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Published: January 19th 2008
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We loaded our 2007 Toyota Camry with all our gear and headed out of Sydney at 10am on Sat with our destination Melbourne. We had nine days to make the journey and it turned out to be just enough.
On Sat we drove about 500kms to a border town called Albury. There we spent a hot night of 30+ degrees in a caravan park. We have a 2person tent so the smallest of us Mum made her bed in the car's backseat to which she became pretty accustomed to. The following day we went to a wildlife sanctuary for hurt animals and saw a lot of kangaroos, wallabies, emus, dingos, lizards, koalas, birds and tiny penguins. One of my mum's scariest and at the same time (atleast for me) funniest experiences are at this place. While she was feeding some kangaroos a black swan came up to her demanding some food too. Mum refused feeling the kangaroos were cuter and kept feeding them. To this the swan started chasing mum which was hilarious! I was laughing too hard to get a picture out of the act but you can all imagine my tiny mum running away from a swan half
her size. Funny thing happened to Carolina too. One of the bigger kangaroos somehow managed to steal Carolinas flipflop and was walking around for a while with it. Again I had too much fun even to manage to try to take a picture of this act. I did though get an excellent photo of kangaroo testicles. 😉
Afterwards we drove all day to reach the Grampians, a huge national park in west Victoria formed before the Iceages. There we camped with kangaroos right in our sight and during the night we could hear them right outside our tent looking for food.
The following day we went to see the sights of the Grampians. The land is of great importance to the local Aboriginals and if you hike for miles you can get to caves that have their paintings. We were lazy and just drove to the lookouts and one of the caves. We also hiked to the beautiful McKenzie Falls. After this we drove to the start of the Great Ocean Rd(GOR) at Warrnambool and spent the night there.
When we woke up it was cloudy and Carolina didnt want to see the GOR in bad weather
so we waited the weather to clear up. Of course it didnt so we drove anyway, but just so far that we saw the Bay of Islands, the London Bridge and the Arch. After that we camped and waited for the next day which turned out to be much better 😊
And then we saw them, the great 12 Apostles. We walked down the tracks and paths and down to the beach and saw them from every angle and it was spectacular from every point. We decided to stay overnight at Apollo Bay and then head back to see Victorias Rainforest. Mum went for the walk they charged $20 for and enjoyd it. We had done the same in Queensland so many times we just skipped it enjoying the company of just some of the billions of flies of Victoria. After the Rainforest, we started our drive to Mornington Peninsula where we found a camping site by pure chance.
We owe Charles and John and their families sooo much. We went to ask them if its ok to camp anywhere near them when they invited us to join their site and come and sit with them as well.
We spent two nights there enjoying each others company and learning a great deal of Aussie friendlyness. Mum got to sleep in their sparetent which had a bed and the other night she slept in a camper with a queenbed. She was sooo happy to be out of the car 😊 We were supposed to go and swim with dolphins and seals but they canceled it because of too windy conditions...... we were sooo sad. 😞 So we went to some wineries to taste some wines 😉 It cheered us for a while and we were just hoping that our next plan would work as planned as we were going to go see the little penguins on Phillip Isl. And it did! And they were little tiny cute creatures wobbling on to the shore and to their babies. We saw some baby penguins too. If anyone else is going to go see the penguins remember to take warm clothes and a lot of them 'cause it might get extremely cold. We got this good advise from Charles and took it.
We got to Melbourne on Sunday and on Monday the Australian Open in tennis started and of course we
were there!! Gotta love Tennis! IT WAS AWESOME! Jarkko won his game and we saw S. Williams Davidenko, Moya beat their opponents and saw Murray get beaten by Tsonga, which was the best match so far. Yesterday we went to see Jarkko Nieminen beat his 2nd round game and that was great too!
Mum left Today so now we are alone again and living on the very budget again. Love ya all!
Jani & Carolina
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