Apr 4, Tower Hill, Port Fairy, Capes Nelson & Bridgewater

Since Tower Hill was such a good hiking place, we took a short one after breakfast and saw a different koala and maybe 8 kangaroos. It was hard to tell with them, because they bounded away and we may have seen the same ones later on the trail.

Port Fairy was our first stop. We took a walk around town, a really nice little town, with old cottages, a wharf area with ships docked and a busy downtown. Griffith Island was near the wharf and just over a footbridge, so we walked around it. It's where shearwater birds come to lay eggs and hatch their babies. They spend part of the year in Alaska and fly to Australia in November. They lay the eggs in burrows in the ground, like the fairy penguins did. After our walk we stopped for coffee at a bakery and were sitting outside with our scrools (like cinnamon rolls - Samson's was apple with lemon frosting, mine was coffee with raspberry frosting) when a lady approached us and said she was writing an article about people who were out and about. Since we were definitely out and about, we agreed. She took our picture and promised to send us a copy of the article!

We stopped at The Crags to see jagged cliffs and formations. On the undersides of the cliff tops there were calcified tree roots hanging down, looking very strange.

We drove into Portland and stopped at an overlook. A man in a truck did a u turn and stopped to talk to us. He was trying to get Portland designated an RV Friendly Town. In order to do that, the town needs to have a waste dump site, a place to get fresh water and adequate parking at the Information Center. I don't know if there is any more to it. He wanted to know what we thought of the designation. There are only 24 designated towns in Victoria, but he believed it would help Portland's tourist industry. He couldn't tell by our accents where we were from and we've heard this from other people. Maybe it's the nondescript Midwestern thing with a hint of southern thrown in.

Off to Cape Nelson and a hike around their lighthouse. On. Short hike to an overlook we saw an echidna! It was on the trail, but moved off before I could get a clear picture. Then we took another hike to the Enchanted Forest. It was a steep climb down the cliff to a boulder filled area with Moonah trees shrouded in vines hanging over the trail. We had to walk on the road at the end of the hike and we saw another echidna, again, it was shy.

At Cape Bridgewater, we walked to see the blowholes. These were areas carved into basalt cliffs that were being pounded by huge waves that made a lot of noise and big sprays. Not like blowholes we had seen before. Near that was a 'petrified forest' that wasn't really petrified wood. There were two theories that explained the formations, but I didn't quite understand them. They had to do with calcium deposits that built up in hollow columns that did look a lot like tree stumps. We took another walk on a trail along the cliff top for more views of the coast. The whole area had a moonscape look about it. Very little vegetation and what was there was low and sparse. Part of that was due to overgrazing and burrowing rabbits and wind.

It was a pretty good place to watch the sunset.
Pictures - Scrools, calcified roots, The Crags, Samson close to cliff edge, echidna, Enchanted Forest, sunset