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Hello!
Apologies for the late update on here but I have had a whirlwind 6 weeks! Anyway...onto the details of my travel along the great ocean road and South Australia.
It was amazing. Me and 3 friends rented a camper van, it was a toyota corrolla that was converted into a camper van, on the roof was a "pod" of sorts that opened up from the width, not length, and would sleep two, whilst two others slept inside. We had a kitchen sink, cooker, fridge, storage and maps...all we needed to get us where we needed to go.
The weather wasn't perfect everyday, we had a couple of bits of rain, but most of the time it was sunny and fresh!! The coast is very dramatic down there, the waves were enormous and the cliff edges were a little scary too! I didn't do much driving, only a little 10 minute stint just to say that I did it! but I left the driving to others who were a bit more confident!! It was a very windy road!
The beaches were just great all along, every 20 minutes or so was a little beach town with cute surf shops, souvenir shops and lots of free barbeques to use along the beach. We tried to use these as much as we could, we ate right next to the beach most nights!
On a drive one day, Joe spotted a couple of Koala's in the tree's just on the side of the road so we stopped and there they were! Just hanging about in the tree's...one even did a little climb for us. Apparantley they sleep 23 hours of the day so we were pretty lucky!
Most nights we camped in free camp sites, this involved no showers and the use of pit toilets. There were tanks of rainwater that I used to wash my hair in the morning, but at 7am the water was pretty cold...it certainly woke me up!!
We were going to drive all the way along to Adelaide but decided that we didn't really have the time and that we would rather take it slow and have a nice day on the beach instead of driving a fair way more. So we visited a place called mount Gambier in South Australia, they have a lake that is SO blue due to Limestone. It's crazy how blue it is!! Then we went up to Naracoorte to see some caves...Naracoorte was also voted Australia's tidiest town in 1994...just a quick factoid there for you! It was a very tidy town too...and it's botanical gardens were in a cave!
We then drove back into Victoria to visit the grampians national park. Unfortunately it had suffered some pretty severe flood damage so we weren't able to see some of the prettier things. An entire mile of road had been washed away and replaced by boulders the size of cars! It was pretty crazy. But we camped out, had a fire, roasted some marshmallows and in the morning we woke up to have breakfast with 6 or 7 Kangaroo's! It was so surreal!
We visited the 12 apostles, including a sunrise visit which we had to get up at 5am for!! It was worth it though, the sunrise was pretty cool to watch.
After making our way back to Melbourne I hung around in St.Kilda for a couple of days, it's like a little beach suburb of Melbourne...the beach is pretty grotty though...the sea is all brown...not nice. We went to Phillip island and watched the penguin parade. At around 9pm at night, about 200 penguins come out of the sea (not at the same time) and waddle over to their nests.
St.Kilda was also having a festival the weekend we were there, so there were lots of bands, motorbike stunts, BMX stunts, volleyball tournements, food stalls, clothes stalls, windsurfing competitions and various different entertainment on offer. It was so busy, they shut down so many streets and everybody got into the australian spirit and had a few beers.
So...having booked my flight to perth for the 16th of February I rooted around for a job and got landed one in Harrismith, Western Australia. But that's a whole different story......
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