In a nutshell, we flew into Hobart, hired a little manual Nissan (I specified a manual because I knew the roads would be fun), and drove around the State in four-and-a-half days.
Day 1: Hobart to St Helens via the Freycinet Peninsula.
Day 2: St Helens to Wynyard via Scottsdale, Launceston, Burnie and Somerset.
Day 3: Wynyard to Strahan via Cradle Mountain.
Day 4: Strahan to Hobart via Queenstown and Lake St Clair.
Day 5: Hobart, Richmond and the airport.
It was a superb trip. We missed heaps due to our tight schedule, but we’ll be back.
Enjoy the photos. The slideshow below goes a bit too fast for my liking. To slow things down and see in full screen, go here.
I need to sit down and write a proper post about our trip away last weekend but probably won’t get time to do it until this coming weekend, so in the meantime here are a couple of photos and the link to more on our Picasa page ….
Saturday: Near Hotham Heights looking towards Mt Buffalo
Saturday: On the Bogong High Plains Road between Omeo and Falls Creek
Saturday: Walking up the Summit at Falls on our way to find the place where we were married
Saturday: At the little hut near Eagle Chair where we signed our marriage papers
Saturday: Looking down the Kiewa valley from Road 24
Saturday: The spot on Road 24 where we got married
Sunday: Hanging a right in the Wandiligong Hedge Maze
Monday: Fanging it on the Dargo High Plains Road from Hotham to Dargo (Jayne took that shot from the sunroof!)
Yesterday I had to go to Sydney for work. There are only two flights from Avalon in the morning and the second one got in too late, so to kill some time between arriving there at 7.20am and my meeting at 11 I decided to do the Bondi to Bronte coast walk.
I hopped out of my taxi at the south end of Bronte beach and made my way along the path past Tamarama and around the point to Bondi. It’s just over 3kms and it took me around an hour and a half (there are quite a few sloping sections and steps, plus I was stopping every so often to admire the view and take photos!).
It really is spectacular. All the Melbourne is better than Sydney stuff might be true on some levels but I can’t think of anything that Melbourne has within 30kms of the city that matches this walk. I suppose I got it at it’s best – calm and sunny, early morning before the tourists and the backpackers had woken up so just locals about exercising, big swell up on the ocean – but even on a bad day I’d say it would still be magnificent.
At Bondi I stopped for some breakfast at the Lamrock Cafe (also almost deserted, but good brekky and coffee) and eventually dragged myself away to Surry Hills for my meeting.
I took the camera, so here’s a slideshow. Some of the pics are a bit similar to each other but they all look good. They’re all stored on our Picasa page.
It seems like I write about this walk every weekend. There isn’t much of it left for us to do, so there’ll be something else to read about in a few weeks …
This week, apart from spending a few hours enjoying the scenery and the sea air, the point of walking was to determine whether or not we’re fit enough to walk up Mt Bogong in a couple of weeks. The original plan was to walk from Anglesea to Airey’s Inlet and back, which is a 20km return trip. But the place where we wanted to start the walk looked boring – it was a fire trail through heathland – and a closer inspection of the map showed the trail to continue like that for at least 5km. So we decided against it, drove to the other side of Anglesea and walked to Point Addis along the cliffs instead.
We’ve done this section before but I don’t think I blogged it so here are some photos.
Near the start
Disobeying the park rangers to get closer to the clifftop for a self-timer photo
The self-timer photo
An industrious ant earning his dinner
Deserted beach near Point Addis
Jayne reckons this looks like something carrying something else
Re the fitness experiment: this walk took around 3 hours including a stop for coffee and a rest at Point Addis. Not sure how far it is but I’d say we covered around 9-10km. The walk up Bogong is about 7km (one way), but it’s all uphill. No flat sections at all. I suggested that our effort to get up it and back would be roughly the same as walking this walk three times … so I don’t think we’re fit enough to make it at present.
We could try, but when do you make the decision that you either are or aren’t going to make it? If we only get halfway it’ll seem like a waste of time, but if we get 3/4 of the way we’d be really tempted to try to make it. I don’t think we should start a tough, potentially dangerous walk like that unless we’re properly prepared (i.e. fit), so we’ll probably walk Feathertop via Razorback instead. That’s 22km return but mostly flat and although we’ve done it once before (in 2001) it was an amazing walk so we have no qualms about doing it again. But that’s another blog post for another day.
Crappy surf conditions this morning so instead of our routine Saturday morning drive to 13th Beach we decided to walk the Jan Juc to Bells section of the Surf Coast Walk. We’ve done it before but it was good, so we decided to do it again.
The wind was really strong today (Jayne’s hanging on to her hat in the second pic) and it was a little bit overcast – but that’s just what you want on a clifftop walk.
We had more visitors last week: Jayne’s Auntie Heather and Uncle Colin from Wynyard in Tassie arrived on Tuesday at the end of a 7,500km driving trip up the east coast. Jayne and I couldn’t spend much time with them during the week, and they went for a day trip to Bendigo, Ballarat and Daylesford on the Saturday, but we enjoyed spending time with them in the evenings and on Sunday.
We decided to do a bit more of the Surf Coast Walk on Sunday morning – the Bells Beach to Point Addis section. I thought it would be a great morning to do it, as there was a bit of a sea breeze blowing, the swell was up and the cliffs would be spectacular.
We set off just after 11am from the Southside car park, which is where Jayne and I walked to from Bells a few weeks ago. The path tracked inland a bit at first and was surprisingly narrow and poorly-maintained, compared to the other sections that we’ve walked, but we kept going, expecting to round a bend and see an amazing bay or clifftop at any moment.
Strangely, clifftops and bays and well-maintained tracks were not forthcoming. The track wound its way inland through a big ironbark forest, away from the cliffs (and the seabreeze) and down (and up) some steep gullies. After about 45 minutes we passed a couple of mountain bikers who told us that another 20 mins walk would see us at the top of the Point Addis Road. I knew that was at least 2km from the steps down to the beach, and as we had no water, no food and it was bloody hot we decided to turn back! We probably could have made it and then walked the return along the beach but we didn’t want to push our luck without water.
It was still a beautiful walk, and Jayne and I will have another crack at it one day to finish it, but it surprised us by being so different from the other sections we’ve walked. It was bushwalking as opposed to cliff/beach walking.
A few pics ….. some from my cameraphone and some from Colin’s flashy camera.
It was great to spend some time with them at the end of their driving trip!
This morning we woke up at 7.30, which is early for a non-surfing Sunday, and went for a walk along the Surf Coast Walk between Bells and Point Addis. The path runs for about 30km from Jan Juc to Airey’s Inlet – we’ve walked sections of it before but hadn’t done this one.
The surf was pretty flat so there only a few desperados out on their longboards but the calm ocean was still great to look at – it was as blue as can be when the sun came out.
We were walking for just over an hour, so we’ll call it 5kms return. Just tried to find a map online but couldn’t so I made my own.
I’ve thought about doing the Australian Alps Walking Track once or twice but it’s unlikely that I’ll ever get around to it without something decent to motivate me.
Right. I’m getting this done. Three weekends ago we had a great time in Apollo Bay/Marengo and I haven’t written about it. Time has conspired against me – I knew that writing about it would take a while. Well now I have half an hour (Desperate Housewives is on and although I used to watch it I don’t anymore), so here we go.
After a lazy breakfast in Anglesea we took our time we along the Great Ocean Road. We’ve driven it plenty of times before but not in the last couple of years, so it was nice doing it again. The traffic wasn’t too bad (we left home early to beat the tour buses) and the weather was clear, so we could see forever.
We were camping at Marengo, which is about 5kms past Apollo Bay, and after setting up our tent on a great site overlooking the ocean we went back into Apollo Bay to stock up with some food for our walk that afternoon.
The weekend is our engagement anniversary weekend, which we prefer to celebrate instead of Valentines Day (means nothing to us and we don’t even bother with cards). In past years we’ve ridden the Murray to the Mountains Rail Trail (twice), ridden our own cycling tour of Rutherglen’s wine region, and sold a house.
This year we thought about doing the rail trail again but our bikes are in disrepair so Jayne suggested walking part of the recently-opened Great Ocean Walk, which runs 90kms from Apollo Bay to a homestead right around the other side of Cape Otway. We had two sections of the walk planned for Saturday and Sunday.
Saturday’s walk started with a 30km drive towards Cape Otway lighthouse and a left turn just before it onto a dirt road towards Blanket Bay. Our walk took us south through the trees and along the clifftops towards Parker River and back, about 9km in total. The weather was clear and fine, a little bit hot and steamy actually, and after an hour and a half of walking we emerged from the trees to the small secluded beach where Parker River meets the ocean.
Jayne, bless her, had brought our swimming togs, so we quickly donned them and cooled off in Bass Strait. After we’d toweled off we started to make our way back along the same route, but there were some surprises waiting for us along the way: the fattest echidna we’ve ever seen (it could have been a wombat), and a nasty-looking tiger snake.
I was walking in front of Jayne when I saw the snake maybe three metres in front of me, just off the track. I stopped walking, said “whoah”, and Jayne was already running in the opposite direction before she even knew why I’d stopped. I had no idea what sort of snake it was, although now I realise I should have picked it as a tiger – watch the video. I just sort of stood there hoping it would go away. Eventually it did, but it had a good look at us first. The video footage isn’t great (but at least I had the presence of mind to flick the camera on), but you can sort of see how it has its head and neck all bunched up. Ready to strike at our juicy-looking legs, probably.
Anyway, we finished the walk in one piece and made it back to Apollo Bay and Wayne’s Craypot Bistro for tea. No cray on the menu, mind you, but Jayne had a nice steak, I had some chook and we washed them both down with some local Otway Ranges vino.
The next day we had planned to walk another section of the Great Ocean Walk, but we were feeling lazy so a fun drive up the Beech Forest Road took us to the Otway Fly walk instead.
Worth going if you get the chance. Apparently it’s the highest treetop walk in the southern hemisphere. It was as good as the one in the Huon Valley that we visited in 2005 but was more of an effort to walk around. It’d almost be too tough if you were unfit. Luckily there’s a golf cart to take you back up the hill to the visitor centre.
We had pizza and beer that night then drove home the inland way. Yet another great weekend.
Tomorrow I’ll write about this weekend, which we spent wakeboarding up at Mulwala and Bundalong with friends. We’re lucky to live in such a State with such diverse landscapes and activities and so few crowds.
