The next leg of our trip is from Melbourne, along the coast, all the way to Cairns. We've given us month and a half to do this. It's a lot of driving, but there's no way around in Australia I guess.
Wilson's Promontory National Park - 250km SE of Melbourne. It's a peninsula with protected forests, full of great walking tracks, wild animals and beautiful scenery. The problem is that large section of the park was burned down in the fairly recent fires. The most important consequence it had for us was that most of the really nice walks were closed. We did one of the few day-walks that were open and saw first-hand what impact fire has on these forests - surprisingly rejuvenating. Trees were already starting to grow new leaves, grass was picking up. We were hoping do see wild wombats - we even went for a little track at night, but no luck. Actually I stand correct - we saw about a hundreds of them on the side of the roads, killed by cars :(
Diving at Huskinson - some 200km south from Sydney. This was our first diving stops along the coast. The main attraction was supposed to be the possibility of diving with seals. I can't even express how excited we were after! The first dive we went to Seal Rock (accessible only in winter due to wind dirrection) which is where we got to dive with the seals (as promissed). First half of the dive we didn't see any, so I went to the surface to check where they were - basking in the sun on the rocks the little buggers. But then some of them  went in to check us out and it was absolutely awesome. They're just like little puppies - with very long sharp teeth though :) The next dive was a bit closer to the land where we got to see couple of sharks, eaglerays, etc.To make a perfect day even better, we saw whales like 20 meters far from the boat on the way back. Super awesome.
Bungonia State Recreational Area - 200km SW of Sydney. This uninvitingly sounding name was one of the biggest (nice) surprises we ran into so far. I was just looking for a spot in the Sydney area to do some walking. We've chosen to do a "red track", which was supposed to take us through the gorge, promising huge boulders and so on, classified as Grade 6. The markings were very sparse to say the least (no markings in the gorge, but again, there's nowhere else to go :), but that made the track even more interesting. It's hard to describe how beautiful it was - check out the pictures, but they fail to give you the real sensation. First we had to drop down more than 1000ft through a narrow valley, then walk through the gorge (actually calling it walking is not exact as it was more climbing from one huge boulder to another) and then climb up very steeply back at the end. This was (so far) my favorite spot during our whole trip. There are also quite a few caves to explore in the area.
Sydney. Not to much to write really - we're just not city-sightseeing type of travellers I guess. First day we spent just walking around and also took a cruise through the harbour which was quite nice. Opera house is nice from far, but up close not that much. Most of the second day we've spent in the Powerhouse museum - it was surprisingly entertaining and we had hard time pulling ourselves out.