The search for the Platypus and other stories...

Friday 8th - Sunday 17th January, 2010

After our crazy 3 weeks up the east coast, we eased ourselves into the next road trip by taking a business class flight from Cairns to Melbourne - yes, finally all those years of flying to Milan paid back, thank you Unilever and British Airways! As you can imagine we made the most of the journey, starting with using our excess luggage (in the form a lot of gear and our tent!), then into the business lounge for a quick snack, and finally by sipping the sparkling stuff on the plane! I had found ourselves a little gem of a place to stay, just the other side of Fitzroy Gardens in Melbourne, set in the leafy suburbs and surrounded by beautiful big houses... a bit like Hampstead Heath really! It was a small hotel (it called itself 'boutique' hotel, but I wouldn't go that far!) for little more than the price of a hostel, with a buffet breakfast included, and again we filled our boots to set ourselves up for a few days of wandering around the city!

And what a fantastic city Melbourne is. We'd been told we might like it better than Sydney - I was a little sceptical about this, but I was very pleasantly surprised to find I did - it has much more character and somehow seems more alive than the capital city. We had a few days to explore so we mooched around Fitzroy, the 'grungy' part of town full of funky shops and cool bars, we made it to the Queen Vic Market just in the nick of time to get some picnic supplies, and we sat in the sun around Fitzroy Square and the river watching the world go by as we ate our picnic. We found ourselves back in funky Fitzroy on Saturday night in a bar called Grumpy's - it was a place Frank felt he could relate to, and, no, not just because of the name, but it's philosophy is to keep the beer miles low, so it tells you how far your drink of choice has travelled. They also serve yummy vegetarian food (veggie=better for environment) and the local bands were pretty good too.

Picking up Gaby the Getz early Sunday morning (a close relative to Gary the Getz of east coast fame) we headed to St Kilda for a mooch around the market before getting supplies and driving down towards the Great Ocean Road. Despite its name it actually only takes a couple of days to drive the Great Ocean Road (a drive in the park compared to some of the roads we travelled on in Australia!) It is a very pleasant windy ocean drive, and there's plenty of places to stop at if you've got the time, from sandy beaches to national parks. First stop was Torquay for a surf lesson, we couldn't pass by without riding a few waves at one of Australia's surfing hot spots. Despite it being our second lesson ever in about 5 years, we weren't too bad, but then we weren't great either... but then nor were the waves! We both eventually got up with the help of an extra big board! That evening, we took a detour off the Great Ocean Road to the Great Otway National Park in the hope of seeing a platypus at dawn. We arrived at the campsite at dusk, it was completely in the wild and we were the only people there - I was doing alright and then the mosquitoes came in for a bite to eat. Despite this, we had a good vibe for seeing wildlife due to the remoteness, and we weren't disappointed. The first wildlife siting was as we parked up - Frank spotted a koala who was actually active and awake for the camera (they sleep for about 18 hours a day - not a bad life). The next morning we were up early with hope in our hearts after our last attempt at platypus spotting failed dismally. After much patience, there it was, he was just coming to the surface for some air and hung around long enough for us to get a little peak and positively identify that, yes, it was the shape of a platypus! Then, on our way back to our campsite for breakfast we had a bit of a shock - a snake sprang out from the side of the path only metres from Frank and reared his head to let him know he was there and this was his turf - he slithered off quite quickly, but it didn't stop out heart rates going through the sky! Phew, quite enough wildlife for one day!

Having driven the rest of the Great Ocean Road and joined the tourist hordes at the 12 Apostles and the many rock formations carved from the sea, we decided that before heading to the Barossa Valley we had time to detour through The Grampians. Here we spent a day around the major lookouts and saw our first Aboriginal rock art. There was a fantastic Aboriginal cultural centre in the town, Brambuk Cultural Centre, where we would have loved to have spent more time - it was the first sense of Aboriginal community we had come across in a month in Australia, and it felt like this place really brought their culture to life, explaining the good, the bad and also the very ugly times that came with the arrival of the Europeans.

Hiring bikes for the day in the Barossa Valley seemed like a good idea at the time, but in reality was far too much like hard work in the heat! First stop was Penfolds, and having stopped for over an hour to try some very nice wines, it felt like a hard slog to find some food in the midday sun. We soon settled upon Maggie Beer's place, she's a famous Australian cook who has created all things lovely, much of which goes very well with wine. You can taste much of it in her shop (pates, relishes, jams, ducca... mmmmm) before settling down to a basket of goodies. Needless to say, yet again we filled up on the free tasters before buying our lunch! We only had time to go to one more vineyard (wine and bikes really do not mix n match), so we chose Two Hands, a funky little place focusing mainly on Shiraz, but after our feed at Maggie Beer, my stomach couldn't handle any more heavy wine, so I was more interested in their marketing strategy than their wine!

Finally, we couldn't leave this stretch of Australia without visiting Frank's cousin Fiona and the Yeardley family, just outside of Adelaide. So after a day's planning on the internet in Adelaide, we found ourselves being spolit by the Yeardley's, including the in-laws who kept topping our glasses up! Yet again we had to tear ourselves away for our next adventure - we had a 24 hour train ride into the outback to catch!