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...