First Australia Vacation Day 4

One of the first things we realized the day before was that we weren't prepared for it to be cold. Our hope was that the coldness of the previous day was an aberration and it would be warm and lovely for our sightseeing. Well, it wasn't. It got down to 10 Celsius in the late afternoon (50 Fahrenheit) and since we were used to the lovely summer up north, that seemed especially cold. Our little hiking forays to check out all the cool places were brisk walks - literally. It was quite windy and we found the weather to be either threatening rain or or having a little sun break in between the threats.

We saw some fabulous coastal formations and cliffs. As you can see, it's pretty special scenery. We especially enjoyed the Grotto and the Loch Ard shipwreck area. The ocean has long since erased the remnants of the Loch Ard wreck, but the story remains. The whole stretch we drove was dubbed the "shipwreck coast" because so many ships have met their end along there.

One of the highlights was the Twelve Apostles formations. Unfortunately they've lost a few apostles over the years, so it's now a bit misnamed, but the ones left are doing their best to look especially good.

We also went to the Tree Top Walk which was cool, but in our opinion was quite overpriced ($22 AUD each). I saw a new bird there - the Eastern Yellow Robin - and managed to immortalize it in the camera.

We next headed to Cape Otway where we would be spending the night at the lighthouse manager's accommodations. As we drove down the road to the lighthouse, we had heard there were koalas so we were keeping an eye out for koala bums (and the rest of their bodies, too!). It wasn't long before we saw one, then another, and we just kept seeing them. We stopped and got lots of pictures of these cute (sort of) little furry guys. After forever scanning the trees near our house for koalas with no success, we felt like we'd hit the jackpot. We also spied our first fox in Australia.

Staying at the lighthouse was an interesting experience. It truly was a step back in time as there was no cell phone coverage, internet, television, or telephones. We were - gasp! - cut off from the world. I think if I were to live there for any length of time I'd need an awful lot of books. But for a one night stint, it can and does keep its charm.

I posted the full set of scenic coastline, tree top walk, koala, fox, and lighthouse pictures here (Pictures). As you can see by one of them, the wind blew my hair into a frightful 'do.

First Australia Vacation Day 3

One of the things we all seek in a vacation is the chance to "get away from it all". Well, we got away from it all - including the internet. All it took was a few days of no internet and suddenly I've nothing to say. Sadly this is mostly because I can't recall half of what happened, but this is where pictures are a leaky mind's best friend.

Based on the evidence presented by the camera, we first saw a gannet colony. It might have been a lot more interesting if we could have actually gotten close enough to the colony to tell we were looking at gannets and not just some moving birds of some sort in the distance, but the environmentalists must have deemed our visage so repulsive to gannets that they'd no longer be able to reproduce if they took a gander at us (oops, I think I'm mixing my 'birdaphors').

Apparently the only thing gannets can look upon with equanimity are Maremma dogs. They have two of these dogs and the two dogs take turns guarding the gannet colony. The dogs are trained to make a fox wish it'd never even thought about a gannet dinner. All I know is I felt kind of sorry for the dog that was there because he sure seemed to want some human contact.

We moved on down the road and after checking out a reproduction of an old boat, we turned off into an area called the Tower Hill Reserve. It's a monstrous crater from long ago volcanic activity and is a lush environment. We found a shingleback lizard, emus, koalas, and one kangaroo that scared the dickens out of me and vice versa. It was a completely different world.

We hopped back onto the Great Ocean Road and made our way to Warrnambool. Warrnambool has a lovely viewing area on one beach to look at whales, but since it's not the season for the whales to be around we contented ourselves with admiring someone's beach artwork. Pretty cool, eh?

We moved on thinking we'd spend the night in Peterborough. That plan fizzled when we saw the motels there - they just didn't look like what we were hoping to find. We moved on to the next town and found a place to drop our carcasses for the night in Port Campbell.

The next stretch of road holds the big attractions of the Great Ocean Road so we looked forward to seeing even better stuff after a good sleep.