Great Ocean Road
Hello Again, this time from Melbourne, Victoria
I am glad to be able to tell you something, because it’s been a while since I wrote the last post on this blog.
Well, a lot of thing happened in the last couple of days. And that might also be the reason for why I did not really have enough time for writing a lot of text here. But you might have noticed that I put some pictures on flickr but were not mentioning the sets here in the blog. So that is why you have to check the blog as well as my flickr site.
So what happened during the last couple of weeks?
Well, at first I went to Semaphore Beach, by bike again. It was a very calm and quiet beach. But that was for a reason. The beach was not very very pretty. There was sea grass all around
and the water was kind of shallow. Well I tried to make the most of the situation and take some nice pictures of the good parts of the beach and on my way from and to
the beach.
Then Tuesday March 17th was St. Patricksday which was celebrated intense and till 3 am.The day after I got a severe cold, including a sore throat, the sniffles and a weakness worse than ever before. One day I did the laundry and was kind of exhausted afterwards.
So I spent most of the day on the couch, drinking peppermint tea and playing PS2 and or reading books.
The next days were more or less just ups and downs, the cold getting better, getting worse again and getting better again. After like four days I started sufferiing from my chronical bronchitis which startet kind of heavy but got better pretty soon.
Right now, about two weeks later I am still coughing but am able to do everything since I am not weak or exhausted in any way.
Just hope that I don’t relapse and get sick again
I was pondering whether when to move on to the next city and where to go and how and everything. But everything was just not the thing I wanted. I knew that I wanted to go to Melbourne by end of March or in the first days of April.
The tour I tried to book was full and all hostels were full as well as they were very expensive during the Grand Prix weekend. I am talking about a three day guided tour from Adelaide to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road.
But then, one day, everything turned out to be alright and fitted like a puzzle which had just the last pieces missing.
Let me explain this a litte more detailed:
First, the two gals, namely Jo and Nancy, who booked the tour already and who I wanted to do the tour with, became sick so they had to postpone their tour two days (from Tue, March 24th to Thu March 26) which made me being able to book the same tour as they did.
Then I booked the same hostel, but from monday because it was booked out during the weekend.
So I invited myself to Chrisitan who I got to know at the couchsurfing.com community.
I had to write to some more members in order to find a place where I could stay.
Then I also purchased a ticket for the F1 Grand Prix. The ticket was about A$ 100 (99 + booking fee) which is ridiculously cheap compared to what you pay for a ticket in Europe / Germany.
The ticket was a general Admisssin for the race on Sunday and a The Who concert after the race.
We had to leave the hostel on thursday early in the morning. That is why we celebrated the last evening in Adelaide with a lot of people from the Hostel 109 in a pub round the corner called Crowns Szepter which happened to have half price cocktails every wednesday. Well, this was not our first night at this place 🙂 We became sort of regulars in this bar. They are serving really good cocktails even during the happy hours. And A$ 7.00 is really cheap for a well made Planters Punch.
Now comes the sad part. Leaving Hostel 109, a place where I met a lot of people and made friends with almost all of them. I am missing these people and now that I am writing this lines I become kind of sad, thinking of all the good times we had together.
I definately have to come back to the Hostel 109.
Now comes the fun part again. The Great Ocean Rd. We were picked up at 7 pm. The bus had about 25 seats and we were just 5 travellers plus Tom our funny tour guide. So we had a plenty of space to put our luggage and to make ourselves comfortable.
The first day was mostly driving through the nowhere. I never rode more than two hours by car whithout seeing anything but gumtrees and plain fields. It was somehow impressive and gave me just a tiny bit of an impression how big this country is. Then we had a couple of breaks during our journey through South Australia and Victoria including one where we saw white kangaroos which were behind fences though. Plus they were lazy just laying around in the sun. The first active stop we had when we arrived at the McKenzie Waterfalls. We hiked like 45 Minutes in total and saw a nice waterfall. I took some photos which you can see on my flickr site. The next point was “The Balcony” which was a mountain kind of look out where we had a good view over the gorgeous hills and mountains.
In the evening we arrived at our first overnight stay in the Grampians. This place was a little house with two rooms plus kitchen and lunge room.
and close to the house was a forest and a meadow in between the forest and the house were we could observe about 15 Kangaroos. Even one mother Kangaroo had a little baby Kangaroo in her pouch.
In the evening we had BBQ with salad and potatoes. After dinner we watched a DVD, namely National Teasure, which was quite a good film but we couldn’t enjoy it because the disc was full of scratches so the film was in the middle very choppy and refused to work properly so we decided to not to go on because it was really bothering. So we watched “Evan Allmighty” instead.
The second day we got up at 6 pm in order to see the sunrise at the pinnacle mountain. This was really nice, because we were hikking about one hour to the top of the mountain. I would not want to do that during the day when it was like 28°C. So it was nice and cool. The way up to the top of the rocky mountain was really exciting and a bit dangerous. It was sometimes really narrow and steep. Though it was an exhausting hike it was a very rewarding, gorgeous view on the top of this mountain.
The way down took about 40 minutes and was not as exhausting but required a lot of attention because we had to watch our steps while hiking down to the bus again.
Then we drove to a cultural centre were aboriginal life and art was displayed.
Then in the mid day we arrived at the so called Great Ocean Road, which is splitted in five different parts. The ship break coast, the blue coast, the classic coast, the green coast and the surfers coast.
You can see on the pictures the bassalt rocks in the sea which were created through continous waves splashing against the rocks. The abrassion of the rocks appears to be two centimeters per year.
In the evening we arrived at Port Campbell where we stayed in a hostel. Port Campbell is a tiny but pretty place with a nice coast view and a pub were we went for a beer in the evening.
Next morning we had to get up very early, i.e. 06:00 am, in order to see the sun rising at the twelve apostels, wich is a group of rocks in the sea. Appearantly there are just 7 of the 12 Apostels left because 5 of them collapsed due to wheater conditions (need to look up for more details)
The morning was freezing cold and the wheater was kind of dizzy and cloudy. Nevertheless I took some nice pictures; not so much of the sunrise, but of the landscape in general.
After freezing our buns of we headed to a rain forest area where there were a lot of very tall trees and and some palm trees. The most significant thing I remember of the rain forest is, that the temperature dropped some degree when we went down in the wood.
Then we had a short stop in … don’t remember the name really … but there were Koalas in the trees. And that was everything I remember of this little vilage.
Then we went along the ocean, gorgeous view by the way :D, to the end of the classic coast part where we found a memorial of the soldiers who built this part of the road. The story i was told is that it was a programme by the australian government to give jobs to the veterans of world war one which needed to acclimatize and find back to normal life somehow after the devstating fights on the battle field.
The last two stops were at the surfers coast where we stopped to see and take photos of surfers riding on the waves and tourquee which is the shopping paradise for surfers and where you can get everything according to surfing and sportswear like quicksilver, billabong, rip curl and so on and so forth. I did not buy anything though I liked the stuff.
I have so much clothings whith me I can’t carry anything more.
in the late afternoon we approached Melbourne where I was dropped of at Flinders Street Station. I took the train to Footscray where I met Christian who was my host on saturday and sunday. We drove to Aldi where I got some groceries. In the evening we watched a film. I went to bed early because I was soo tired.
Sunday morning I got up at 8 am in order to go to the city and see Melbourne. I met Mark and Rufin who I knew from Adelaide already. We went to Albert Park where the Grand Prix took place. Before the actual race there were some other races with V8 cars, Formula 5000 and a Mini cup. There was also an air show with 5 planes an a quantas aircraft which flew very low and slow above the track. The F1 race startet at 5 pm. I took tons of photos and still need to sort out some good photos to upload them.
After the race I have seen the concert of The Who but as the sun was gone it got really cold. And as I was tired from waliking and standing all day I was really happy when I was at “home” round 1145 pm. I went to bed and copied the pictures to my harddrive and chatted a little, then I slept in.
Today I needed to change my place because I booked from Monday at Cooee’s Hostel in St. Kilda.
I packed up and moved to the hostel which was easy to find and good to reach via train and tram. After cheking in, Mark (who stayed here already) and I went to the city and used the free internet wireless hot spot on Confederation Square near Flinders Street Station.
When done we took the free tram which goes round the city and an announcer tells what sights are worth it to see and a little about the historical background of the buildings.
Then we returned to the hostel and went grocery shopping at Safeways.
At 7 pm we ate free snags (sizzeled saussage on toast with tomato sauce) Btw: For some odd reason, the Australians call ketchup tomato sauce instead of ketchup, so there is no difference between these two.
Then we spent the evening in front of the TV (so called cheap monday) It’s because on monday scrubs and some other tv shows are on which makes us stay in the hostel instead of spending all our precious money in Australias pubs, bars and clubs.
Wow, now its 1 am and I wrote a looot! I never meant to, but I had to keep up 🙂
OK, folks…
I am off to my bed. Cya whenever I have to tell you about the next part of my journey though AUS!
cheers,
Hauke