Apr 7, Naracoorte Caves, Robe

We bought tickets to see 2 caves and got to see Wet Cave also. We went through it first. It was a self-guided tour and it was strange being in a cave without a guide. The caves here have big round openings at ground level, then we have to go down stairs. This cave had several large chambers with big columns and the ceilings had many indentations that look like large round dimples, called naves.

Next we went into Victoria Fossil Cave, with a guide and large crowd. This cave is special because in the 1960's cave explorers found a massive cache of fossils. The fossils came from animals falling into the cave over a period of 500,000 years, then the bones were covered with dirt and more bones and finally a flow stone formation that preserved it. They found fossils of extinct animals, like a large flat faced kangaroo and a drop bear. A drop bear is a distant relative of the wombat, much larger and it climbed trees so it could jump down on its prey. The guide was really good and talked about the differences between herbivores and carnivores in their jaw bones and eye placement. Herbivores spend their time with their faces down while they eat grass and have eyes on the sides of their heads so they can see enemies approaching. Carnivores have eyes in the front of their skulls and have better depth perception so they can judge the distances to prey. Good tour.

The Bat Cave tour didn't actually go into the cave. It's where the bats breed and spend the summer and they don't want to disturb them. We had the tour to ourselves and went into a viewing room. We watched the feed from the infrared camera in the cave. On the tv screen we could see the bats hanging in the cave and flying around. Then our guide switched to recording done when there were babies in the cave. Since infrared pictures are shade of grey, the babies were just whitish thing hanging from the cave. Babies are called pups and are pink and as big as the end of a finger when born. The pups were grouped together in a nursery and the mothers would fly in and out to take care of them. Bats are mammals so the babies drink milk. They grow up quickly and start practicing their flying in the cave before they venture out to feed on mosquitoes. It was all so interesting.
Our guide took us to Blanche Cave, where some of the bats spend their winter. She even took us beyond the regular tour route, crouching under the low roof to a place where she had seen a bat a day or so before. It wasn't there, but we did see possums sleeping near the cave opening. There was also a new archeological dig there. A researcher was looking for pollen and vegetation and came across fossils, including that of the extinct Tasmanian Tiger.aA

That was a full morning and after lunch we drove back to the coast to Robe. It's a small port where 16,500 Chinese came ashore during the gold rush. Victoria had begun charging 10 pounds each when the Chinese landed there. So these Chinese came to Robe in South Australia to avoid that tax, but then they had to pay someone to guide them 500km to the goldfields. There was a lighthouse there too, a modern one.

Our crayfish thawed out and we had it for dinner.

Pictures - Jeanne in Wet Cave, Skeleton of short faced kangaroo, Bat pup, Bats, Archeological Dig, Robe Lighthouse, Samson at Robe coast

Apr 6, Tantanoola, Millicent, Penola

We left Mt Gambier for the drive to Tantanoola to see the Tantanoola Tiger, an animal that was killed in the 1840's and mounted. One book we read said it had been identified as an Assyrian Tiger. It looked to be about the size of a big dog.

Next was Millicent, a sleepy little town with a giant windmill vane in the park. It was from the new huge windmills that we see popping up now. There are a few windmill farms in Australia now, especially on the coast.

From there we made our way to Penola. It is noted for being the home of the only Australian saint, Mary MacKillop. We walked around for a little bit, then wandered into the Penola Fantasy Model Railroad and Rose's Tearoom. We didn't know what to expect and we found something totally unexpected. The owner and creator, Graham showed us around his kingdom. He has used styrofoam and figurines and railroad tracks, and anything else he can find to create scenes. It was very colorful and filled with allusions to wizards and cartoon characters and superheroes and pop culture. There was a horror movie being made with a giant Barbie, a salute to the Beatles, Dracula - it went on and on. There was a setup in a building and another set up with water features like the Bermuda Triangle outside.
Graham said he had been working on it 12 years and still has lots of ideas for expansion.

We were there for a long time, then walked to the Mary MacKillop Center for the story of her life and the life of Father Woods who inspired her. She was just made a saint in 2010, Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop. We also toured Petticoat Lane to see some cottages. The lane was named that because all the men in town went off to the goldfields and the only thing on the clothes lines were petticoats.

We left Penola to drive to Narracoorte to get some pizza and now we're parked in the parking lot at Naracoorte Caves. We're going into a cave or two tomorrow. A camper parked here too told us that we could see bats coming out of a cave at dusk. So we walked to the area and met two women, one of whom directed us to the bat cave. They came to the cave also and started setting up equipment. One was the park manager and the other was a volunteer technician and they were going to count the bats as they left the cave. It was done with a computer and sensors in the cave. They were using software designed by the US military to track missiles, heat seeking technology and the software counted the bats as they exited the cave. We could just barely see the bats as they came out of the cave. We were told they circle around the mouth of the cave before they come flying out, not in a big swarm, but individually. We moved and were able to see them dart out of the cave and zoom by our heads. The bats will travel up to 30 or 40 miles in search of food, mostly mosquitoes. They return at dawn and will gather near the cave and enter as a big group. There are 20,000 to 30,000 bats in the caves at this site.


Pictures - Samson's shoes after six weeks, Tantanoola Tiger, Samson with windmill vane which looks a lot bigger in person, 2 pictures of the Fantasy Railroad, us with a smal train set, Mary MacKillop

Apr 5, Nelson, Port MacDonnell, Mt Gambier

Driving down the coast to Nelson we saw kangaroos in the fields and on the sides of the roads, lots and lots of them.

Nelson is a tiny village on the coast and when we stopped at the info center there, the lady recommended the nature walk over a tour of the town itself. So we drove out to the estuary where the Glendelg River goes into the ocean. It was the first time we've gotten poor advice. It was a walk through the woods and on a boardwalk through salt marshes. We did see black swans and pelicans in the water. In the woods we had trouble walking on the trail because echidnas had been at work. They make cone shaped holes with their snouts in the dirt to get to the ants. The holes were everywhere.

We entered South Australia and had to turn our clocks back 30 minutes.

Port MacDonnell is known as the crayfish capital of Australia. I think we would call them spiny lobsters. We stopped to ask a fisherman about buying fresh ones, but he said most of the crayfish and crab that is caught on the boats goes directly into bins that are locked. When they come ashore, the bins are taken to be shipped to Asia and will arrive there in 2 days with live catch. We went to a local seafood shop, but she didn't have any fresh crayfish, so we bought a frozen one for $45 a kilo. I'm not sure how long it will take to thaw it out.

Then we drove into Mt Gambier, noted for the limestone in the area and for extinct volcanoes. We walked up to Blue Lake, a startlingly blue lake in the crater of a volcano. It serves as the source of the city's water. Because of the limestone, there are sinkholes and caves here too. We went to Umpherston Sinkhole, which was an underground cavern before the roof of it fell in thousands of years ago. Back in the 1800's Mr Umpherson planted a garden in the sinkhole and in the 1970's the town replanted it and turned it into a park. It was a beautiful formal garden with hydrangeas, roses, fushias and ivy. Then we went to see another crater lake and Englebrecht Caves. They were unusual because they're filled with water and divers explore them. We went down to a couple of viewing platforms to see the crystal clear water and learn about how the caves were formed and found.
After supper we went back to town to wander around and see a sound and light show. We went into a theater thinking they were showing a movie about volcanoes, but it turned out to be Low Impact Man, about a family that set about living with as little impact as they could - no elevators or subways or car, eating locally grown food, trying to have no garbage to throw away, no electricity. We did watch about an hour of it, then had to move on.
We watched some films being shown above a sinkhole in the middle of town and then 2 short Aboriginal dreamtime stories were shown down in the sinkhole.
We're staying at the show grounds in town tonight.

Pictures - Holes where echidnas dug, jeanne at Blue Lake, Umpherson's Sinkhole Garden

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

Apr 3, Great Ocean Road, the 12 Apostles

Our first stop was Gideon's Steps. We weren't sure what it was, but we were excited when we saw rock stacks and steps down to the beach. This area of the coast is limestone that has been worn by waves and wind. As the limestone erodes around it, the harder stone remains and tall pillars of rock are stranded on the beach. We took the steps down to get a feeling for the enormous size of the rock stacks.
Further down the road was what they call the 12 Apostles. It was a group of 12 rock stacks at one time, but now I think there are only 7. Still very beautiful.
Then we drove to Loch Ard Gorge. It's an area where the ship, Loch Ard ran aground with only 2 survivors who washed up in the gorge, a long narrow cut in the cliffs.
Next was the Arch, a rock formation that has been shaped into and arch. Then, we went to London Bridge, which was a rock bridge on the beach that fell down in 2009.
We had to drive to each of these sights, then take a hike to see them. More sights were the Grotto and the Bay of Islands, with lots of smaller rock stacks where birds nest.
The water that come on shore here come uninterrupted from the Antarctic, which accounts for the power of the wave action on the cliffs. The whole area is beautiful, with great waves crashing against the rocks, making fantastic formations.
The Great Ocean Road ended in Allansford, but we're still driving along the coast. We stopped at Tower Hill, an animal reserve that has been reclaimed after quarrying destroyed most of the vegetation. It is at the site of an ancient volcano, so we drove down a steep hill to get here and saw emus near the road on one side and kangaroos on the other.
We parked and went for a hike. There were koalas in the trees. We started on one trail and then decided to do the rim of the crater. We hadn't gotten very far when we heard some people yelling. We rounded a curve and there was an emu on the trail between us and the other people. I think we distracted it long enough for the other people to go on, but we couldn't continue. The emu kept looking at us and making deep gutteral sounds, not reassuring. We backed up, hoping the emu would go off the trail, but it stood there watching us. Then it started eating, but if we moved its attention went back to us. It went off the trail a bit and we thought we might be able to go around, but it didn't go off enough to forget about us. Finally we turned and headed back down toward the visitors center. On that trail we passed another emu, but we walked by quickly and it headed after us, but lost interest. Emus are really big.
We came back to the camper and while I cooked, I could see kangaroos eating grass in the picnic area in front of us.
Pictures - Samson with rock stacks, some of the Apostles, the Arch, Jeanne and the Grotto, kangaroos, emu

Apr 2, Great Ocean Road, Otway NP

We Skyped with Ben, Mika & Tashi and Kate, Adrian & Evelyn this morning and found out the Easter bunny had been very good to all of them.

Then we packed up and drove to Mait's Rest. It was a boardwalk through rainforest. We saw soft tree ferns that only grow here and myrtle beech and mountain ash. The mountain ash here are an ancient species of eucalyptus that can live up to 300 years and are the tallest flowering plants in the world. They grow straight up and seem to go forever. The bark peels, like other eucalyptus, but comes down in 20, 30- foot strips. The older trees fall and are covered in lichens and moss and little ferns.

From there we drove to Cape Otway Lightstation. We were able to go through the lighthouse, old telegraph building and light keepers cottages. The lighthouse is the oldest surviving one in Australia, but it isn't operational. It was replaced by a small, powerful, solar powered light.

After the lighthouse, we drove back to the Great Ocean Road for a while, then left it to go to the Otway Fly, a series of metal walkways high above the rainforest. The walks went from the ground, up to towers and rose gradually up to 33 meters. We could see the understory of the forest, the middle and the canopy. Then there was a spiral tower that went up to 47 meters above the trees. The structures themselves were amazing and the views indescribable. There was one walkway that went out on a cantilever high above the trees. On the way down, one tower had another option for getting back to ground level, abseiling. It's like repelling, but the person just goes straight down on ropes. Samson had to do it. They fixed him up with a harness and hard hat and ropes and down he went, 25 meters. He looked like a pro, went down really quickly.

We were close to Triplet Falls, so we drove there and hiked up and down about a million steps and were rewarded with beautiful cascades. It had been raining off and on since last night, so there was more water for the falls. It was a loop trail, so there were only half a million steps back to the rv.

Our last stop of the day was another rainforest walk, Melba's Gully. Another trail up and down steps with a small cascade and a big, big mountain ash. Unfortunately the ash fell in 2009, but the roots were impressive. On the way back we noticed a sign that said there were glow worms in the forest. It was late, so we decided to camp here. After supper, we heard cars coming to this car park and people going down the trail, so we took our flashlights and followed. The info sign said to go a little way down and turn off the flashlights and let your eyes adjust and look for the lights. We tried that several times with no luck. Then we heard people talking further on, so we went toward the voices. They were standing on the path and on one side there were all these tiny little lights - glow worms! Everyone had their flashlights off because the lights makes the glow worms stop glowing. And we just stood there and marveled at the little glowing larvae.
When we got back to the rv we looked up and saw more stars than we've seen on this trip. There is so little light pollution that stargazing is wonderful here. Tonight was a great night, especially since we've gotten good at finding the Southern Cross.

Pictures-Samson and 300 yr old mountain ash, Jeanne on Otway Fly, 2 shots of Samson abseiling, Triplet Falls

April 1, Great Ocean Road, Aireys Inlet

We watched a container ship through The Rip this morning. It was surprising to see how many people got up early to come to the lookout to watch.
After breakfast we drove through Barwon Head and Ocean Grove, small tourist towns on the road. We walked up to an overlook to see back toward to lighthouses we had seen yesterday.
We drove past Bell's Beach, but didn't stop. The Rip Curl was going into its last day. It is the worlds oldest surfing competition and surfers come from around the world. Traffic was just frantic.
At Aireys Inlet we stopped to go up into the Split Point Lighthouse. The tour took us up to the top for good views of the cliffs along the water. Known as the 'White Lady'', it does look like a white queen from a chess set. It has the only first order Fresnel lens in Australia and operates with light sensitive equipment to turn it on and off.
We're driving down the Great Ocean Road that stretches from Torquay, north of Bells Beach, to Allansford a distance of 151 miles. The sun came out this morning and the drive was amazing. Clear blue water, sandy beaches or steep cliffs. There were scores of surfers out at every surfing beach we passed. And vacationers everywhere - walking, biking, hiking, driving.
Next was Lorne and Erskine Falls - a walk to the top and down 240 steps to the base. The falls were 10 km off the main road and the parking lot was packed. There was a continuous stream of people up and down, but it was a nice falls dropping 30 meters.
We hadn't had lunch yet, so we stopped in Wye River on the recommendation of Mark from church yesterday. The fish and chips were good, but the view was great - overlooking the ocean and the surfers.
We stopped early at a caravan park in Kennett River because we needed to do laundry. It's an okay park, everyone crammed in together. But there are koalas in the trees here. I've seen 4 just around our site!
Pictures - View from the road, Split point Lighthouse, Jeanne at Erskine Falls, Samson at Wye River, koala in tree at Kennett River campground
Note - We've been in Australia 6 weeks, have toured around New South Wales and Victoria and have traveled 4844km (3027.5mi)