Grampian Mountains and the Great Ocean Road

We left really early in the morning to start our three-day trip from Adelaide to Melbourne. We slept most of the morning on the bus until we got to the Grampians. The Grampians are a mountain range in Victoria, and they are some of the oldest mountains in the world. We hiked up to the top of one of the peaks and it was a really fun trip. It was not a very long hike, but at least half of it was climbing over boulders and going through tunnels that the rock formations had made, and that was a lot of fun navigating up the mountain. The view at the top was cool as well. After getting back to the bus, we drove past a farm where they breed white kangaroos. Our tour guide said that this project was just for the benefit of tourists, and that the animals really should not be bred, as they are albinos and have a lot of genetic problems associated with them. They are more susceptible to cancer and other diseases, and it's just a bad deal. It's possible that the one at the San Francisco zoo came from this place, our driver said they are shipped all over to different zoos. It was just sortof a weird place, right off the highway in the middle of nothing else. We saw tons of wild kangaroos along the side of the road just driving along too, literally hundreds of them at a time. I found out that a group of kangaroos is known as a 'mob'.

The next day we went on another hike to the Pinnacle, which was the top of another one of the Grampians. It was a bit cold and wet out, but was a sweet hike nontheless, and the view at the top was amazing. You could see for miles around and it was really beautiful. We saw a wallaby, and were told that echidnas live around the area too. I learned that a baby echidna is called a 'puggle', that's a pretty cool name. After we completed that hike, we started our trip along the Great Ocean Road. The road was originally built by ex-soldiers after WW1 that returned to Australia and could not find work, so the government gave them jobs building this road. It was very hard work and some of them even died in the process. It was originally named 'Government Road', but the name was eventually changed to the Great Ocean Road, and that is exactly what it is. The vista points along the road were amazing, really beautiful rock formations and the water is super blue. We saw the sunset over the formations known as the 12 Apostles, and it was really pretty. We had good weather this day, and it was nice that the sun was out for most of the time.

The third day we went along more of the Great Ocean Road and walked down along this beach that had a really neat cave we got to walk through. A ship, the Lock Ard, had crashed near this beach in the 1880s, and the two survivors of the wreck very luckily found their way to this cave and lived there for awhile until they figured out how to climb up the cliffs and find civilization. After that, drove to the Otway Fly, a rainforest in Victoria. It was a really neat walk, they set up these catwalks through the trees so you are walking pretty high up in the air. At one point, you can walk up the stairs of a tower to be right at the tree tops, it was a different perspective and was interesting to be looking down on so many plants. We didn't see very many animals there, but the plants and environment were really cool to see. We kept driving down the road and stopped at this camper van park where a ton of koalas hang out for some reason. They were all around, and we even got to see a mama with her baby on her back! It was really cute to say the least. Another interesting Australian animal fact I learned is that male koalas have a double headed penis, and that female koalas have 2 vaginas! Ridiculous! It reminded me of the girl in my freshman dorm that had 2 utereses (uteri?), but even more crazy. As you can tell our guide was full of information. We went by Bell's Beach on the outskirts of Melbourne on the way into the city, it's a really famous surf spot. It is the only beach that is dedicated as a sort of 'sanctuary' protected area for surfers. I thought that was pretty cool. It was rainy and cold out, but there were still guys in the water, and we watched them catch waves for a bit. We finished up our trip that night and got into Melbourne about 7 or 8PM.

We went with a group of about 16 people from all over on this trip (Germany, Denmark, China, Korea, Netherlands, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Belgium to name a few), and it was a good mix. One woman from the Netherlands was a bit annoying and complained about a fair number of things. She found the bathrooms to be unacceptable everywhere we went. She had just gotten back from a tour through the outback, I was wondering what she did out there? Everyone else was just like, suck it up princess! The guy from Korea was really cool, he kept asking me what phrases like 'suck it up' meant. He had just finished his military duty in Korea and was on a working holiday visa hanging out in Australia for awhile. There was a mother and daughter together too (from China), and the mom was wearing the most unpractical shoes on the hikes we were going on. I was amazed she made it through most of them (had to stop at the rock climbing parts for the first one), because they were like semi dressy shoes with no backs. People are funny. The only bad part of the journey was that Shannon got attacked by some nasty spider and has a few hardcore bites on the right side of her body. They are pretty intense and we are hoping for them to heal up soon, it looks painful. Other than that, it was a good trip with many very awesome views.



Photos are: view from the top of the Grampians, hiking down slippery rocks on our second hike, the tower you could climb up to be above the treetops in the Otway Fly, rock formations on the Great Ocean Road (the one on the right used to be called 'the tits', but is now known as the 'salt and pepper shakers'), one of the koalas we saw along the Great Ocean Road, sunset over the 12 Apostles, and Shannon and I being oh so gangsta