Geelong, Melbourne to Tasmania

The southern half of Australia has been pretty impressive so far, and Melbourne and Tasmania haven't let down this half of the country. The weather has been absolutely shit though...

 We stayed in Geelong a couple of days, this was a really nice town, and reminded me a lot of Newcastle, except way colder. We had a good time there, and visited the Australian wool museum. That sounds really boring, but it was actually really really cool, and the people running it were really friendly.

 Then we hit Melbourne for about 4 days, which was fantastic. We blew heaps of money on food and clothes, that city has a lot to offer, public transport is excellent there and it has a great feel to it. Definitely in my top 3 favourite capital cities.

 After that we headed over to Tasmania on the Spirit of Tasmania car ferry. The ferry ride surprised me a bit, you got a nice room with nice beds, a shower, there were 2 bars a games room and lounges and a theaterette. It was actually really nice, way better than flying over.

 We're in Tasmania now, and we've spent most of our time at Pirate Bay with family, which is on the south east of the island on the Tasman peninsula. We've also done some tourist things in Hobart as well (headed to Mona and the local markets and shops and junk), but it's the national parks around Tasmania we're really interested in. We managed to paddle out to a local fur seal colony on the Tasman peninsula off fortesque bay, this was a great spot to visit. It's not advertised at all but is definitely worth doing. You can either kayak out from fortesque bay, or you can walk out to cape hauy which is a 2 hr walk and then at the end scramble down the cliffs and swim the narrow channel over to the seals if you don't have a kayak. Either way its definitely worth doing, swimming with seals is becoming one of my favourite things to do, they have so much energy its contagious.

 The freezing cold city of Hobart from above - the temperature reached 25 degrees and that was meant to be a warm day. This is in summer.... That's just atrocious weather

Fat car at the Mona art gallery - There were so many cool artworks in there but my camera ran out of battery after this photo (I don't learn). It was a really cool (and disturbing) place. Some of the artworks just looked like regular junk though

 Some tasmanian devils fighting in the Tasman devil park. This was an excellent place to visit, Tasmanian devils were so funny, they'd be fighting one minute, then sleeping the next. Funniest animals ever.

 Tasmanian Devil - It looks ferocious but its actually yawning

 Tasmanian Devils eating dead wallaby - They are carrion eaters, and they can eat a big chunk of meat and bones amazingly quickly. It was pretty impressive

 A live wallaby getting pats from Rachael - Very cute animal. I don't know why you can't have wallaby's as pets in Australia, if you could then maybe all the feral cats and dogs wouldn't be such a problem. You can't really get feral wallabies running around.

 Tawny Frogmouth

Another Tasmanian devil (I went a bit crazy on devil photo's, they were just hilarious animals)

Box fish - We went for an obligatory scuba dive with eaglehawk dive centre, I'm liking scuba diving less and less every time I go out.

Leafy sea dragon with a bunch of eggs - I think the female keeps the eggs, but then the male keeps the kids maybe? something like that

Southern rock lobster (they are still called crayfish in Tasmania) - some would argue the best tasting lobster in the world

Spotted quolls at the tasmanian devil park - very funny animals, the keeper guy went in to feed them and one jumped right up to his hand and bit him. He was not impressed.

Pirate Bay on the Tasman Peninsula

Pirate skull - I'm not sure if this is why pirate bay is called pirate bay, the scuba guy had never heard of this, but the rocks in the cliff look just like a giant skull.

If you went in, there was a bit of a blowhole under the chin which would probably be pretty cool in a big swell.

Fur seal showing off off of fortesque bay, There were some scuba jerks swimming around at the seal colony and the seals were doing laps around them, they were so slow in all their scuba gear. It was a good feeling swimming around them just snorkeling.

 Freediving is definitely the way to see seals, they are really fast and there is no way you could keep up with all the gear you have to wear to scuba dive.

Sea cliffs - At the end of the cliffs you can see two small rocks out at sea, in between the last two rocks is where the seal colony is.

Kayaking out to the fur seal colony

Southern Stargazer - apparently we were lucky to see this fish when we went scuba diving, I'm very glad we got to see one, you don't get them up north. Weird looking fish.

 

 

 

 Fur seal scratching
 

Thats everything so far, as far as the lemon is concerned we haven't had any new problems, I don't want to say it, but maybe the old girl has stopped breaking down (famous last words there...) Tasmania is pretty hilly and winding so we've been going really slowly, and really pissing off the locals...

 Otherwise everything is going fine, we're parked at the local boat club at the moment, it's an interesting place, full of a lot of interesting salty characters. They are all happy for us to park here as long as we want so we'll probably park here for a while as a base while we see the rest of Tasmania.

Grampians to Geelong

  We were having a good time in South Australia, the spearfishing and surfing is terrible, but the people are really nice, and the place has a pretty good vibe. That has changed a bit since hitting victoria, I think its mainly just the shock of being around people (mainly other tourists) all the time but its not the same as South Australia.

 Having said that though we've seen some pretty nice spots since crossing the border, even though we've had to share them with the swathes of foreign tourists who come to travel along the great ocean road.

 Since leaving Portland we headed to Cape Bridgewater to see Australia's largest fur seal colony. It was very nice watching the seals play around, we sat there a long time watching them. I don't know what it is but I really like seals. Maybe it's a spearfishing type camaraderie, I was reading a blog a while back about a man who found a seal pup and brought it up and used to take it spearfishing with him. That would be the best pet.

 Anyway, there was no swimming with seals here, the tourist info lady said that you could not swim with the seals as there was no way to get to the colony from the cliffs, after getting there though I wish we'd brought our gear along, you could have walked around the bottom of the headland along the rocks and swam out there.
 Next time maybe. There's always more seals in Tasmania too.

The largest mainland seal colony in Australia. You have to look closely though. These seals are all the rejects from island colonies which are no longer young enough to keep up with the fast pace of island seals, they just come out here to retire and don't breed anymore.

 Hanging out next to the petrified forest - Turns out these are just limestone formations and not trees, they look pretty cool just the same

From Portland we headed to the Grampian mountain ranges. These are a lot like the Blue Mountains in NSW, they look pretty similar, and it rains all the time. It did not stop raining while we were there, we did some of the walks, but after four days we cut our losses and left the Grampians not having done half of what we originally meant to do.

 I wasn't too upset really, growing up in the Blue Mountains I think I've had my fill of mountain views already. (Plus the blue mountains are way better). It was pretty expensive to stay in the park too. All the national parks in Victoria are really expensive to camp in. (I really hate Victoria, it is the worst state).

 Looking out on Grand Canyon gorge in the Grampians. A beautiful spot.

Rachael Standing at the Pinnacle lookout in the Grampians

Kangaroos and Emu's grazing in the Grampians. It's unusual to see kangaroos and emu's eating together at the same time but they got along fine.

Feeding Sulphur Crested Cockatoos outside the bus in the Grampians. When we got up in the morning the birds were looking at us really expectantly, so I got some of my Aldi balance right cereal out for them and they loved it. They liked it so much they drew blood on me and Rachael, one even bit me in the back when I wasn't watching it, for no good reason.

 After the Grampians we headed past the Pinnacles into Cape Otway. A guy we met in the Grampians told us you could see a lot of Koalas in there so we thought we'd give it a shot.

 It turns out they are there in plague numbers. They even have to fence them off the trees, there are sections of eucalypt which are stripped bare and are dead from all the koalas. I don't know what their natural predators are, but they aren't there anymore. It made for some good photo's though.

 I also had a crack at spearfishing around the cape, it looked pretty promising from above, but it was totally barren under water. It seems like the diving all along the south coast is completely barren. I hope this isn't a sign of what Tasmania is like.

 Some of the Pinnacles on the great ocean road - They were really impressive, but I have never seen so many tourists before in my life.

 Posing by the pinnacles

Shipwreck beach - This is the site of two shipwrecks, the anchors and a few other parts are still lying on the rocks

 

 Koala up a tree on the way out to the beach - This was one of about thirty we saw on a track out to the beach, but it was in an easy to climb tree and so had to suffer the usual harassment. It was very placid for a wild animal (I'm glad because its claws look like they could scratch pretty badly)

 Koala sleeping like a drunk bogan

 

Koala proofed trees at the caravan park. This Koala didn't succeed in getting up to one of the few trees left with all its leaves on it (it was leaving its old tree after a domestic dispute). There were a lot of trees with barriers which had a fat koala sitting up in them which had somehow gotten past the iron ring.

Some rainforest walk in the Otway national park

Thats about everything so far. We're now in Geelong, we're gonna check the town out and then head to Melbourne and on to Tasmania. The trip is quickly coming to an end which is scary, I'm not sure either of us are ready for reality yet...

 As far as the lemon is concerned she is going great, after checking whether the bus was using too much fuel it turns out it was. I checked all the spark plugs, one of them had corroded at the tip, and had some carbon deposits along the side (I should have taken a photo, as it was pretty bad looking) which looked like it was probably not making a spark, I replaced all the plugs and she is running really well again. The old girl was feeling a bit gutless on hills, but now she's the same as ever, and less fuel inefficient which is nice. It's really nice when things are an easy fix, which is more often than not with the bus these days.

 The bike however is another story. After cleaning out the carburetor I thought I'd fixed the blown head gasket issue, but after riding over some pretty steep hills in the Otway National park the new head gasket has shown signs its about to go as well. I thought again I had found the problem with a missing bolt on the spark arrester, which was maybe causing a loss in back pressure in the exhaust system (making the mixture too lean), but no dice there.
 So, I figure it could be a problem with oil delivery around the head, causing it to overheat, or it could be the carburetor making the mix too lean. Tomorrow I'm going to run it for a while then check through a valve screw to see if there is oil getting through to the crank case, and I'm also just going to buy some new jets for the carby.
 After that, who knows what the problem could be...

Fleurieu Peninsula to Portland

 We've been cruising along the coast the last week or so and life, as usual, has been pretty spot on perfect. We headed from Adelaide down the Fleurieu peninsula across a car ferry and into the coorong national park then down the coast from there until we crossed the SA border into Victoria.

 We've spent most of our time at the beach, I've been attempting to spearfish at the various spots down the coast. They've been a bit rubbish though, it seems like all south Australias water is shallow and sandy, and only really good for trolling along for flatheads (which I've been doing). It is also FREEZING COLD.

On our way down the coast we took a brief detour inland to visit mount Gambier. The original idea behind this trip was firstly to have an awesome holiday, but also to scope out potential paradises to move to in the country in the future.
 Mount Gambier is one of those I reckon, it's near the coast and has some really cool stuff around it. The whole town is built on a network of limestone caves (only discovered relatively recently). There are a couple of sinkholes in the town, where caves have collapsed and in these they've planted some beautiful gardens. Also at the top of mount gambier in the volcanic hollow there are some beautiful lakes. The nicest one (blue lake) is also the towns drinking water supply. The only problem with mount Gambier is it is way too cold...

 Nearby there are also a few limestone 'cave in' ponds with crystal clear (and freezing) water you can snorkel in.

 Here's some photo's;

 

 Horse and cart on the bridge out to granite island at victor harbour. There's a penguin colony out at the island, and for $6 you can visit the rescue penguins on the island which are pretty cool. What was more interesting than the penguins though was the volunteer tour lady, she spelled out all the penguins personalities and behaviour and went into which penguins had cheated on their husbands and gone off to live in other burrows etc... She was very funny, it was a great thing to do when you retire. She was spot on about the penguins too.

Robe obelisk and headland - A very nice town

Umpherston Sinkhole Mount Gambier - Originally made into a garden by a rich man in the 1900's it was left to grow over after he died, the nearby sawmill's social club gardened it back into this and it looks amazing. If you sit here in the evening possums will come out and eat fruit out of your hand.

 Caves under Mount Gambier township. We took the guided tour of the caves, it was so bad, there were only two caves you could walk into, the rest were underwater, and they were lame, but not as bad as the tour guy who talked like he was reading off a sheet of paper the whole time. It was depressing listening to him. There were some Chinese tourists with us on the tour, I was embarrassed to be Australian.

 Rachael on Ewens Pond - I only managed to squeeze off a couple of photo's before the camera ran out of battery, it was a nice spot, but freezing.

 

 Piccaninnie Pond - You wouldn't think it, but under the surface here is a chasm in the limestone which goes down 135 metres!!!! It just looks like a little pond. It was very very cool. (but freezing). During the snorkel there were some cool birds diving under and swimming down pretty deep, they were impressive to watch.

Here's another shot of Rachael over Piccaninnie Pond this time. I took my depth gauge with me to snorkel this and see how far down I could get. This shot was at about 15 metres deep, I managed to get down to 24.5 metres, and I'm pretty sure I could have got up near 30, but it was too scary going down into the chasm, in fresh water you sink really easily, and after about 15 metres you start falling really fast. That coupled with the fact that the bottom is another 120 metres down I didn't want to take any risks and push too hard. It also started to get pretty dark further in and I didn't bring a dive light. It was spooky going into the chasm, but very cool.

Freediving into the abyss at picaninnie ponds - Rachael tried getting a shot deeper but there's not enough light

Coming back out of the chasm

That is everything. Right now we're in Portland, which is a nice town in victoria (victoria's first town apparently) tomorrow we're gonna head out to the largest fur seal colony in Australia and to a petrified forest, and I'm gonna spear fish an old shipwreck which is just off the coast (if I can find it).

 As far as the lemon is concerned, she's ripping as always. I get the feeling we're using more gas than normal, so we're writing down the K's till the next fill, it might just be that it's hilly country and we're making a lot of detours. We'll see.

 As far as the bike is concerned the pre-ignition problem is finally solved. I cleaned the carburetor out including the jet needle and now it is running quite rich. I think maybe something was clogging the jet needle and it wasn't getting enough fuel. It's running fine now, thank god, I didn't want to have to buy a third bike..

South Australia

 So we've done a lot, and not updated the blog at all. The usual really....

 There is way too much to write about, we've crossed the Nullarbor, which was a pleasant drive, we went down the Eyre peninsula and then headed up to the Flinders Ranges, which were AMAZING, then down to Adelaide for a few days, which is a really nice city.

 Here's our trip so far summarised in photo form...

The trip across the Nullarbor - on the way we stopped at Eucla, there was an old abandoned telegraph station there which had to be abandoned because of all the sand building up and burying it.

 This was because of the rabbit plague back then. Rabbits don't seem like a massive issue now, but I think back then they came through in plague numbers and ate all the small plants causing winds to bury this place 

Blue Swimmer crab from the Eyre Peninsula - There are thousands of them - the Eyre isn't very good for spearfishing, it is just sandy shallows, I did spear a flathead after trolling along the sand for ages, but thats all you'll get around there. Prawning at night was ok though and I got this crab as well on an evening prawning.

 On the way through the flinders ranges we passed through a town called Hawker. There there's an artist who has painted a massive panorama of the Wilpena Pound mountains. It was amazing, almost as good as the real thing, it took him 4000 hours (13 months) to paint the massive circular picture, it was in a special room and you had to go up stairs to a viewing platform to see it. you can read about it at www.wilpenapanorama.com/

When we got to Flinders Ranges National Park we took the longer (9 hour apparently) walk to the Saint Mary's peak summit. It took 6 hours all up and the view was amazing. The olympus didn't do it justice at all though, so here's an aerial photo of wilpena pound. The highest bit is Saint Mary's peak. The mountain range here was a 'pound' which worked to keep sheep in for a farm which was in there. It was so cool

 

Mother Emu taking the kids for a walk - In the background are the beautiful Flinders Ranges - There were more emu's in the Flinders ranges than I've seen anywhere else. You literally couldn't walk or drive more than 2Km without seeing another group of emu's. We almost hit one in the bus which ran out in front of us from some bushes. Luckily the new brakes are bonza so we (just) missed it. The crockery and crap inside the bus wasn't too happy about it though

 Rachael and I after walking up Saint Mary's Peak, It was an amazing 360 degree view but too big for a camera

 Dune Sliding using a chopping board - It was the only flat thing we had, It didn't work at all... I can't even remember where that was...

Tumby Bay horse and cart ride. This is a $10 horse and cart ride which goes for about an hour. It was so goddam boring, the old guy doing it just went around town pointing out houses of people he knew. So crap... I want my $10 back

 Yellow footed rock wallaby in the Flinders ranges - I really wanted to see one of these, and we got lucky on a walk outside of the Flinders National park. These are cool wallabies, if you zoom in you can see the tail has a great tiger stripe thing going on

Some Gorge Somewhere

Adelaide Bus network - I don't know if I haven't been catching enough buses in cities but I thought this was way cool, a lot of the buses in Adelaide have little wheels coming out the sides from their front wheels. This lets them drive up onto bus tracks which go along for ages and steer the bus inside the little concrete gutter thing. They scream along these and once they get where they want to be they can just cruise off a ramp and drive around the city like a normal bus.

Thats pretty brief, but whatever.

 As far as the lemon is concerned there was a mystery creature eating holes in our fruit and vegetables. Rachael was adamant it was a bug or something, I was certain it was a mouse. After setting a mouse trap it only took a few hours to catch the culprit.

 I have no idea how it got in, it must have climbed up one of the wheels... It's good we got it though, they can destroy your wiring if you don't catch them soon.

  Otherwise the bus is great as usual, just a few stone chips which I've had to spray paint over, otherwise its great, the new muffler has made it a lot quieter which is nice.

 The bike on the other hand needed a new head gasket. After replacing the head gasket it is still making a tapping/ticking noise when the engine warms up. I was hoping it was just the tappets, but this is a classic sign of preignition, which will destroy another head gasket if we don't fix it soon. I'm fairly certain now that it's not due to the mix being too lean (I've made it as rich as possible and it still makes the noise), so Its either there's some carbon deposits in the engine causing a second spark, or maybe oil isn't flowing around the engine properly (blocked somewhere) and it is getting too hot for this reason. I'll try cleaning the air filter, and spraying carbon cleanser junk in while its running and see if that helps...