The start of a 3 day journey to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road. We started late but with a full cooked breakfast (cooked by Nicola). In Oz there seems to be two styles of B+B, the normal one where the guest sleeps and eats and the DIY B+B where everything is provided and you do the cooking. This is much more common and in this case tasted great!
The accommodation in McClaren Vale was a very pleasant two room garden flat with all mod cons which made it harder to get up and running. However once on the road the mud map was put to the test taking us to Meadows, Strathalbyn, Langhorne Creek and then Wellington to cross the Murray River using a 24hr ferry.
The Murray River has played a significant role in the early development of the area as it allowed easy passage to the interior before the development of a road network. The ferry is still used on a daily basis by locals and tourists alike.
The route then turned south following a series of shallow lagoons and off-shore islands close to the sea, perfect for the nesting pelicans. We stopped at Jack Point and took some time to see the birds come and go with graceful flights often in V formations. The feeding ground is in the river estuary where the freshwater fish encounter the saltwater for the first time and this stuns them making fishing easy for the birds.
Further south we came to Kingston SE the home of the Giant Lobster a 17 metre behemoth. We stopped and took the obligatory photos. If this is the size of the crayfish in these parts then the boat that Phil showed us in Cervantes will be no match but on the other hand catch one of these and it would pretty much fill the annual quota!
From there it was a small hop to Robe our destination for the night. A pretty fishing town that started as a major port in the mid 1800's. We found some accommodation in the oldest house in Robe and was built for the Government Representative.
We had decided to have a walk around the harbour and make an early night of it. In the event we met 2 twitchers from the UK (Annie and Rodders) and seeing the binoculars we could not resist asking what was the interesting birdlife. They had managed to see close to 200 different Australian birds during their travels and for Rodders it felt a bit like he was starting out on his ornithological journey again as, once spotted, he had no idea where to look for individual specimens within his reference book.
Their bird watching played second fiddle as the conversation carried on during our walk round the harbour and we gained a few good tips as to what to see on our journey to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road. With the light now gone we continued our discussions over pizza and wine at the only place open in Robe at 20:30. We were most envious of their experiences in Business Class for the flight over. How the other half live!
Great company and so much for an early night and updating the blog.