After we’d recovered from the fact that we were camping in Hackney (Adelaide was obviously settled by a big group of East Londoners, because they’ve got Hackney, Mile End, Stepney etc. as suburbs – all shitty areas of London!) Adelaide proved to be a really nice city.

We wondered round Central Market and stuffed ourselves with lots of funky specialist food, wandered around the impressive botanical gardens, visited the aboriginal art centre they have there (where I bought a new bag for my pipe and tobacco – tres exciting!). A wander around the city revealed more of an old-style charm to it than other large towns in Australia, although the main shopping plaza felt thoroughly English which was strange. There’s a strong presence of public art all around the city.

It’s a real shame that we didn’t get more time to stay here – we kind of wish we’d skipped Melbourne now and come here instead in one sense. It’s making us think of doing things very differently on our trip to New Zealand which we’re planning for this time next year. It would have been nice to have been in Melbourne and then moved here after just a few months for a few more months. Anyway, thoughts are slow-cooking for travel plans in 2010 as a result of finding somewhere that we might have preferred….

A bizarre but welcome change was the opportunity to actually use our legs! After 2 weeks in a car for most of the day, you get this feeling that your legs are beginning to atrophy and then, BOOM!, all of a sudden your walking a few kilometres down to the city and back from the camping site. My goodness, I do have legs! So for 2 days we didn’t use the car – a welcome change since we were so used to walking everywhere in Melbourne.

By the time we’d caught our ferry in the afternoon (which, I might just say, I didn’t get ill on at all this time! Ginger tablets, water and sitting at the back all helped!) and driven a bit up the Fleurieu Peninsula we were ready to make another stop at Normansville again.

This is a lovely little town with a nice little beach with a beautiful sunset and, even better, a fantastic little food wagon on the beach that is open all day until late and did great fish’n'chips and good coffee. I could have done a few days here chilling, but we needed to move on unfortunately.

Adelaide was calling….

Wow, when we finally got ferry over to Kangaroo Island I suddenly remembered why I haven’t been on a ferry for over 20 years – I have not felt so bad and sick in a long time! My only consolation was that I didn’t chunder all over the deck!

Kangaroo Island has been amazing. A few of our experiences have been;

• visiting a family run honey farm, tasting amazing honey, finding the queen bee and marveling at how industrious and organised bees are.
• cuddling a koala (WOW!)
• feeding kangaroos (wow-wow-wee-waa!B)
• feeling sad at all the road kill
• watching possums, echidnas, koalas and kangaroos just stroll through our camp site
• being surrounded by dozens of wallabies at night time
• resting up and getting a chance to reflect and catch our breath.

If you’re ever coming to South Australia, I cannot recommend Kangaroo Island enough. We’ve had a great time here. With an ‘overwhelming’ population of 4800, but still taking about 2 hours to drive across, Kangaroo Island is pretty rural. But it’s got a great atmosphere and there’s lots of little foody and wildlife orientated things to do.

When we got here at first, I was completely destroyed. We’d been on the road for 8 days solid without a break and had over-stretched ourselves. 8 days of solid driving, stopping, sightseeing, back in the car driving, sleeping, driving etc. You get the picture. So we decided that a)we needed to build in more downtime for ourselves to just chill out and what-not, and b) we needed more of a budget if we were going to actually enjoy our traveling experience and eat healthily and not get stressed out with the whole experience.

So, you learn a lot of things on the road and you can only learn these things by actually doing them. You need to find your own pattern and no-one else can dictate this for you – this we’ve learnt through personal experience and through all the people that we’ve spoken to. Every person has a different pace and a different pattern – we might need more chill-out time than others (especially considering that we’re taking a long trip) and we might be covering more distance than, well, most, but you’ve got to ‘find your stride’ and our time chilling out on KI allowed us to reflect and measure up all these things.

It’s also given us some of our real stand out experiences so far – feeding kangaroos and cuddling a Koala. We did both of these at an animal sanctuary called ‘Paul’s Place’ in the north. Here we got to feed the ‘road-kill joeys’ that he’s taken in over the years who are so gentle and love to be patted and stroked and eat out of your hand! How cool was that?!

(Incidentally, for those who are concerned about any commercial exploitation here – all these animals were rescued when they have been either abandoned in the wild or their mothers have been killed by a car on the road and they have survived as babies. They are then taken in, but once a wild animal leaves the wild it can’t return because it won’t survive. Therefore they must stay in captivity. But believe me, these animals didn’t have a hard life!….)

Another big thing for me was cuddling a koala. Photos to follow, but it was wonderful to have this cuddly thing holding onto you and feeling so natural about it.

Back at our campsite in the west, we were surrounded by wildlife. When you went back to your car/tent at night you suddenly realised that you were surrounded by dozens of wallabies. If you stood still all you could hear was the firm ‘tug-tug-tug’ of wallabies eating grass. Allow your eyes to get used to the light or turn on your torch and do a quick scan and you were surrounded by about 70 or so wallabies on a midnight forage! Fantastic. Plus, on our last night we had the chance to watch a koala just walk around the camp, up and down a few trees and then wander off on it’s business and we found an echidna rustling around in the shrub ground just behind our car. Echidna’s rock – fact, and it was great to watch one from a few feet away (they’re not scared of people because they haven’t had to learn to avoid people during their evolution).

From here it’s straight up to Adelaide. Here’s hoping that I manage that ferry a little better this time….

I get a little silly at Clifford’s Honey Farm

Bernice feeding a Kangaroo Island Kangaroo (they’re different to other ‘roos and are only found on the Island)

Me feeding some roos by hand – this was so fab!….

…but not as fab as this – cuddling a Koala – he was lovely. Although brief, this is a real standout experience for me.

This is an Echidna – again on KI they have blonder spines than their mainland counterparts. These guys are so cute – one of my favourite animals.

When camping at Flinders Chase in the west of KI, our car was surrounded by 70-100 of these guys – Tamar Wallabies (again, particular to KI).

Bernice standing atop the tallest dune in Little Sahara – which really was a Sahara like desert in the middle of KI!

Thankfully we didn’t see or hear our ‘friend’ from the previous night (see previous post) and were able to get up and out without any more traumatic encounters.

So at last we really started to drive and took a route down to Geelong (the ‘Gateway to Colac’ as I’ve heard it described once!), down through Torquay (even more surf obsessed that it’s Cornish counterpart back in the UK) and picked up the Great Ocean Road – one of the things that you never stop hearing about when you say you’re going on a road trip around Australia.

And it’s for a good reason.

The view of the Great Ocean Road (GOR) is amazing. Every little point you want to stop and take photos, but if you did that then you’d never reach anywhere, ever!

It’s also very well constructed and although a very windy road there are plenty of ’slow vehicle passing points’ so you can get rid of those idiots giving you rear love up the exhaust pipe and let them pass.

We made a brief stop in Lorne for lunch and lovely walk along the beach, then carried on to Apollo Bay further down the road.

It’s a quaint little town, but not really much else to do apart from be on the beach and chill out there and in the cafes along the GOR, which of course is pretty great.

En route to Apollo Bay we stopped at Split Point Lighthouse – a major contribution to ship safety through the Bass Straits. Now I hope that that doesn’t really excite you all that much, but many of you might be a little more interested when I tell you that Split Point is where the, er, ’seminal’ Australian children’s series ‘Round the Twist’ was filmed and based.

Can’t say that it particularly excited me either. But it completely made Bernice’s day!

Bernice’s moment in front of the Lighthouse!

A view from the Great Ocean Road

Bernice on the beach at Lorne.

So we finally headed off from Riddell’s Creek!

Thanks to Rod for all his hospitality this week and before. It was a real help to have somewhere to go and to just get out of the house in Carlton! Plus you get the sensational company of Rod Baker. Simply cannot go wrong!

So then, day one – the drive to Daylesford.

It’s not a very long drive at all but we fancied seeing a few places in Victoria before we joined the Great Ocean Road and started to make our way west to Adelaide and beyond. So we drove to the Spa Town of Daylesford (often associated with the nearby smaller town of Hepburn Springs).

It was a pretty looking place but nothing too interesting to do with the town itself. If you had lots of money to splash out on spa treatments, massage and organic herbal stuff – then you were in there (Daylesford has a thriving alternative scene and this shows even at the Tourist Information Office!). Alternatively, if you’re the type to get up at the crack of dawn on a weekend, don your walking boots and then spend the rest of the day trekking 14km through hilly forest and rock landscapes, then yet again you would have been in your element.

Not being too flush and certainly not the types to choose to greet the morning like the lark out of preference, neither of these defining characteristics were of much use to us.

However, we did find a beautiful lake just outside the main town complete with walks, parking space, public toilets and a barbeque (for those of you who haven’t been here, Australia has a kind of national policy of putting free hot-plate barbecues in most of their public spaces). So we decided to choose to sleep there on our first night. Some cheap knock-off meat from the supermarket allowed us to even cook big fat steak sandwiches on the barbecue. Tough life.

There was even a cute little book shop and cafe down by the lake to look around when we got up.

So we survived the first day pretty well. “No dramas”, as the Aussies say.

Seeing as we were sleeping by a lake, had toilets but no showers and had seen several people swimming in the lake the day before, what better way to start your day than to go for a swim in the lake?

After we transformed our car into day mode (our car has a ‘day mode’ setup and ‘night mode’ setup – the latter involves everything that lived in the boot and on the back seat being flung into the front seats so we can sleep in the back), we began our drive to Ballarat – the former centre of the Australian Gold Rush that saw the countries population soar back in the 19th century.

Ballarat is a pretty town and it’s certainly got a very different feel to lots of other towns in the area. It’s managed to keep much of its original 19th century architecture, and it’s not just all restoration for tourism purposes (or at least, it doesn’t look like it!).

The main attraction of Ballarat is Sovereign Hill – a living re-enactment mining town based on the town’s beginnings as one of the major centres for the Gold Rush mentioned above. But we couldn’t do that – too expensive again!

So being the, er, ‘budget travelers’ that we are, we went to the Aboriginal Cultural Centre. I’d wanted to go anyway – Australia seems very keen to make up for it’s mistakes in the past with regards to mis-treatment of Indigenous Peoples and destruction of their habitat and lifestyle, and many of these exhibitions provide a valuable and interesting insight into a radically different culture that we could all learn from.

The Aboriginal Cultural Centre was a good move and comes highly recommended if any of you are ever there. Oh, and it’s free!

Tonight we decided to be luxurious and actually pay to stay somewhere. So we found a caravan park and settled in for the night.

The only strange thing was some woman from Doncaster (a large town in the north of England) who came into the kitchen whilst Bernice and I were playing MahJong (this is a new game that our friend Rod Baker has got us into), with her elderly mother in tow, apparently to phone her ‘Aunt Tilly’ back home.

She then proceeded to scream down the phone at the poor recipient who picked it up (presumably from an old folks home where Aunt Tilly might or might not have been eagerly awaiting her phone call. Or death, depending on your outlook.) about how she tried phoning last night, didn’t speak to Aunt Tilly, and how a dog was trying to talk to her over the phone all the way from Doncaster to Australia, that aforementioned lack of service cost her $30, oh, and to tell Tilly that they’re okay.

She went on screaming down the phone (especially about the dog), getting frustrated and obviously unaware that a little time is needed in conversations over this distance for over 40 minutes. Amazing. I think our friend was a little mad and absolutely thick as shit.

By the time I left that kitchen (which was ASAP – about 15 minutes) my head was spinning. What a time to not have a beer handy.