
Boy am I behind with the updates. We're just too busy travelling and I guess I got a bit lazy too :) Oh well, i'll try to catch up now. Last time I wrote anything was when we were picking up our camper from Wicked and were on our way from Melbourne. We've decided on doing something like a big loop - starting from Melbourne, driving north-west, hitting Adelaide, going up north to Flinders ranges, coming back to Adelaide and then back to Melbourne along the south coast. I'll just highlight the really interesting stops we did.
Grampians National Park - located about 250km west of Melbourne. We spent basically 2 days there walking. The first day we went to the pinnacle, which offers great view of the ranges. It was our first longer walk in Australia and not a bad one - we've never seen so many wild kangaroos, plus we found an echidna in the bushes too. The weather got progressively worse though, so we cut the rest of the stay short and moved on.
Flinders Ranges - located about 500km north of Adelaide. It's a very dry region with something what I imagine being Australia's typical scenery. Dry, bushy, reddish rocks. We did 2 major walks here - one to the top of the St.Mary mountain which we almost reached (last couple meters were just too narrov and slippery) and the second day Mt. Ohlssen Bage. Apart from stunning scenery, we spotted shingleback and quite a few dead kangaroos (plus about zillion live ones ;). Oh I almost forgott the most important partt - it was WARM; for the first time in months! :)
Mt. Gambier and
Naracoorte - is some 450km SSE from Adelaide and is known as the limestone coast. It was mine prime interest as 80% of the cave-diving in Australia is done here. They actually have a dive-able cave in the middle of town! We went to some sinkholes (the nicest ones are down south, hidden in the woods) which were incredibly huge. We also spent one day a bit north in Naracoorte, where the biggest fosil caves are located - at least it gives you something different to look at other than just formations :)
Great ocean road - follows the coast from Adelaide to Melbourne (well, technically it starts about mid-way, but that's a detail). There are many stops along the road, mostly looking at different pieces of more-or-less narrow pieces rocks sticking out from water. There's one called London bridge, which actually collapsed like 20 years ago - funny thing is that a couple was on the rock when it collapsed and got stranded on the middle piece for couple hours. Why is that funny? Well, they were both married, but not to each other ;) Oh and we did one crappy beach dive in Warrnambool - totally not worth it (cold, no vis, no life).
Otway National Park - is about 200km SW of Melbourne. There are at least two touristy reasons to go there. First is a Tree Top Walk which was actually very nice, except for the fact that what I recon all the kids from all of Australia were with there with us as well. My salute to the engineers who built it - the sctructure actually survived. Oh and they have some big plastic dinosaurs along the trail too! Second major reason for visit is the fact that you're basically guaranteed to see wild koalas there. And we did and they were sooo cute...
This whole circuit took us about 2 weeks.