KANGERS, KOOKABURRA'S, KOALA'S, KRAZY KURT, KINKY KEVIN KISSING KAREN AND A KOLOURFUL KAMPERVAN,....

We landed at Melbourne Tullamarine airport at about 5.30pm on Tuesday 30th October and as soon as we got out of the airport a wall of heat hit us. This was the Australia I was expecting. Serious sunshine, beautiful...sadly though it wasn't to last and the next day as we explored the sights and sounds of Melbourne it was as cold and windy as it had been on those winters days in Manchester!!

After the success of the kiwi campervan experience we had decided to book another one for a round trip down the Great Ocean Road, up through the Otway National parks and Grampian mountains.

As we pulled up to the van hire place we saw several plain camper vans waiting to be picked up but parked up on its own was a little white van with bright purple and yellow flowers and 'Hippie Camper' painted all over the sides. It was seriously shouting..." LOOK AT US , WE ARE TOURISTS!!!!"..hee hee, a totally in ya face little van and of course I loved it but Ray said "bloody ell, hope that's not ours!!"....and guess what??!!.....it was ..yay!!!

So after we had sorted the payment with an extremely flamboyant, over talkative and over enthusiastic guy called 'Kurt' who was an Australian Alan Carr in every way, we waved g'day to the chatty man and set off for Victoria's Great Ocean Highway with a very unimpressed and embarrassed Ray on navigation duty, ducking down in the passenger seat in case he saw anyone he knew!!

First stop was a place called Anglesey. We'd been told that there was a golf course where the kangaroo's hang out and sure enough as we drove up we could see them all lying down, chilling out on the 18th hole. Not one of them got up and bounced!! Lovely as it was, I really didn't feel like I had seen them properly. I wanted them to be hopping across the red sand, in a sunset scene with Joeys in their pouches whilst Aborigines played didgeridoo's in the background or see them boxing each other (not the Aborigines) But these kanger's looked like they had been placed on the golf course for a natter in an animal magic sketch with Johnny Morris narrating..

"G'day Bruce"

"G'day Sheila"

"How ya going?"

"Yeh, I'm a bit crook!" .

(I know, I've really shown my age there but you get the idea!!)..

Happily though, as we turned to go and in the space of about a minute I saw my first Kookaburra, cockatoo, Echidna (hedgehogggy creature with wiggly nose) and Galah...so my Australian fauna and flora tick list was well on the way to being completed...

That night we stayed in a beautiful beach resort called Lorne. All around in the trees were hundreds of wild cockatoo's, shrieking and flying about, so weird. Like an Afred Hitchcock film with a twist!. When I saw the first solitary one I got really excited but they are as common place as seagulls and pigeons are in the UK...far more pretty though and fascinating to watch as long as you're not on their dambusting guano flight path!!

That evening we went for a walk on the beach at Lorne and a storm started brewing in the distance which created the biggest and most beautiful rainbow across the entire beach. After this the weather closed in and the rain poured down and that night was absolutely freezing in the campervan....I know we British love to talk about the weather but please......this was Australia and I needed a hot water bottle, bed socks and a nose cosy.....not what I was expecting!!

The next day at the information centre I was reading a book about the deadliest creatures in Australia and was surprised to read that in the last 80 years very few people have actually died from spider bites and shark attacks and it is the reclusive hairy feral pig that has one of the highest scores for human attacks on his tally sheet!...brilliant, so another thing to worry about!!!..big angry hairy pigs!!

When I asked about the likelihood of seeing wild koalas and kangaroo's, the lady at the information centre told us about a campsite which was deep in the Otway national park forest called Bimbi so we headed there. The campsite was lovely. We parked under the gum trees and headed off on foot through the trees to the beach. As we went further and further into the forest we were aware of a growling noise and became quite anxious as it appeared to be getting closer and closer. At this point I mentioned to Ray about the hairy pigs tally and just as we were about to leg it we realized that directly above us in the eucalyptus tree was a big fat, grey gremlin like, angry, but very cute koala and he was the one doing all the growling. Now our first thought was that he was growling at us as a warning to leave his territory but after we spotted another koala further up the tree we felt sure that he was after a punch up with the gum tree imposter. Suddenly koala 1 legged it up the tree and jumped on koala 2, there was an almighty growling and screaming match between the two of them with lots of biting and scratching and Ray and I were getting quite concerned that they might fall out of the tree, but koala 1 was hanging on to koala 2's back as if his life depended on it!! Gradually it became apparent that they weren't actually fighting!! No, this is spring time in Australia and these two cuties were doing what healthy young koalas do up gum trees in the spring time...Ray and I felt a bit voyeuristic standing there watching , so we decided to stop staring and leave Kevin and Karen to get jiggy with it in peace!!!........we continued our walk to the beach but that night as we tried to get some sleep, the noise all around us was all well..growly ... let's just say....Kevin! , Karen!.....GET A ROOM!!!

The next day was beautiful, the sun was out, the sky was perfectly blue and after a very disturbed night's sleep..(thanks Kev!) we drove to the famous 12 Apostles. An amazing stretch of coastline where after millions of years the rocks have eroded into the sea leaving gigantic weird and wonderful rock formations. Beautiful blue sea contrasting with the orange sand, white waves and green shrubs all vibrant in the Australian sun.....a proper treat for the sleepy peepers!

After The 12 Apostles we stayed at Port Fairy, a really picturesque little town where the houses seemed to be lost in time. Many of them unchanged since the settlers landed here. Little white picket fences, one story houses with rocking chairs on porches and beautifully green, trimmed lawns...(anyone remember the Sullivans?)

On our fourth day in our flowery camper we headed for the Grampian Mountain range. Again we stopped at the information centre and were warned to watch out for brown snakes as they were just waking up and might be a bit grumpy!!... (I'm sure I heard Steve Irwin say something about the brown snake being one of the most deadly snakes in the world once??)

The Grampians are a range of beautiful mountains with some fantastic walking and hiking trails and stunning viewpoints. We managed to climb the lung busting, knee cap snapping Pinnacles and were rewarded with the most spectacular views and fab photo opportunities on the rocky outcrops at the top. The photo's look like we are teetering on the edge of oblivion..... (Its ok mum, we weren't!) The walk led us up past a proper billabong and through dusty mountain tracks and 'The Bush' and it really was crocodile hunter country. We spotted wild grey kangaroo's and the faces of little wallabies which kept popping up from the shrubs, cute little geckos, kookaburras but thankfully still no huntsman spiders, brown snakes or hairy feral pigs. In fact the most threatening ( and most irritating) creatures we came across were the flies!....I am seriously going to tie corks to my hat when we get to Queensland!

We spent a couple of nights in a forest campsite gathering wood and building our own campfire, drinking stubbies of beer and watching proper bouncing kangeroo's hop by as the sun went down through the trees.... Idyllic apart from the contaminated tap water from the creek, the lack of showers and the stinking black hole in the ground that was the toilet, more than nasty during daylight hours and a place of insecty terror at night!!

On the sixth day we headed back to Melbourne to return the hippy camper to lovely Kurt the chatty man, passing places with fabulously ozzie names such as Petticoat Creek, Phantom falls, Lemonade creek, Dog foot creek, and Billabong-wallamalloo-ya-great-galah-Bruce-the-swagman throw-another-shrimp-on-the-barby-Sheila-Pass (ok, not the last one!!) ....loved the Ocean Road!!