The Oz Experience

EDIT: This post is actually finished now. Enjoy.

Right, I've got a lot of catching up to do... get ready for a big one.

Wednesday morning I was up bright and early for my bus. I was on an Oz Experience tour with 15 others (mostly female :D), which would take 3 days to get from Adelaide to Melbourne with an overnight stop in the Grampians and a second near the Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road. The first 4 or so hours of driving were fairly uneventful and consisted of the 16 of us getting to know each other, sleeping, reading, listening to aboriginal music and stopping in tiny little towns to buy food and drink. Eventually the Grampians were in sight and we were warned of some 'light trekking'. Okay, so maybe it wasn't a sheer cliff face, but it certainly wasn't light. Good fun though and definitely worth the effort once we reached the top. We climbed Hollow Mountain and Mt Zero, I think. Amazing views from the top overlooking the plains. We could see areas of controlled burning everywhere in the distance.

From there, we drove up to a place who's name I've completely forgotten, but we got there for sunset and it had some amazing viewing points and big rocks you could climb out onto and hang over 300m drops. We picked up a few more people from another Oz tour and they came with us to the night's accomodation. They'd be travelling with us for the next two days too. One new guy, Tony, sat next to me on the bus and it turns out he's just quit from being a tourist info guy in Sydney. So he's turned out to be a very useful person to know, and I now have a pretty decent idea of what to expect from there, and where the good places to go are :)

The night's accomodation was a series of small house-like buildings in the middle of a forest clearing in the mountains. Dinner was spag bol, and was cooked (extremely thoroughly!) by half of the group. The other half (including me) washed up afterwards. I ended up scrubbing the charred remains at the bottom of the spaghetti saucepan. Thank you very much, Kirstine! The food that survived was very nice though. The rest of the evening was spent talking and generally getting to know each other better.

6am start the next morning in order to catch the sunrise from 'The Pinnacle'. We left at 6.30 and it was an hour and a half trek to the top. And my word, it wasn't half stunning at the top! I'll let the photos do the talking...

After another 45 mins or so coming back down from The Pinnacle, we were to head off towards the coast. It was a few hours to Warrnambool, where we'd join the Great Ocean Road. So naturally, everyone used the time to catch up on some much needed sleep. Reaching Warnambool, the weather was taking a turn for the worse. Not awful by any means, but overcast and gloomy aren't really ideal conditions for seeing one of the most beautiful coastlines on the planet.

Most of the day was spent driving and stopping in little seaside towns for coffee and toilets, until we reached the Twelve Opostles. These are a series of massive limestone sticky-outy things just off the coast and had we had better weather, they'd have looked stunning against the sunset. We didn't even get a hint of a sunset though, unfortunately.

So back to the bus it was, and we had a 10 minute drive down the road to Princetown - our host town for the night. Simply by turning up, we tripled the local population of eleven. Princetown consists of a small hostel (where we stayed), a pub and a shop. That's about it. So no big night out on the town for us... we stayed in had dinner and watched a film instead. The meal was great - sausages, burgers, mash potato and peas. And even better, it was made for us (and therefore not burnt. Well not much anyway...). Dinner was spent learning phrases (please don't ask what they were) in some of the many languages spoken around the table. Somehow the German word Fleischflanzel cropped up and has become a running joke ever since. It means 'burger' apparently. After dinner, we had the daunting task of choosing a film to watch. The hostel has a film rental system with a good 200 or so films to choose from. Though perhaps 'good' isn't the best word for it. Not being a fan of chick-flicks, I could see half a dozen decent titles on the shelf, but amazingly one of these was actually chosen! Gone in 60 seconds. Not bad...

So I spent the night watching a film in a room where girls outnumbered guys about 4 to 1. Not a bad way to spend a night, I'm sure you'll agree. Of the dozen or so that watched the film from the beginning, only 4 remained at the end. Lightweights!

And so all too quickly came our last day together. Most of it would be spent driving the last of the Great Ocean Road and then heading through the evening traffic into Melbourne. There were still some highlights to come though. Early on, we stopped by the road side, walked a little way into the trees by the road and very quickly were met with our first sighting of koalas. I've been told not to call them koala bears, because apparently they're not bears. Anyway, they were basically balls of fluff high up in the trees. We saw 4 or 5 in total and I got a few pictures (you might have to squint to see the koalas though).

Next stop was to see the official starting point of the Great Ocean Road, so we took the obligatory pictures of the archway. And then beyond this was Bells Beach - a surfer's paradise apparently. Not today though, it had just started pissing down with rain as we pulled up in the car park, but we valiantly got out, walked down to the phsycadelically painted toilet block, and walked back up to the van where the girls (Lou especially!) had a not-so-subtle perv over a surfer getting changed by his car.

The rain had cleared by the time we reached Otways rainforest up in the mountains. It has the highest metal walkway in Australia and you do get some pretty good views from it. We were set the challenge of finding as many black snails as possible; they're a native species of Australia, only found in the Otways and they're carnivorous. Emily and Kirstine took the challenge somewhat too seriously, racing down the paths to be the first to spot them. We found about ten in total and the two girls valiantly declared a draw to their game. Anything else would have ended in tears I think. Oh yeah, there were dinosaurs in the rainforest too... probably should have mentioned that.

And once again it was back on the bus for the last time (unless I'm forgetting things, which is extremely likely... I can think of about 3 or 4 places I've missed and I've forgotten where abouts they came in the trip - Included would be some cool waterfalls and a chocolate factory. My memory is still as useless out here as it is at home. Anyway, where was I?). We were about 2 hours from Melbourne and the last of the driving would be on boring highways with lots of traffic. We passed the time with (extremely loud) renditions of all our national anthems, which all the melbournite passers by thoroughly enjoyed. Having exhausted all but Vanessa's energy levels, we agreed to meet up later that night to go out for the night.

So 9 o clock was the agreed meeting time and Flinder Street station was the agreed meeting place. The three of us staying in Nomads (me, Emily and Kirstine) went for dinner at a little outdoor pizza place and ordered far too much Hawaiian pizza. Then onto Flinder Street to see who else would show up. In the end it was only Vanessa, but the others had decent excuses, so we'll let them off.

Anyway, we got very lost in the suburbs, watched a very drunk man dance with the local chav population in a sleazy pub in south Melbourne, got the tram back to where we'd started off and went to a club in federation square. It will suffice to say (because no doubt my parents are reading this very carefully) that we all had a good night and drank very responsibly. Vanessa definitely didn't cause a fight between two guys at the end of the night. Definitely not.

We got back to Nomads at a very respectible hour and went our separate ways. I haven't seen anyone from the Oz tour since, but they're heading in similar directions to me, so I'm sure this won't be the last time.

From now on, my blogs are gonna be shorter than this - not only because it's expensive to be on the internet for this long, but it's bloody boring too!

Time now for the photos though: (CLICK ON THEM!)
Not entirely sure why it cuts my photos in half... Daniel???
























Clockwise: Me, Emily, Vanessa, Kirstine


The lovely cramped bus


Those photos are not even close to chronological order, so don't try and work out where/when each place is. I don't even know myself...

Goodbye for now,
Much love,
Matthew