"The Bush"

To all you loyal readers, we apologize for the delay in posting. But, fear not as this will be an epic one.

Naomi's parents have been visiting for the past week. This gave us the opportunity (the excuse) to explore a bit out of the city. We made our first escape into "the bush" this past weekend, heading west along "The Great Ocean Road," then north into the Grampians mountains before heading back east through some gold rush towns on the way back to Melbourne.

1. The Great Ocean Road is basically what it sounds like - mostly a coastal road (with a bunch of great cliff-coast views) going through various little cute towns.

This is a view of 'Bells Beach' (near the town of Torquay), which is known for great surfing:

We saw a couple surfers, but they seemed half-hearted. The waves didn't seem very impressive, at least to die-hard surfers like ourselves.

This is the cute fishing town of Apollo Bay, where we spent the first night:

Going inland a bit from the coast, there is a lot of temperate rainforest, which includes fern gullies and waterfalls. We stopped at one of them, Erskine Falls:

Another unexpected, amazing thing we saw in one of the towns were...

...bunches of calla lilies growing wild, like weeds!

The best-known site on the Great Ocean Road is "The Twelve Apostles." These are rock formations jutting out of the water, along the coast. I don't think there were ever actually 12, but some have collapsed and now they're down to about 6 or so...


This part of the coast is also known for having had many shipwrecks (particularly of ships that came from England). This was the site of one. We're sure it's less beautiful if you're approaching it from the sea during a storm.



2. The Grampians. On the way heading straight north from the end of the Great Ocean Road, we could see our destination looming in the distance:



The town we stayed in, Halls Gap, is known for having kangaroos grazing on front lawns (at least according to our guide book). Behold: the guidebook didn't lie. We woke up to a bunch of 'roos grazing in the grass near our cabin (and walked by some at night on our way to dinner, in the dark!). Although they are in town, they still seemed on guard when they saw people coming to take a photo of them:


The Grampians also include some waterfalls as well as pretty views from above, looking at the landscape around:


They are also supposed to contain many varieties of wildflowers that are not found anywhere else in the world. I assumed these were some of them:

The Grampians are also significant to the Aboriginal people who have lived in the area - we visited an Aboriginal cultural center in Halls Gap explaining the significance of the land to the cultures. There were also numerous ancient rock art sites around the park, of which we visited one:


As one would expect, the history of the area in the past couple hundred years is tragic. The Europeans changed the landscape very quickly with logging and grazing animals (not to mention the introduction of non-native pests like foxes). So it's kind of hard to know what to feel about it all...

More to come.