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Published: June 13th 2008
Panoramic View: Grampians From Atop Mount Hollow Back On The Road
With a day break, we were back to our travelling antics and were picked up early by our new driver to take us out of Adelaide. The new driver's name was Dave, and he conclusively proved to be the best guide we were to have in our time in Australia. He really knew his stuff but was also very funny and put some great tunes on to boot. It's a fact that a good guide can make a trip as this was probably the most fun we'd had here.
Anne from Denmark continued on with us from the last tour and we were introduced to some new people which included 3 English guys, 2 French people and a German. Again, it was actually quite nice to have a more compact group size. We set off from Adelaide while being given some information about the area and most of the bus again fell asleep due to the early start. We crossed The Murray River which had once been used for goods transportation before the days of roads.
We soon reached the border between South Australia and Victoria where
we had to sacrifice half an hour to satisfy the time difference between the states. After a stop for coffee, we soon reached Horsham where we had lunch. After a quick bite, I decided to phone the tax office to find out the status of our tax return to be told that the cheque had now been sent out. Phew, our money troubles were over for another couple of weeks.
The Grampians
We headed to the Grampians as our main stop of the day and near to where we were going to be staying. Australian town and place names either derive from one of two places; the original Aboriginal name or a name taken from the UK. As we said, we were in Horsham earlier and now it was The Grampians. The history of it was basically a Scottish guy being sent to charter the region between Adelaide and Melbourne. He discovered some hills which apparently reminded him of his original locality, thus they were called The Grampians. In all honesty though, they don't look too similar as both climates produce entirely different mountain ranges. In Scotland, they are greener, snowier and earthier whereas here they are rockier
and sandier. There is a fair bit of green surrounding them here though as this is a lot nearer the temperate coastal regions than the outback, so it was quite a bit different from Flinders. In Aboriginal lore, these ranges were called Gariwerd which basically means nose/shoulder, as that's what it looked like to the original tribes of the area. More similar than the Scottish Grampians anyway.
We climbed Mount Hollow, which was a nice climb. This involved squeezing our way through a narrow crevice and also hiking up some fairly big rocks. We were shown how eucalyptus can help clear colds (quite popular in herb shops too) by inserting rolled up leaves into your nostrils which I dutifully tried (check the photo). It smelled nice too!
The views from the top were pretty impressive and I think we were a bit climbed out from the past week as we found it a bit more taxing than we should have. After heading down, it was back on the bus and we headed to McKenzie Falls; a waterfall nearby. Seeing more kangeroos and another climb later we hit Reids Lookout which casts a view over a large portion of
the ranges.
Our stop for the night was at Halls Gap in a nice little bunkhouse which the tour company owned. It surpassed our expectations as it was really nice and pretty much brand new. We had acquired some extremely cheap and out of date Goon en route so we were soon drinking away at dinner and getting to know our group better.
After a period of time, we noticed the lodge had the game Twister. This was obviously too tempting and we were soon falling about the place. I was a wee bit worse for wear for the game though and ended up falling too much. It was a good laugh and capped the night off nicely.
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