Wild Places and Open Spaces

Before we went to Kangaroo Island, a couple of blokes we bought fries off tipped us off about a secret hot spot called Deep Creek. So, once we were back on the mainland we figured it was logical to check out this ‘hot spot’!

It was a decent spot, but nothing more spectacular than anywhere else we’ve been. We were however informed by the park ranger that in case of fire make sure we got ourselves out of the woods to open country or we’d be overcome more quickly than we realized. But, with luck we’d probably be all right and we were.

We went on quite a steep hike down to the ocean and met an older fellow in unlikely hiking attire – a dress shoes and dress shirt – making his way back up the hill with a hundred flies in tow. Anyway, we chose the hike because of its moniker ‘the blowhole’ …but as it turned out there was no blow hole to speak of. Turns out it aquired its name through a series of spelling mistakes?!

After our uneventful trip in deep creek – which didn’t exist either – we followed the coast of South Australia then diverted inland to the east to see the Grampians National Park.

We took a good hike up Mt Williams and saw a small snake which we were unable to identify. But mostly, we saw a lot of closed areas due to recent fires which roared through Victoria and still are. The park did have an excellent aboriginal information centre which never pulled any punches describing the atrocities to the natives in the hands of Australia’s original settlers.

We headed back to the coast and came across a place called Tower Hill, just outside of Port Fairy. Tower Hill was a very pleasant surprise. It is an extinct volcano crater with a lake – with water (which is hard to come by in Oz) – and full of koalas and emus! We spent a couple of hours there photographing animals , especially the koalas which are tough animals to find. We even managed to photograph koala joeys which made our day!

Next stop(s) were the wonderous views of the Great Ocean Road. It would definitely rank up there in my best scenic drives. The water in South Australia is azure blue and has cut hundreds of interesting land formations out of the soft sandstone.

When approaching Melbourne and its 3 million sporty/artsy inhabitants, we opted to drive right around it. Sporty and artsy or not, 3 million people are something neither of us want to contend with. We simply aren’t city people.

Our next stop would be Wilson’s Promontory National Park to find the common, but elusive nocturnal wombat. Wilson’s Prom had some lovely beaches and fortunately the weather was perfect. We spent the day on the beach and swam in the cool southern waters basically just killing time until we could go spotlighting for wombats in the evening. Just before dark Kris needed to use the dunny (toilet in Oz) so I just sat in our campsite sipping on some wine waiting for her and low and behold doesn’t a sleepy wombat stumble right into our campsite, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and scratching all his itchies away. By the time Kris got back to camp I already found and photographed our little wombat friend. He hung around and entertained us for a short while before he went on his merry way. We went for a short walk and spotted four more of the funny little creatures so we had success at the Prom!

The next morning the clouds rolled in and the temps dropped by about 10 degrees, so we cut our visit to the prom a little short and once again headed along the coast – east then north – to Eden, New South Wales where we spent the night. In the morning we had ashes on our tent from the huge fires burning all through the south west. We took a chilly walk down to the beach to find a pod of bottlenose dolphins frolicking near shore for our own personal show.

Before heading to A.C.T. (Australian Capital Territory) we stopped at the Bega cheese factory and sampled some tasty cheese…yum. We also stopped at an australian Christmas store to see if we could purchase some Aussie decorations to send home as souvenirs. Much to our amazement this huge Christmas store only had the standard fare as well as a North American assortment of animals!? Worse than that, they had a small section of U.S.A. decorations including a moose decorated in stars and stripes with “I Love USA” written on it!

We weren’t sure when we were going to visit Canberra ACT, the nation capital, but after several weeks tentingin the desolate interior we decided we could use the change of some civilization.

Canberra is a thoughly planned city. In 1901 when the colonies federated the plan to build a national capital was actually written into the constitution. In 1908 the site was selected and in 1911 the land was purchased. An international competition was held to find an architect and of 136 entrants, Walter Burley Griffin – an americann – won.

In 1913 the foundations were laid and baptized “Canberra” thought to mean ‘meeting place’ to the Aborigines. In 1927 Canberra officially took over as the nation capital – which was Melbourne before then.

Planned or not, we got in our typical arguements over navigating an urban environment, but soon found the information centre and a caravan park which was only a 10 minute drive from downtown.

One could spend a full week in Canberra looking through galleries, museums, shops and the capital building. We spent one entire day in the brand new National Museum – free of charge. We spent another day split between the National Art Gallery – free – and the War Museum – free – but easily could have spent the whole day in the very impressive National War Museum and Memorial. We took a guided tour of the capital building on our final day which was very interesting and you guessed it – FREE!

There are a ton of other free attractions to visit if one had the time and some other attractions which have only a nominal fee. We may pass through again during this trip, but if you ever come to Australia be sure to save enough time to explore their capital city thoroughly!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.