Camping through Victoria & South Australia

Thanks to the Australian lifestyle, the RAAF takes four weeks off over Christmas.  To experience the break in true Aussie fashion, we loaded our camping gear into our Honda Civic and headed off for a 2.5 week/3,000 mile journey through Victoria and South Australia.

With me being pregnant, Jason was instructed to tone it down a bit for this trip.  He knocked it out of the park!  First, he allowed an air mattress in the tent.  That alone is unheard of for him.  Second, I wasn’t given a hard time about taking bathroom breaks while driving.   AND, to top it off, he backed off on the long hikes.  Had I known this was how it was going to be, I would have bumped up this baby thing earlier. 

Our first stop was the Snowy Mountains to climb Mt Kosciuszko.  Mt Everest and Mt Kosciuszko share the same title as their continent's tallest peak.  That’s where the similarities end.  Getting to the top of Mt Kosciuszko requires a grueling ride up a chairlift followed by a 1.5 hour walk on a grated platform sidewalk.  The final 30 minute push to the summit was on a dirt path that you could drive a truck up if you wanted.  We enjoyed the summit views from a whopping 7,310 feet above sea level before our equaling challenging return to the base.  The base area also sported a luge track which Jason couldn’t pass up.  By the look of his face you’d think he was chasing Gold in the Olympics. 

The bump, nearly centerd, is Mount Kosciuszko.

 

From the Snowys we drove to Melbourne.  I wouldn’t label either of us as “city people,” but we really enjoyed it.  Melbourne has a European feel with its many side streets lined with outdoor cafes.  We spent two days wandering the city, including a tour of the Melbourne Cricket Grounds.  This is the Yankee stadium of Australia sporting venues.  It’s home to the Australia Sports Museum, and hosts Cricket and Australian Rules Football matches on its massive 200x160 yard field.  We finished our time in Melbourne on New Year’s Eve enjoying a firework spectacle that rivals Sydney’s.  

Melbourne

Colorful Beach Huts at Brighton Beach

This picture is the reason I wanted to come to Melbourne

Melbourne Cricket Ground

One of Melbourne's popular laneways

Street art in Melbourne

 From there we made our way to the Great Ocean Road.  Many compare this drive to California’s Pacific Coast Highway.  The rugged coastline is lined with lighthouses, amazing little beach towns, and shorts hikes to secluded beaches.  We finished the drive at the famous 12 Apostles site which has turned into the seven apostles (the Southern Ocean washed 5 of them away).

I checked a box when I saw this guy in the wild

Twelve Apostles

 

Grampians National Park was next.  The mountains in this park rise steeply out of the Victorian plains which surround the park on all sides.  On our first morning I woke up to a kangaroo taller than me standing just outside our tent.  I felt trapped despite the roo being gone before Jason could even get his head off the pillow for a peek.

 

 

From the Grampians we had a seven hour drive to Kangaroo Island.  Driving across the Victorian outback allowed us to view great expanses of nothing.  The radio only picked up one station – the cricket match between Australia and India.  We’re slowly picking up cricket; Jason more so than I.  After a short ferry ride we arrived at Kangaroo Island (KI).

KI is an island just off the coast of mainland South Australia.  It’s known for wildlife, beaches, and its remoteness.  Despite everything we owned being covered in red dust, our trusty Civic held up over the couple hundred miles of corrugated dirt road we traveled.  Although the wildlife was not as abundant as we expected, we saw kangaroos, koalas, seals, penguins, and our favorite, the pelicans.  The pelicans found on KI are the largest in the world.  John, also known as “The Pelican Guy,” volunteers to put on a demonstration with them every day at 5pm.  At 4:50pm the pelicans and seagulls are fighting for position for the feeding frenzy that’s about to occur.  John, with his dry and sarcastic humor, puts on an amazing demonstration.  The pelicans went absolutely nuts.  We knew it was serious when one pelican had another in a choke hold with its beak all in an effort to keep him from swallowing his food.  Along with the wildlife, the scenery was spectacular.   One of our favorites was the rock formations appropriately called Remarkable Rocks.

Lots

of

starfish

I was not given the gift of height.

Seal colony at Seal Bay

These two guys were starting to get aggressive, but one retreated at the last second.

 We left the ruggedness of KI for the more refined wine valleys surrounding Adelaide.  South Australia is known for their red wines, especially Shiraz.  I planned this leg of the trip before the pregnancy.  It was going to be my time in “Shiraz Heaven.”  Instead, smelling it was the best I could do.  That, and drive Jason from winery to winery.   He took full advantage of his driver by putting in quality testing sessions throughout Mclaren Vale and the Barossa Valley.  Our little car may have been filled to the brim with camping gear, but we happily found room to bring home a few bottles.  We also spent one day in Adelaide and its beaches.  There isn’t much tourism in the city but we both agreed it would be a nice place to live given the beach, hill regions, and vineyards are in close proximity.  No worries, we don’t actually plan up setting up shop there. 

Our last day of vacation was spent in the car.  We woke up early to rain.  We packed our wet tent for the ninth and final time and then started our trek home.  The drive from Adelaide to Newcastle was mostly on the one and only major highway that runs from Adelaide to Sydney.  The “highway” is only a total of 2 lanes.   It wasn’t all bad.  We did come across two McDonalds; there was just a 9 hour drive between them.   Most of the ride was spent looking at the nothingness of the outback and playing the alphabet game.  After 17 hours of straight driving we pulled into Newcastle with our biggest road trip complete.  

Stateside, this would not pass as a highway.