Right then. The Oz Bus left Melbourne and moved towards Sydney via Wilson's Promontory, through Foster and into Snowy River Country. We drove through the Tarra Valley and walked down to the river through a cool-tempered rainforest that was full of more blackened trees. From there we walked along a stretch of a 90mile beach and oninto the Snowy Mountain range - and that was just the morning!! The bus was friendly enough but nobody had really spoken much to eachother much up to that point. I'd met a crazy German girl and two British girls and we were just commenting on how quiet the group (of 21 people) was when we pulled into a vineyard near a place called Lakes entrance. A$2 and a bit of wine-tasting later and we were all much more sociable. I think the idea was that we were supposed to spit the wine into a bucket after each taste - but come on, we're backpackers on a shoe-string here! There were about 12 wines to taste and we were the third group to coe through that day so the vineyard-owner was laced enough to be giving us quite generous servings and kept forgetting who had tried what so we all got a few good slugs of each bottle. A couple of hours later we staggered out, squinting into the sunlight and clambered onto the bus where we cracked open any booze we had. It was a very classy affair, with us emptying our water bottles out the window so we could fill them from boxes of wine we'd bought the night before. With 21 of us it soon descended into chaos and Roger our long-suffering driver had to contend with jokes from the Brits about the Ashes, chats of "we love you Roger - we do" and constant requests for toilet stops. We managed to persuade Roger to stop at a backwater pub - which was probably our undoing as we then persuaded the landlady to give us all a carry-out. Back on the bus for more nonsense as we made our way to Ontos and our digs for the night: A mountain health retreat with a dim view on the consumption of alcohol. A lentil cottage pie and a plate of veggies pretty-much finished us all off and we collapsed in our dorms by around 9.00 :)