Monday, March 29th
Okay, I know I keep saying it, but this was a another great day. I feel like I’m finally on holiday – I discovered my watch battery died during the night, so I had absolutely no idea what time it was all day unless I asked Mark. It was kind of freeing.
When we were having breakfast this morning we met the owner of the hotel/restaurant where we were staying. He is a Greek that came to Australia 40 years ago thinking he’d stay for 3 years, but fell in love with country, stayed and married an Australian and never left. He and Mark struck up a conversation and his first question to Mark was, “Who is going to pay for Obama’s health care bill?” Again Mark said he was wondering the same thing, to which Chris replied, “The US is going to be just like Greece. Greece’s economy is terrible and they are dependent on Germany to bail them out. The US will end up being dependent on China.” Kind of scary analogy.
We woke up to a dreary morning, but could see a little blue sky by the time we left our hotel heading west. It turned out to be an absolutely beautiful day – blue skies and about 60°. We drove for quite awhile through the most beautiful rainforest, with huge tree ferns and tall, tall eucalyptus, which followed the coast. As I drove along, I looked over and saw Mark trying to spot koalas in the trees. We drove off the highway to an old lighthouse and on the way we saw dozens of koalas in the trees. It was so much fun to see them. We’d be driving down this narrow road and up ahead see a cluster of cars that had pulled off of the road and we instantly knew why they had stopped. Then we’d get out and talk to everyone and every one would point out what they had spotted. We watched one agile koala navigate 3 trees to get to what must have been a delicious branch of eucalyptus. An Australian lady that we started talking to said she had never in all her life seen such an active koala. From what we learned at the Healsville Nature Reserve last week, they sleep about 20 hours a day. They only eat certain species of eucalyptus, which are not particularly nutritious and that doesn’t provide them enough energy to be very active. (Sounds like some humans we know!)
After visiting the lighthouse, where we got a great maritime history lesson from a salty former lighthouse keeper, we drove to an area named Crawfish Bay (remember they call lobsters crawfish). It was very deserted and just driving there made me feel like someone might discover us in a few weeks if something happened to us! But within 15 minutes of us getting there we saw an American guy from Georgia who was traveling by himself and we struck up a conversation with him. He is getting ready to start him MBA program at Emory and had some time off before then and decided to travel Australia and New Zealand. As we worked our way down the coast we ran into him several times. I can’t imagine traveling alone and not being able to share this experience with someone. He said he had been Skyping home to stay in touch when he could find internet service. Jennifer, I told him about being able to Skype from a cell phone (mo-byles as they pronounce mobile phones here).
We walked around on the rocks on the beach and were amazed at the iron ore embedded in the rocks. Alan Basham (our host in Melbourne) had told us that one of the reasons Australia has not suffered the same recession as the rest of the world is that they have a huge iron ore resource and export much of it to China. He said in Western Australia you can almost just scrape it off the ground in areas.
We then drove through Warrnambool – the dairy capital of the area. There were cows everywhere and butter and cheese processing and manufacturing plants up and down the road. We didn’t stop for any cheese tasting and kind of flew through that area so we could get to the Tower Hill Nature Reserve right before dusk. We had read that we’d see a lot of wildlife late in the afternoon, so we got there not long before sundown, and did see a lot of kangaroo, rabbits, emu, and more koalas. We even saw one mom kangaroo with a baby in her pouch. That made my day!
We are staying tonight in a small fishing village along the coast named Port Fairy in a beautiful guesthouse along the water. Again we had a superb dinner – abalone and duck breast for “entrees” and rack of lamb for dinner.
Little Australian tidbit for today (although I said the subject was closed): We finally got an explanation about the toilets here. For water conservation what they use here are called dual flush toilets and they are one of the brightest ideas in this field, where there are two options on the toilet, the full flush and the half flush depending upon whether you need to get rid of solid matter or not. Half flushes only use 3 liters of water (3 quarts) and even the low flush water saver toilets in the US use about a gallon of water per flush. The old kind in the US uses about 3 gallons per flush. Okay, no more on the subject!
5 of the greatest things today:
- Seeing all of the native animals – we took some wonderful pictures today
- Beautiful weather – it makes all the difference in the world to have a gorgeous blue sky
- Experiencing again the friendliness and helpfulness of the locals – from the 3 cute girls that served us at the restaurant tonight to the guy setting the tables for breakfast in the morning on the terrace where we are sitting writing tonight.
- The best Greek yogurt with local honey for breakfast
- Seeing the beautiful coastline – it is so dramatic – sheer cliffs straight down to the ocean
It’s been a long day and I’m heading to bed. We have about a 7 hour drive to Adelaide tomorrow. Mark and I have been sharing the driving and we’ve only had a couple of scares (like driving on the right with cars coming toward us!) It’s like riding a bike – it doesn’t take long to get back into the groove. I’m just glad we have an automatic and aren’t trying to shift with our left hand! I’m not sure if I may have mentioned it earlier, but both of the times we rented cars here we paid extra to “reduce the excess” on the cars. What that means is that our liability for any damage to the cars (from a scratch to a wreck) is capped at about $3500 and if you pay extra per day (about $33/day) then your liability is reduced to $0. It didn’t take us being geniuses to realize that driving on the left meant we needed to “reduce our excess!” When we picked up the car in Melbourne to start this leg of our trip, the guy at the counter told Mark that reducing our excess to $0 meant we could bring the car back as “bits and pieces!”
Oh well, tomorrow is Tuesday and that means we come home in 3 days. I hate to admit it, but I’m not ready! The more we travel around this small part of the country, it makes me want to see more of it. I miss everyone, but I could easily live out of my suitcase for another few weeks!
Mark and Freda's Wanderings 