I had pretty much the best weekend ever, which seems to be a pattern lately. They just keep getting better! Another week of school and long nights of studying to catch up done with, I left school on Thursday evening and watched the sun set over Melbourne as I drove to Avalon airport, between Melbourne and Geelong. A little over an hour after leaving my dorm, I picked up Shanna, who is from Ormond Beach but is at uni in Sydney for the semester and decided to come down and go on a road trip with me.
It was already dark when we headed south from Avalon through Geelong and Torquay, down the Great Ocean road to Lorne, and up into the hills to where I had camped before. After scaring a massive kangaroo out of our campsite, we cooked some stir-fry over our campfire and talked for a while. Then I set up the tent for Shanna and climbed in the back of my car to go to sleep.
Because I'm like a fish, happier in the water, the first beach we drove by on Friday morning had us going for a wake-up swim in the freezing cold water and body-surfing the little waves. Farther south, just above Apollo Bay, I again had to pull over into the little dirt parking lot when we saw waves... two small right reef breaks close to the rocks and another a-framing slab down the beach. The slab was calling my name, so I made the long paddle to join the one guy who was out at the wave. When the water dredged out in front of the foot-to-two overhead set waves, the seaweed from the rocks just beneath the surface stuck out into the air, meaning it was perfectly safe and I had nothing to fear: If the wave slammed me onto the rocks, the seaweed would cushion the blow so it would probably just hurt a lot instead of a ton. I watched some cool yellow fish swim beneath me, threw down a few turns on the right and headed back in to join Shanna on the beach, where she was taking some amazing photos of the waves, tide pools, and beautiful scenery, which I should mention was incredible... huge hills with forests and farms on the sides fell right down to the rocky beach, where the water was perfectly blue.
We drove all the way south to Cape Otway, where the Great Ocean Road turns West along the south coast of Australia Toward Port Campbell. The views were amazing, the lighthouse grounds were fun to see, and the guy who worked in the lighthouse was... well, let's just say I had a short awkward conversation about how lame it was that the lighthouse wasn't functional anymore (at Shanna's prompting) and got a strange look. To change the subject, he told us "Take a look up there!" and we climbed up and looked through up at the huge light and the reflectors that used to shine it out to sea. On the way back to the Great Ocean Road, we stopped because some people had gotten out of their cars and were pointing up into the trees, and lo and behold, we spotted our first wild koalas! The furry lard-balls were lazing in the treetops in very uncomfortable-looking positions, their arms and legs hanging down from the branches they lay across. I have to say, though, they were slightly more energetic than the sloths we saw in Costa Rica.
Further down the road, I spotted the sign for Johanna beach, the backup surf spot for the Rip Curl pro surf contest at Bells (which, by the way, starts this week. Check the videos from the surfing each day at the Rip-Curl website to see what the waves are like down here). A few k's off the highway, we climbed up into the tall sand dunes and ran straight down them and across the beach into the ice-cold water, where we got washed back up onto the beach by the swells. Johanna is basically right on the roaring 40's, the band of water that circles the globe just north of Antarctica, so the water, even in the summer and with the heat we've had lately, is the ice-cream headache kind of cold.
As the afternoon grew later, Shanna and I headed up the winding dirt-and-gravel track back to the Great Ocean Road, and west toward Port Campbell, where some of the most amazing ocean scenery in the world is found. It started at Gibson Steps, where we climbed the steep stair down the cliff to the beach, feeling dwarfed by the huge sandstone walls above us, the massive rock columns rising from the water just offshore, and the waves crashing on the sandbar beyond. We found a tiny penguin hiding under one of the rocks!
Then it was back up the cliff and west down the road. We decided to pass the world-famous Twelve Apostles at first in favor of Loch-Ard Gorge. We watched from the top of the cliff as waves crashed through a pass in the cliffs and up into the appropriately named Thunder Cave. We saw the blowhole, where waves run through an underground cave into a pool in the middle of the headland. Then we went to the gorge, a beautiful cliff-lined beach, which we foun deserving of a swim while the other tourists were content just to take pictures.
With the sun headed for the horizon, we parked the wagon at the large Twelve Apostles carpark and walked down the path to the cliffs overlooking the ocean. After the posters, postcards, and photos I've seen of the Twelve Apostles, it was incredible to see it firsthand. The scene was breathtaking, the sun low on the horizon burning the sky a pale orange through the salt mist, and the monolithic sandstone towers rising a couple hundred feet out of the water, isolated from the cliffs that lined the beach.
After sundown, Shanna and I looked for a campsite and ended up back at Johanna. We made a fire up between some rocks on the beach and cooked the leftover stir-fry from the night before, which ended up a little... well, sandy. But I was hungry. The night was perfectly clear, so we put out the fire, saving the big burn-log we had found to make another fire the next night and pulled out our sleeping bags. The milky way stretched across the sky, interrupted by brilliant shooting stars. The crashing waves lulled me to sleep as I gazed up at the incredible sky.
Throughout the early morning hours on Saturday, I woke up freezing cold because of the broken zipper on my sleeping bag. A while after sunrise, I got up and washed the dishes in the surf. When Shanna woke up, we packed up the car and got ready to leave. But when I turned the key, it wouldn't start! There were some people camping in the campground nearby, so I borrowed some leads off some old dude with a cool accent and we went about jumping the wagon. But then I found out that the only problem was that it was stuck in between reverse and park. I simply forced the stick into park and it started right up. I just let the guy who gave me the jump think that I had really needed it, and we left.
On the road back to the Twelve Apostles, we suddenly encountered lightning, the fastest sheep I have ever seen. It was just standing in the road, so I pulled over as quickly as I could and got out. I've always wanted to tackle a sheep (or at least I had a sudden impulse to tackle one when I saw this one in the road), so I got out and began chasing lightning, who of course evaded me the first time. My second try was a little more successful. I didn't get a tackle, but I dove at lightning and managed to push the scared sheep off his course. He kept running for several kilometers down the road before disappearing into the woods, never to be seen again.
We saw the Twelve Apostles by day, which was spectacular, and the Arch, another rock formation, and London Bridge, which were both incredible. We needed more adjectives and decided to use superfluous because everything was "extravagantly created and much more than necessary but definitely not in a wasteful or unwanted way because everything we saw was amazing" (thanks Shanna!). After stopping we drove up into the Otways to see some of the mountains.
We hiked through the woods to a couple of waterfalls. One had a perfect pool for swimming in, so of course we dove into the chilly water and swam up under the waterfall. The column of water was so cold and falling so hard it was really painful when we stood beneath the main fall, but it was really cool to sit against the wall behind the falls and watch the water drop over the cliff above us. It felt terrific to swim in fresh water too.
After our swim, we drove down a dirt/gravel track for almost an hour toward Apollo bay. Then it was back up another road into the mountains, where once more we found ourselves on a dirt track looking for a place to camp. The sign said "Grey River Picnic Area - 10 k," which is a really long way on a bumpy track full of potholes, but we did it and were rewarded with a picnic area by a little creek, complete with barbecues to light a fire under and cook on. We had this beautiful spot in the middle of the woods all to ourselves.
All to ourselves, that is, for about twenty minutes. After hard dark, people suddenly started driving up and parking at our picnic area. And heading up toward the toilet! So we're in the middle of the woods fifteen kilometers down a dirt track from the highway and twenty people show up and head to the toilet at the same time?
Our riddle was solved when a girl came up to us as we ate and asked us where the glow-worms were. "Nope" was the quick answer, but as soon as we said it Shanna and I just looked at each other. "Glow worms?"
Once the last car left, we decided to go check it out. So we walked over by the toilet, and sure enough, sprawled across the side of the hill right by the picnic area was a colony of thousands of glow-worms. It was like the stars started at the ground and just continued up into the sky. The night was pitch-dark since the moon had already set and we just stood there in the dark and looked at the constellations on the hillside. On closer inspection we found the worms were tiny, about a quarter-inch at most, and crawled along strands of thread in little cracks in the hillside with their rear ends glowing. It reminded me of my bioethics class where my professor always talks about wanting to have a child genetically engineered so he would glow. Anyway, we found a stunning population of glow-worms near our randomly chosen camp site way back in the forest down a long winding dirt track. You never know what you might come across.
Sunday morning we rented Shanna a board and went surfing at a beachbreak north of Apollo bay. The waves were a little small, about chest to head high peaks with waist to chest high lines, but super clean and fun. My first wave I dropped in late, stuck my hand deep into the wall of the wave, and got in the barrel before coming out and racing down the line. My second wave I did the same thing. My third wave was a really steep vertical drop, followed by a bottom turn back into the pocket. I did a little stall turn low on the face to get into position, ducked, stuck my hand in the wave to slow down, and got the best barrel I've had in a long time. Shanna and I were both stoked to be in the water and surf such fun waves on such a gorgeous day (though next time we'll have to find her a little smaller and better board - she was riding an 8-foot foam top). I surfed the reefbreak again, this time all alone. Then we headed north to see Bells Beach, where they were setting up for the surf contest, and then on to Melbourne.
Sunday arvo we got to Monash and hung out with some of my Aussie mates for a bit. Tim took us to go get pizza, since we hadn't told the cooking group in time that we would be back for dinner. I introduced Shanna to about a billion people, all with crazy nicknames, and I'm sure she remembers every single one of them.
Monday morning, Shanna's last day in Victoria (for now at least), we got up and drove down to the Mornington Peninsula, on the East side of the bay and Melbourne, opposite the coast we had traveled all weekend. We went swimming and exploring in the tide pools at Mushroom reef in Flinders. The hot sun made the cold water feel extremely refreshing.
Next we drove over to Cape Schanck. The lighthouse is on the cliff overlooking Bass Strait, between Mainland Australia and Tasmania (Bass Strait is basically the ocean - whenever we surf down here the body of water is actually the strait), and it has an amazing view of the Mornington Peninsula down toward Gunnamatta surf beach, Rye, Blairgowrie (where I stayed at Tim's house), and Portsea. Sadly, we set our spending limit at 7 dollars and the lighthouse cost 14 to get into, so we opted to walk down the long boardwalk to the rocks along Bushranger bay. The tide was low, so we climbed across the rocks out to the tip of the cape, which consists of a rock shelf beneath a cliff. The shelf is about 6 feet above the water and is full of tide pools and covered in parts with seaweed. A couple of the tide pools were over 8 feet deep, and the water was crystal clear, so of course we had to go for a swim. The scenery was gorgeous: The swells crashed up onto the rocks all around, the tide pools were perfectly clear and the surfaces were slick in contrast to the raging ocean only feet away, and the Mornington Peninsula stretched into the distance to the northwest.
At the very tip, a channel ran through the rocks, separating a bommie (rock island) from the rocks of the mainland, where we were. Though only about 15-20 feet wide, the channel was deep and swells ran through it, crashing against the rocks on either side and creating a current sucking back and forth along the sharp rock shelves jutting out of the water on either side. The rock pinnacle that rose in the middle of the bommie was just too inviting to allow the crashing waves and slippery rocks we would have to climb up deter us, so I dove in, followed closely by Shanna. I found a place where I could grip and pulled myself up out of the water with my arms on the other side, with a little help from a passing wave. I helped Shanna up and we walked over to the pinnacle.
Climbing vertical rocky faces barefoot is a great idea, especially when your feet are already as torn up as mine, with cuts and bruises all over them from previous adventures (My foot was still bleeding when I woke up this morning!). So I might have gotten a few more scratches. But I made it halfway up the pinnacle, which was a challenge due to the perfectly vertical nature of it and the crumbling rock that falls away as you put your weight on it. So about 5 metres up the column, I found a shelf to that had a great view and decided to stop there, because the next part looked a little too steep to climb barefoot, plus the cuts on my feet from a couple days before hurt pretty badly. We climbed down and paddled back across the channel. On the other side I had to use a strand of kelp like a rope to pull myself up onto the rocks.
I took Shanna down to the Koonyah store, near Tim's house in Blairgowrie. I had been there for a hot dog with Tim last weekend, so I decided I'd show off a little of my local knowledge. Cream cheese and mustard might not sound like the best combination of things to put on a hot dog, but I assure you, the Koonyah dog is truly scrumptious. Shanna was sooo stoked on it she went back inside to tell the lady running the store that it was the best hot dog she'd ever had and she was gonna tell everybody in America about it. I laughed.
We went back to school and then I drove Shanna to the airport for her flight back to Sydney. But schmeriously, we had a terrific weekend together. Quite an adventure. However, I need to catch up on sleep tonight as I found myself yawning a little too often in lecture this morning. So it's back to studying, and a whole two days until Easter Break.
