Saturday 20th January

Time to move on to Adelaide, our flight was at 11.40 and we were due to land at 14.30, once again we put our watches forward by 1 hr, we are now 10.5 hours ahead of the UK. The weather forecast for Adelaide was rain but nothing could have prepared us for the rain when we landed, it was absolutely pouring, the rain that we had experienced in Alice springs seemed to be following us! The airport was only just outside the city so we were checked in at our hotel by 15.45, unfortunately though we had to stay put until the rain eased a little, we used this time to book ourselves a trip to the Barossa Wine Valley for tomorrow. By 6 p.m. the miracle happened, it stopped raining and we explored the walls outside the hotel, to one side there were the usual shops and restaurants to the other nightclubs and sex shops, which way to explore first. To our surprise nearly all the shops were closed up and only a few cafes still open so we trudged back to the hotel for “Happy hour” and Rons usual fillet steak.

Sunday 21st January

Picked up by minibus for our tour to the Barossa Wine Valley, it turned out that the people sitting behind us came from Corby. The route out of the city was through the Adelaide Hills, passing through small towns called Cudlee Creek and Gumeracha. We followed the Torrens River Gorge for most of the way, these were the best scenic views we had seen in Australia so far. Our first stop was to visit The Toy Factory at Gumeracha where you can see the biggest rocking horse in the world - it is 60’ tall and 34’ long, weighing 25 tonnes. We also passed Herbig’s Tree (a huge gum tree) where a German immigrant lived with his wife and increasing family for 5 years. After a great lunch which incidentally gave us our first taste of smoked kangaroo we finally visited our first winery, this was a small family run business called Chateau Dorrien, this wine is only available in Australia by mail order or by purchasing at the cellar door (of the 4 places we visited this was definitely the best). Our next stop was Richmond Grove winery (part of the Jacobs creek group) where we had a guided tour and were instructed on the fine arts of wine tasting e.g. sight, swirl, smell, sip, swallow (or spit). This was followed by a visit to Jacob’s Creek visitors centre, this is the largest winery in the Barossa area and most wines are exported all around the world. The last winery was Chateau Yaldara where we done the usual tasting, and visited the Produce Larder where you could taste cheese and olive products, they also ran an Australian Opal Company where jewellery could be purchased at a much reduced rate. The last stop of the day was at Barossa Reservoir where we tried out the whispering wall (much the same as the whispering gallery at St. Pauls). We were dropped off at our hotel at 5 p.m. and lo and behold the sun came out so we took our purchases (bottles of wine) back to the room and headed out for a walk, all of the city centre is surrounded by parkland and our walk found us outside The Oval home of South Australia’s Cricket Assoc. The next 1 day test will be held here this coming Tuesday with England playing New Zealand. On our return to the hotel we bought ourselves a take away meal from the Wok in a Box café, Singapore noodles for Ron and Beef with Oyster sauce for Linda (cost A$10 - about £4).

Monday 22nd January

The sun has got his hat on hip hip hip hooray, at last we have blue skies again. This calls for a day on the beach so we took the tram out of Victoria Square to Glenelg beach (about 10km away) the journey took 30 minutes. After the usual stroll on the sand and the dip into the sea (no more land between us and Antarctica) we found a nice sand dune to sit on and soaked in some sunshine. Within 30 minutes we were too hot so we retired to a café for a nice cool drink. We finished our time at the seaside with fish and chips and caught the tram back into the city. Back at the hotel we headed straight for the cold swimming pool to cool ourselves down, you forget how hot it does get when the sun shows itself again. Thought we would try our luck at the casino which was just one block away, not that we would win much with our usual allowance of $10, we pocketed the $15 that we won on the “pokies” fruit machines.

Tuesday 23rd January

We both done something today that we had not done before, we bought tickets to watch a 1 day international cricket match - England v New Zealand, the game was on at the Adelaide Oval. The tickets cost us A$20 each and that gave us a seat on the grass bank (later on the officials let us sit on a shaded terrace with tables & chairs as it was so hot in the sun). We had a really good view of the game but unfortunately England got hammered, they bowled New Zealand all out for 210, but their batting was terrible and England were all our for 120. The game started at 1.45 p.m. and ended just after 8 p.m. so we headed back to the hotel to pack again!!

Wednesday 24th January

After breakfast we walked to the car hire centre to pick up our hired car and went back to the hotel to collect the luggage, we got on our way at 10 a.m. The drive out of Adelaide was quite simple as the city is laid out on a grid system (a bit like Milton Keynes without the roundabouts), so we only had to head South and East to join the M1 (not a bit like our M1) towards Melbourne. We stopped off at Murray Bridge to take some pictures of the great Murray River and carried on to our first comfort stop at Meningie (a small town with a few shops) but a wonderful view over the Coorong National Park. Altogether Robe our first destination was 335 km from Adelaide and we passed wonderful glimpses of dried up salt lakes that shone with different mineral deposits. Robe looks out on to Guichen Bay and is sheltered from the main Ocean, the sea was a mixture of turquoise and different shades of blue with white sand dunes, there is also a small harbour with very expensive boats moored up. There was a memorial on the sea front to commemorate almost 20,000 Chinese who landed in Robe during the gold rush in the 1850’s and then walked 200 miles to the goldmines. After an extensive walk of the area we went back to our motel room to catch up on the tennis news. We went to the local pub on the corner of our street for our evening meal, we had roast lamb dinner. Amazingly we bumped into the couple from Corby that we had met 3 days ago on the wine tour, they were also doing the Great Ocean Road run and were staying in the same motel as us, and to cap it all they had even booked for the same motel again tomorrow at Port Fairy. As Robe lies in a bay the sun was setting over the West cliffs so we tried for the usual unsuccessful sunset pictures, hey the cloud behaved today and we think that we have got good shots.

Thursday 25th January

Left at 8 a.m. and stopped at Beachport 40km along the coast for bacon and eggs to sustain us for another long drive ahead (about 350 km today). We were heading for Mount Gambier, home to Blue Lake. The lake changes colour from a steel blue-grey in the Winter to a brilliant turquoise colour in the Summer months, the lake is 70m in depth at its deepest point. Our final destination today was Port Fairy (previously named Belfast) and is supposedly one of the prettiest towns along the Great Ocean Road. The Moyne river runs through the town and we saw some very expensive yachts moored up there. Running parallel to the harbour is a beautiful sandy bay which stretches all the way to Port Campbell. On the other side of the mouth of the river is Griffiths Island which used to be a whaling station in the nineteenth century. By standing at the harbour you could see on one side the Southern Ocean crashing in with huge waves, and on the other the gentleness of the sea lapping in on the bay, a complete contrast. We spent the rest of the afternoon just walking on the sands and paddling in the sea, it was a lovely warm day, we thought we would tackle a walk around Griffiths Island the next day before we headed to our next destination.

Friday 26th January

Its Australia Day today and the flags are out everywhere with all the locals heading down to the beach for a “barbie“. We checked out of our hotel and walked over the causeway to Griffiths Island, this island is now a sanctuary for tens of thousands of mutton birds or short-tailed shearwater birds. They nest on the island between September and April after flying thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean from North America. Each year they return to the same burrow they occupied the previous year, during the day they fly out in the ocean to feed and return every evening at dusk. As you walked around the island you could see these nests everywhere (luckily for Linda with no birds in them), on the Southern Ocean side we were amazed at the size of the waves that were breaking on the rocks, apparently the whole coastline is littered with ship wrecks. Just over an hour later we were on our way to Port Campbell which was our next overnight stop, this town is situated between “The Bay of Islands” and “The Twelve Apostles”, the latter being the most famous sight on the Great Ocean Drive. After checking in we discovered that we could book a helicopter flight which would take us over all these sights, the flight lasted 30 minutes and we bought a DVD souvenir of our trip. Again these helicopter flights are just great, we could get quite hooked on them. At the Twelve Apostles visitor centre a tunnel and boardwalk has been constructed under the road and out to the viewing points, we could barely park the car as there was so many visitors there, but again it was worth it to see the power of the sea. We have just heard by email that our 14 day trip in Western USA has been cancelled, so we now need to re fill this gap, any suggestions anybody?

Saturday 27th January

Time to drive to Melbourne, an early start was needed as there was another 5 hour journey ahead and it was raining and quite cold!! This is the coldest we have felt since we left last November, supposedly 20 degrees but it felt much colder. Our starting time was 7 a.m. and we saw several kangaroos sitting at the side of the road (just hoping that they didn’t hop in front of us as you see quite a few squashed ones as well). We stopped at Lorne for another big breakfast and sat shivering in the café with our shorts and tee shirts on with all the locals wearing big jackets. We were assured by everybody that driving into Melbourne would be a doddle, not too much traffic - they were wrong, the roads were packed but luck was with us and we ended up on the right road without knowing how we got there, it was also raining quite heavily by then. We dropped our luggage off at the hotel and drove to the car rental office (just 2 blocks away) we hadn’t expected to experience such a lot of traffic and to make it worse there were so many trams that ran in different directions, we then walked back quicker than we had driven there. After a couple of hours “rest” we took the free city shuttle bus which runs all around the city, luckily for us one of the stops was just 100m down the road from our hotel It was fascinating to be driving past the Rod Laver tennis courts knowing that the Ladies Final was happening at that time. Another early night was needed for us to catch up on some much needed sleep.

Sunday 28th January

Set off to browse around the Queen Victoria Market, apparently the biggest market in the Southern Hemisphere with over 1000 stalls, it took us over 2 hours to walk round but we didn’t spend too much money. After a quick cuppa we caught the “free” city circle tram to Waterfront City (Melbourne Docklands), the area is full of strange but modern sculptures, the most unusual being an upside down cow in a tree. Just across the water at Victoria Harbour we could see dragon boats racing , luckily for the participants there was quite a breeze to keep them cool. We found ourselves a nice restaurant overlooking the water and relaxed over a good meal. The Telstra Stadium is on the opposite side of the road to the docklands, this is a multi purpose designed facility which caters for sporting events e.g. International Rugby, cricket, soccer etc and rock concerts, the most famous victory for us “Poms” is England beating Australia in the World Cup Rugby. When we got back to the hotel the tennis mens final was just starting on the big screen at the bar so we settled down with a couple of pints for Ron and a gin and tonic for Linda c/w a big plateful of profiteroles filled with ice cream and covered in hot chocolate sauce.

Monday 29th January

Our destination today was the Yarra river for a River cruise, the first half takes you up river where you pass the Melbourne cricket ground, Melbourne Park (home of the Australian Open) and Melbourne Olympic Park which had been opened for the 1956 Olympic games and re-used for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. A little further upstream we could see the Royal Botanical Gardens and lastly we circled Herring Island. On the journey we passed two separate rowing schools practising and racing each other (looked too much like hard work). We then had to wait an hour for the tide to recede before we could go down river (as some of the bridges were so low), on this journey we passed where we had walked the previous day and then headed further down to the main commercial dock area where all the container ships were moored up. We then had a long walk along the river bank where you pass the Crown Casino, the smell of the dollars drew us in and we gambled our usual A$5 and lost it. On our return to the hotel we went to the roof top fitness centre where we watched other people using the gym whilst we sat relaxing in the spa (big enough for a netball team & a few reserves).

Tuesday 30th January

Had a bit of a lie in today and didn’t have breakfast until 9.30 a.m., we had decided to go to the Botanical Gardens and the free bus didn’t start until 10 a.m. When we got off the bus we noticed a huge building surrounded by gardens, it turned our to be Victoria’s memorial to the men and women who served Australia in armed conflicts and in peacekeeping operations since the great wars. We then walked to the Botanical Gardens which were founded in 1846, some of the trees had been planted then and were still going strong. We sat by the lake later eating scones with jam and cream (very British). We went back to the hotel at 3 p.m. in order that we could prepare our next instalment for our travel blog. Off to Sydney tomorrow