Mainland Australia

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Around Victoria

We have now returned to the mainland Australia and settled at the naturist club Helios in the Dandenongs. On being urged not to leave Victoria without visiting their most popular national park we succumbed and drove for three hours to Wilson's Promentary, a projection into the Bass Straight which used to be connected to Tasmania before the last ice age. And it looks a bit like Tassie with huge granite exposed rocks all over the place. It is a little remote as it takes another thirty kilometres to get to the campsite from the edge of the park.

Once there we found it easy to follow a number of walks with tremendous views of the sea and hills with beaches almost deserted as usual. We managed two nights before we returned to Helios. And there we found two other vans using the parking lawn. We'd never seen anyone else on our space apart from the wombat! But they were good company, one couple from South Africa living in New South Wales now and the other from New Zealand doing a van swap like we shall be doing once we get to Perth next month.

And then we were off on our tour of Victoria stopping first at a community festival along the main street of Yea where Lesley did some shopping and on to Mansfield at the edge of the skiing country and Mount Buller. Weather still bright, sunny and generally warm. The papers say this is the longest warm spell for the Melbourne area with consistently high temperatures (above 20C) every day since mid December. Good for us.

The papers are also full of welcome information on the amount of rain falling around the place, mainly Queensland but this then travels along rivers south even to Victoria. One town in New South Wales knew it was going to be flooded in a week's time and there were stories of people planning to get in supplies to survive it. Very strange to us thinking about such times and the size of the place where floods take a week to get somewhere.

We are staying in the high country of Mount Buller which is really alive in the winter with snowboarders and skiers but now is fairly quiet. Our Servas hosts are really interesting having done an enormous tour of their own up to Northern Territory and Western Australia. Some amazing photography of their trip. They have put it in a book so we could see easily.

And now it is off to the Murray River and then around some before going back to Lesley's brother's place for Easter.

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Photos

This is us now. At dinner in Tassie
We are on our last night before taking the ferry.

A Possum in the ladies loo
A surprise Lesley photographed while at Wilson's Prom

One burnt tree at Kiinglake
There were a few of these at this town in the centre of the 2009 bush fires

One of the inscriptions
A poignant memento