Petrified? Hole No!

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What a night spent on what has to be the most picturesque site we’ve stayed on - we were out in the night looking at the stars which were spectacular, and not disrupted by the lighthouse lights. Luckily neither were we, but I must confess that it was also the coldest site we’ve been on, and I too am now hunkering down under the duvet! In the middle of the night, I peeked out of the window, and it was somehow reassuring to see the light swinging round.

The morning started with a jolt - John poked an eye through the curtain, spotted 4 kestrels flying round us. Up and out like a shot taking photos! We then went for a stroll along ‘our’ beach to the wreck to take some more pictures. We had the whole bay to ourselves and some gulls. They call this the shipwreck coast, with something along the lines of 80 odd shipwrecks recorded. One of those on this Bay was particularly harrowing with only 24 of 113 on board surviving - the rescue attempts went on for days, and apparently there were even thoughts of cannibalism. I was therefore surprised to see that one of the survivors was a horse which later ran in the first Melbourne Cup (he didn’t win - that would have been too close to fiction!). I have to say that the one that interests me the most was the ‘mahogany’ wreck, which has been found in some sand dunes - there is some theory that it may be Portuguese from the 16th Century ... that would throw Aussie history into meltdown!!

We drove up to Mount Gambier, the second largest city in South Australia and the only one built on the side of a volcano. After spending some time in McDonalds (oh the joy!), we decided to go and look at the volcano crater lakes, Blue, Browne, Valley and Leg of Mutton (we think they ran out of colours after blue and brown!). Leg of Mutton and Browne have dried up, but the others, especially the Blue were very pretty. Blue is only a spectacular sapphire blue in the summer and is due to turn steel grey colour any day now. It supplies the whole city with its water supply. We then went and visited 2 sinkhole gardens - gardens that have been planted in sinkholes that were created when the ceiling of a limestone cave collapsed. They were both pretty, although would have been better if their waterfalls had been running. The Umpherston sinkhole, which was originally planted in Victorian times, was wonderful - it would have been particularly striking in its day because there was a tiny lake at the bottom, complete with boat and island.

And the next thing we knew we were waving goodbye to SA and bidding g’day to Victoria. Our first landfall was to stop at Cape Bridgewater which looked so pretty and promised us a petrified forest and blowholes. The petrified forest unfortunately wasn’t - it was actually created from years of water seepage into the limestone and lots of other technical things - but it did look really good. We stood watching the sea round the blowholes for ages, but the water wasn’t high enough for them to do their thing, which was a real shame.

I was walking back to the van past 3 foot high grass thinking how much the sea and cliffs look like Cornwall, when a kangaroo jumped up beside me and hopped off - I’m still not sure which of us jumped the highest! You don’t get that every day in Cornwall eh?!

A quick drive through Portland, which is where the first settlers came ashore in Victoria, and then we took off to find our site for the night - on the banks of the Fitzroy River mouth.

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