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Published: March 17th 2009
What a cutie
Please don't make to much noise, I'm a little ShyDAY 129
We woke up at Aire River, on a very cold and extremely wet morning; the weather just seemed to be getting worse.
The tent was totally soaked, still we stuck it out, we were warm and dry in our camper trailer, it had rained most of the night and the wind gave us a real battering. In true Andy Trenfield style I still had my shorts and flip flops (thongs) on, there was not a chance of surrender.
The day before the weather was so foul that we had considered getting a motel room or cabin, as the thought of being even colder than we were was not appealing.
The reason for this extremely bad weather is a low pressure front heading down the west coast from Darwin is being pushed along by an area of high pressure.
We talked it over and came to the conclusion that the easy way out was not going to be our way out, this was the adventure we had chosen and we were not going to cave in at the first sign of difficulty, I gave Caroline the choice and she said she wanted to stick it
Raining
And the rain came down hard out.
We knew everything had to be packed away wet, we also knew the most important thing we needed to keep dry was the bedding, so again, as we had done the day we left Cradle Mountain we carefully folded it up and put it on the back seat of the patrol.
It was just about an hour and we were all packed away, we drove around the other side of the hedge and said goodbye to our neighbours, John, Wendy, Jeff, Jeanette and the boys, they were off to Echuca Beach as they hoped the weather would be better a little further North and as they had been thoroughly wet through were glad to go.
As we were talking the rain stopped and a bit of blue sky had appeared, when we left the camp ground, we were on Aire River camp ground west, Camps 5 reference 678, we drove back over the wooden bridge, remembering Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s Journey on the Road of Bones to Magadan and coming across similar wooden bridges that had collapsed over time meaning that they had to ride through freezing waters or wait for a truck to come
Our tent is wet
On the outside only along and drive them across, Andy assured me that this bridge was strong. Driving through the East part of this campground and back the way we came on to the track leading to the B100 (Great Ocean Road).
We were only 100 yards down the road looking for the Koala’s that we had seen the day before, when we saw a truck on the side of the road, they had got out and were looking up in to a tree (Its always a good sign), we got out and started to chat, to these 2 girls Jade an Auzzie girl from Melbourne and Denise was from North London. They had both worked together in the UK for Optical Express, Jade had worked and lived in Southampton they decided that they would go travelling together. Jade only too pleased to be able to show Denise her home country.
Jade and Denise are koala lovers and themselves had camped at Aire on the East side of the river. They had been told to camp on that side because there were Koala’s on the East side, which of course they saw between the rain showers yesterday. Had we realised we may have
camped on that side too!
When Denise had resigned from Optical Express, she sent a card to the management saying F@*k the Job, it did make us laugh. I wondered how many of us would like to have done the same at some point in time, but never actually had the nerve.
At present our Koala count was 3, with Denise and Jade we saw another 2. We talked a little more about their trip they explained to us that they were “wwoofing” around Australia, in unison we both asked “What’s Wwoofing”? Jade explained “Willing workers on organic farms”, basically they worked so many hours a day in return for food and accommodation. This is a great way to ease the strain on the budget while travelling.
Leaving Jade and Denise we drive on, happy to see some more Koala’s, we drove past the tree where we had seen the two the day before and they were there but we didn’t count these, as they had been counted once already.
Driving on to Apollo Bay for breakfast, but by the time we got there with our Koala interlude and chatting to Denise and Jade it was
lunch time, we had a fantastic lunch as a treat in a Spanish Tapas bar, as we ate we charged the laptop and power Gorilla, I have to agree with Caroline, they had the very best chips we have had in Australia to date.
Apollo Bay is a lovely little beachside town on the Great Ocean Road and is well worth a visit, if only just for lunch just like we did, however we think there is more to see and nice places to visit. There is even a modern Youth Hostel in town. We stopped to look at the wooden carvings in town, but could find no explanation behind them, but all the same they were good to see.
After lunch we drove to the old telegraph Museum but it was closed, it seems only to be open on weekends and public holidays, so we headed off the way we had come as we wanted to look at Cape Otway Lighthouse.
This lighthouse was the most important lighthouse In Australia. The journey to the lighthouse was about 24 K’s from our camp ground, through Great Otway National Park. Not long after driving off the main road
Construction
Good rough engineering, it does the job well and towards the lighthouse we spied a Koala, pleased with another find we drove on but then found that we had to keep stopping and starting as every few 100mteres there was another Koala, we saw another 11.
Some of these fella’s were just lolling around in branches, a few asleep, and some perched in the most precarious places trying to eat. Koala’s seem a little more active in this part of Australia, but maybe because it is colder down here. I think they may need the same number of hours sleep though as their diet is not better and they do not get any energy from the eucalypt that they eat.
At the lighthouse, we paid our money and walked through the grounds, the lighthouse was obviously near the sea, you could wander around the grounds, looking at the old light keepers house, the old telegraph station and finally walk around the lighthouse and all the way up to the lens room.
The steep steps took you right to the top where the British made lens by Chance Brothers (Smethwick), nr Birmingahm and a fantastic piece of old engineering, a guy started to speak to us,
Washing
Free camping does have its draw backs, washing at the back of the patrol in cold water, I'm glad no cars came down the track, and I will have to confiscate the camera from Caroline his name was Pat Howell, he used to be a lighthouse keeper on some of the lighthouses in this area and for a short time was at Cape Otway, he was very proud of being involved with the light house. We talked for ages and he had done a lot of research about Chance Brothers who manufactured the lens and all the mechanism to rotate the light beam so there was a lot of information to see.
Pat asked Caroline to try and rotate the lens, which she duly did with ease; Pat explained that the Lens floated in a bath of Mercury, which allowed it to be rotated with ease.
We left the lighthouse at 17.10 and were supposed to drive to Warrnambool where we had a site booked, I explained to Caroline that it would take us 2½ hours to drive there, and then we wouldn’t be putting the trailer up until at least 21.00 which is just too late, we would have to telephone and rearrange our booking for tomorrow night and drive to a free camp site at Johanna Beach (Camps 5 Reference No 679 which we would make by 18.00 and we could
have a fairly easy evening once we got there.
Caroline was disappointed at the prospect of no hot shower and no warm camp kitchen to sit in for the evening, but never mind we have that to look forward to tomorrow. We were overjoyed at our Koala count of 16 to date and could not wait to upload the photographs and upload the blog for yesterday showing a picture of our first Koala since Christmas.
In fact our blog statistics show that we have now written over 150,000 words, 1200 photos (not including the several thousand that we have not shared with you) and over 10,000 hits.
We drove down Red Johanna Road to find Johanna beach the weather was again getting worse so we quickly picked our spot and parked up. We got out of the car to put the trailer up before the rain started again, however just as we got out of the truck someone shouted “Andy”, It was Jade and Denise again they had also found their way to this camp site, we had not noticed that it was their car that we just pulled up opposite. In fact they had both been
Campers
Jeff and Jeanette and the bouys sitting in their car watching as we pulled in and thought they recognised the rig, but could not be sure it was us until we got out as we have blackened out windows.
I said to the girls that if they had mugs they could join us for a cup of tea when the tent was up, as we have said before the most important thing to get your bed ready for the night. In between rain showers we put the trailer tent up got the dry bedding back in and the kettle was on.
We were desperately short of water and milk by now, Camps 5 said there was a water tap, which we found was untreated, so as we were boiling anyway, we threw caution to the wind and let it boil for a good few minutes before using. We all sat for the rest of the evening in our trailer talking and laughing about our experiences of camping, Tasmania, the wildlife and the world in general.
With all due respect Denise and jade were travelling on a shoe string and didn’t even have a decent map, we recommended that there budget would work better
What a face
This dog just had such a lovely face if they invested in Camps 5, it would more than pay for itself in time and of course they would not have to rely on word of mouth for campsite information.
Time crept on and it was time to get some sleep, the weather outside again was fowl so Caroline and myself curled up like mice in a cosy sleeping bags and dreamt of warmer climes.
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