Another friend has come to visit us! We’re exhausting our supply of people who can visit rather early, but that means that they get to spend a fair amount of time with both of us without having to sacrifice any of Adrienne’s vacation! It’s pretty great to be able to share a lot of what we’ve experienced here with people. (Note: Adrienne finally started working today!) This friend is also named Ben, which makes talking in the third person awfully confusing, so to make it clear: I will be referring to myself in the first person throughout this post.
Ben had already spent some time in Australia a couple years ago. Instead of showing him all of the cool things we’ve seen around Sydney, we decided to take a road trip after Christmas. Adrienne posted about our Christmas antics, but needless to say: we had a pretty amazing time. It’s been really great having some familiar faces around to share the holidays.
So. We set out from Sydney on the 26th in a car that Viive and Ian were kind enough to let us barrow, packed to the bursting point with food and camping gear that Viive and Ian were kind enough to let us borrow. Viive and Ian were really the sponsors of this trip. I’m not sure how to thank them enough. As should be expected, we really had no real plans outside of “towards Melbourne, then maybe to Adelaide if there’s time.”
An hour or so after we left Sydney, Adrienne found in one of the books that she and Ben had the foresight to rent the library the park where we spent the next three days. The park had some free campgrounds, lots of animals, and Australia’s Tallest Mountain, with a peak at 2,228 meters (7300 ft) – see if I hadn’t bolded it, it wouldn’t have seemed nearly as cool. On our first night there, we saw wild(!) kangaroos for the first time, about 15 meters from where we set up camp. It was so cool! Additionally, I had my first night’s sleep in a swag. These things are awesome. They are essentially fully enclosed mattresses. Ours had a zip off flap on the top, so we fell asleep looking up at the stars without having to worry about being eaten by mosquitoes or being kicked by a rogue ‘roo. Awesome!
We continued our path through the park, stopping at various points to get cave tours, and explore a couple caves all on our own. One was even unlit! Here we saw some small bats flitting around. On the way down from Australia’s Tallest Mountain we came across an echidna waddling its way across the path and up the rocky slope.
Most of the camping sites we stayed in were nothing more than some flattened land with an onsite toilet, so it was nice when we found ourselves in a campsite with working showers and hot water! Definitely the exception to the rule. That night became more interesting when we found out that we accidentally stole someone’s campsite: the sites marked “late arrivals – 1 night only” are apparently available to be booked online. The park ranger who directed us to the sites didn’t mention that. The people were very gracious though, and everything turned out fine.
We spent a couple days in Melbourne eating some good food, staying in a motel that was far nicer than any of us expected, and looking around some great museums. The Melbourne museum lives up to the quality of museum we’ve come to expect in our time in Sydney. Very cool museum that we didn’t even cover half of in our day there.
Next we headed a bit more south to see a rain forest that promised glow worms! We went out one night to the park where they are and walked one loop around the trail while it was still mostly light one in the dark. There are some really big trees here. After night fell, if you looked into the dirt walls near the trail, you’d find little pin-pricks of blue light spaced a few inches apart all over. Oh, and on the way to the park, we caught a glimpse of a swamp wallaby! I’ve been wanting to see a wild one for quite some time. Add two more really cool species to the list of animals we’ve seen in the wild here.
Then we decided to head home. 12 hours is a bit of an awkward amount of time to drive. Definitely doable in one day, but that is one really long day. We decided to take one brief hike in hopes seeing a cool orange fungus (we didn’t, but we did get to see more, really big trees) and then drive home. This is where everything fell apart. After about 10 hours on the road, our car decided it had had enough and we blew the head gasket in the engine. At 10PM. Luckily, we were near a small town that had motels and car repair shops. Unluckily, the only motel that has 24 hour check in was fully booked, so we slept in the car. It’s easy for something like this to ruin a trip in your memory, but all of the great wildlife that we saw really made it worth it. By the way, we also saw a really cute and fearless possum at a campsite that we had all to ourselves, and a koala on the side of the road watching the cars go by. Koalas are way more interesting in the wild than in a zoo. Especially when they sit at the side of the road watching traffic.
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