 - First shot in Melbourne, on Latrobe Street facing west.

And that's where I'll stop. This afternoon has just been a big unwind and would sound extremely boring on paper. :P

2002 Day 5 - Wayward Bus - Mt Gambier & Beyond

(Someone else did this tour a week after me and posted all their photos online. Worth a look.)

After my sunrise on the balcony and mad photographing mission was complete, we were off to our next destination. But first we walked around the Canunda National Park near Beachport with some very stunning scenery. This was our first taste of the Great Ocean Road I guess, although we had a full day yet until we would get to it.

Next major stop was Mt Gambier, population 23,000 - I was expecting a small regional town, but it was as bad as any city traffic-wise - absolutely nuts and several of our party nearly got hit several times in the main streets. I managed to find some nice fresh bananas and send a postcard home before we went off to look at the Blue Lake south of the town. This lake *is* really blue. Apparently it's got something to do with the way it was formed from volcanic ash, but it looks quite trippy in real life.

(EDIT: I came back to Mount Gambier and spent 2 days there in late November 2003 - see entries from that period for more information.)

After that we went to Donovans, a border town, for a picnic lunch (which was truly sumptuous, but I seemed to be the only person going for the beans and lentils!) and then crossed the SA/VIC border (at which point we all changed our clocks forward half an hour and photographed the signs just so we could say we'd done it :P )

It was quite a while until our first stop - Cape Bridgewater, near Portland, where an optional tour was available to see the seals in their native environment. I was already starting to feel muscle pains and fatigue from all the activity (which did include that long walk to West Terrace in Adelaide where I posted from on early Monday morning) but I convinced myself I'd only get this opportunity to go. So 8 of us headed off on what turned out to be a very arduous walk over some of the highest coastal cliffs in Australia (about 1.5km of them to be exact) to get to the jetty where the boat left from. We went out at quite high speed into the ocean and round some more cliffs to get to the seal colony.

I'd always imagined seals being pretty relaxed creatures, but after seeing them up close I've figured out they spend most of their time fighting and arguing and the rest playing in the water. We went into a cave and got some pretty cool views of seals just sitting there watching us - a couple even lunged for our little boat :) Eventually it was time to head back and we did so. However, once nearly back at the jetty, the guy driving the boat put it in full gear and drove it in circles. Unfortunately for me a wave came through on my side at the same time and I found myself fully clothed and completely underwater for several seconds. It took a while to rescue me, and when we did, several things that had been in my pocket (disposable camera, credit cards etc) had drifted away and/or sunk (and that's not to speak of the fact I was soaked through)

I think the guy (who was only about 21-22) panicked a bit and decided to take me back to the beach in the boat. The next 45 minutes were spent changing into new clothes, attempting to manually dry my old ones, while the entire bus waited for the owner of the boat company to dive for (and successfully retrieve) my credit cards.

We got into Port Fairy at 7pm, that little action drama over ... but my evening in what was really quite a nice town indeed was mostly spent washing and drying waterlogged clothing, eating in an overpriced and unfriendly Chinese restaurant (Four Seasons) and suffering from temporary back pain. The room was nice and I'm now regretting the fact I really didn't have the chance to lay back and enjoy it. But it's life ... and the whole situation did seem to provide amusement for most people on the bus (although they were also sympathetic and gave me good advice with relation to drying out the clothing).

2002 Day 4 - Wayward Bus (SA)

Well, I'm in Melbourne, after 3.5 days on the road. It's been a very fun and interesting time in a way I didn't necessarily expect. I'm not even going to try and explain it - it's something you have to go on a tour with a small group of people (in this case 17 others) to appreciate. You feel like you have connected with a bunch of people over a range of shared experiences, even though you'll probably never see them again and so are more free to be yourself. It was made more interesting by the fact that not one of the other people was Australian, and I spent most of the time with about 3 of the group who spoke only very little English, but who I was able to meaningfully communicate with.

The range of ethnicities was German (2), Swiss (1), Dutch (1), Italian (1), Slovenian (1), French (1), Colombian (2), US (3), Canadian (1) and English (3) - and me, the lone Aussie apart from the tour driver.

We left Adelaide at 8:15am on Monday (CDT = GMT+10.5h, WST+2.5h) aboard Wayward Bus and headed off into the hills. First stop was Hahndorf, a town settled in 1839 by German Lutherans escaping religious persecution in their homeland, and the town still maintains a lot of its German character. I ate at the 1839 Cafe and ordered a "big breakfast" as on the menu. The surprise, I guess, was that they weren't at all kidding. It was big. With bacon, eggs, salad, bits of fruit, toast and all sorts of other interesting goodies behind me, we set off into the Adelaide Hills and beyond. I concluded that most of the south-eastern bit of South Australia is almost as boring as the Wheatbelt of WA - just flat farmland as far as the eye can see for the most part.

The exceptions, however, were glaring. The Murray River was pretty impressive - we had to cross it in a car ferry.

Photo 1 - Wellington, SA.
Photo 2 - Looking east from the ferry.
Photo 3 - Looking west from the ferry.

And the Coorong was stunning - for those who don't know, the Coorong is a mixed salt and fresh water lake about 80km long and only about 2-3km wide, sourced from both the ocean and the Murray. We stopped at a wilderness lodge run by the Ngarrinjiri Aboriginal people, who have been revegetating formerly useless sheep grazing land back to what it was originally. We ate kangaroo and local fish and had a tour of the area from an Aboriginal guide who showed us some of the natural food and medicines the Aboriginals have through history lived on. I won't debate the guy - his cure for mozzie bites does work, as most of us concluded at some point or other during our trip. And some of the edible plants found as far east as Lorne, VIC, served me well the following year in emergencies.

Photo 4 - 90 Mile Beach, Coorong Peninsula.

The next surprise came when we hit the town of Kingston SE - Larry the lobster :) An 18m high lobster outside a shop in the town was the centrepiece of all manner of photographs - unfortunately the shop itself didn't really live up to expectations (they don't believe in change, and overcharged me a dollar for an icecream...) Marine Parade in Kingston SE reminded me a lot of Bunbury for some reason, but it was very nice.

Anyway, at about 7pmish we arrived at a town called Beachport - population 407 - about 400km SE of Adelaide, 80km W of Mt Gambier, and had dinner at our accommodation, Bompa's by the Sea. The "Fisherman's Catch" was quite an interesting (and large) meal and I rather enjoyed it. (This is coming from someone who normally doesn't like fish or seafood, too...)

Despite its size, there was a lot to do on foot, although I seemed to be the only person actually willing to do it. A map of Beachport led to me discovering the Pool of Siloam which is 7 times saltier than the ocean, a Scenic Drive which hugs the coast at some altitude, a jagged and cliffy west coast and a smooth east coast with a nice beach and an 800m long jetty, one of the longest in Australia (the longest is in Busselton WA, incidentally, and is 2km long - I walked it last time I was there in 1998) Getting lost in pitch black climbing up steep hills through bush and falling into brambles wasn't totally fun though, and I came back with an intended mission the following morning to photograph the better bits of what I'd seen (complete with a shortened and bramble-free path to get there). I did just that.

The accommodation was amazingly good. I guess my expectation of backpacker accommodation in small towns was something of a "room with a view" over the top of the pub. While this was in fact entirely correct, it wasn't entirely accurate - the room was quiet, very stylish, and very large - the bathroom has to be the largest I've ever seen in any hotel or motel I've stayed at. I'd gotten a few bites during the day and enjoyed a nice bath before bed :)


(Note about photos - Any separately marked, numbered photos are my own. Any others are scammed off the Web - a couple were from someone's collection taken exactly one week after I was there! I hope to replace these links soon, but I don't have a scanner.)

2002 Day 2-3 - Adelaide - Well, it's life...

After leaving the cafe, I weaved my way around the streets of the city, taking photos on my Kodak disposable (Hosting courtesy of Webshots:)

Photo 1. North Terrace, facing east, from Morphett Street bridge.
Photo 2. Victoria Square, in the centre of Adelaide.
Photo 3. Light Square - final resting place of Adelaide's founder Colonel William Light. (More info about the statue and a closeup of it)
Photo 4. Eastern Parklands near my motel.
Photo 5. SA Museum, in a historic building in North Terrace.

I also had plenty of chances to observe the near-psychotic behaviour of its drivers and noticing a few unusual things about Adelaide:

1. They have very weird pronunciations for many of their streets and suburbs which are anything but obvious.
2. Adelaide is not pedestrian friendly - you have to go in whatever way the green lights take you and hope you'll eventually reach your destination intact.
3. The city centre and suburbs are two different beasts. The city (although eerily quiet at nights) is quite busy at most times of the day - especially that part of the northern half within about 200m of King William (the central N-S route) and Pulteney Streets (the one east of KW). The suburbs meanwhile maintain a slow and somewhat laidback demeanour.

Let's say the evening was interesting and leave it right there. Although the ending was good - I went to a coffee house called Spatt's on King William Road (bit south of the city) with Andrew, who had been there a number of times before. It was very ambient and intimate and very unlike any other cafe I'd been to - he tried a Gold Wasser which smelled like aftershave, was very potent and had actual little bits of gold leaf in it, and I had a chocolate crunch (kind of like a milkshake with class :P )

On Sunday I walked straight into a picnic in the eastern parklands (Adelaide city centre is completely enveloped by parklands) which all looked very happy and fun, and then wound through the streets again and checked out the State Library (which was in effect a single room with a very dark finish) before meeting up with Andrew. His parents were very sweet and made dinner for me - I don't think they or I wanted me to leave as we were having a very good conversation, but we were to meet a friend of Andrew's who I've gotten to know over ICQ and is very nice. He was as nice in person as I'd thought he would be and it wrapped up an interesting night (we ended up going to Spatt's again :).

Except that I couldn't sleep so I ended up walking all the way to West Terrace (about 6km from the motel) and am now sitting in a net cafe there at 2:40am. :P

So concludes another entry - Tomorrow I leave Adelaide bound for Melbourne, the long way. Don't quite know where we'll go but it should all be nice.