The beautiful hills

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A sad goodbye to the coast and off we headed to the hills. Our first stop at the base of the Grampians gave us a surprising and amusing discovery, in every town we have stopped at we visit the big blue I. Normally the staff, as eccentric as they may be, talk up their town and every little thing init that could comes under the remit of an attraction. However in this town the guide just gave us a strange look and told us to move on to the next town, so we got back in the van and drove on. What a marvellous ambassador for her town!

The road to Halls Gap, the heart of the Grampians lead us through deep forests and up hills to beautiful look outs. We pulled off the road and had our lunch in the bush, really peaceful.

The whole range is national park and with a permit we pulled into a camp site and set up for the night. I played man and lit a fire and Alice cooked on the gas stove, typical, although I did manage to boil some water on my fire before it went out. We were a little unsure what to expect from camping out in the park but it was really great.

We woke up very refreshed and headed out into the park to see what we could find, the rain had returned and we had to bide our times to stay dry. We went to MacKenzie Falls and took the short walk to watch the water fall before heading back to the van to shelter and enjoy some chicken soup.

Our second night and we returned to the sanctuary of a proper camp site and a welcomed warm shower. We set to making our dinner and were joined by a family of kangaroos eating the grass next to us. Very cute especially as one of the kangaroos had a little joey and every time she bent down to eat the joey in the pouch popped out and did too.

Unfortunately there was a massive bush fire in 2006 and still many areas are only just starting to recover, I think that many koalas died in the fire and we certainly did not see a single one, we felt quite lucky to see kangaroos. Hopefully over time they will be able to repopulate the hills with the little bears.

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Photos

silver band falls
the amazing disappearing waterfall

camp cooking
we have fire

from the top
see the rain clouds, then it hailed, i thought i was back in England