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Author : sue_and_nathan Diary name : yearaway   25 Oct 2001 : Adelaide to Melbourne - Australia     The Great Ocean Road As we were flying over the spectacular Great Barrier Reef this afternoon we realised that, once again, it has been a while since we last wrote an entry. In the last three weeks we've done just so much - after all, Australia is just so big - and we've been doing our best to fit in as much as possible! But, doing so much has also meant very little time to write home. A few of you may remember that we left home only a couple of days before Sue's birthday. This meant that I didn't have any time to buy her a pressie (in my defence, we had just packed up a home AND got married!) So, on her birthday in Koh Samui in Thailand I had a cake delivered, took her out to the best restaurant in town and presented her with 'an experience' ticket which could be redeemed whenever she saw fit. Well, she cashed in half of her ticket for an Otwild Platypus Canoe Trip just a few days ago. It was another one of those early starts, after all platypus are nocturnal so you have to be up early to catch them before they go home to bed. So, we left our B+B at 5:30 with Bruce, our guide. We drove off into the Cape Otway State Reserve on our way stopping for a fat fluffy pedestrian on the road. At first we thought that it was a wombat, but then it climbed about a foot into the nearest tree and turned around to have a look at us - it was a fat, cuddly koala. There he sat staring at us for quite some time as we stared right on back! Bruce told us that he's never seen a koala on the ground like that and so the two of us decided that even even if the platypus didn't show up then the koala had made it well worth getting up so early for anyway. But, the platypus spotting was successful too. In fact, we watched one swimming on the surface of the lake before we even got into the kayak. All in all we saw about five of these amazing creatures - kind of like an otter, but with a bill and webbed feet. Do not fear though, Sue hasn't dumped Splash ,her otter in Devon, in favour of a platypus, although I reckon if she could have climbed into that tree to join the koala I may well have become a single man!! But, let me go back to the beginning of the Great Ocean Road in Adelaide where we left you last... Well, we spent a few days in Adelaide before driving East to Victor Harbour where we treated ourselves to a 4-poster spa room in a beachfront hotel (this travelling business can be real hard at times, as you may have noticed!) We'd actually stopped there in the hope of going out whale spotting, but we were told that we were too late as the last whale had passed through here about a month ago. So, we opted for a night walk out onto Granite Island to see a fairy penguin colony instead. We were two of a very small group who were crazy enough to go out in the cold, torrential rain to watch them coming home after a busy day fishing at sea. We were more than pleased to get soaked to see them though - they we real small and so noisy. As they emerged out of the sea they waited until there was a small group of them before they waddle in a very comical fashion back to their nests in the rocks. The next morning, after another long spa, we set off again to cover some more kilometres. Early afternoon we stopped in Kingston at a cafe that had a gigantic lobster outside. Larry the Lobster was his name and he is famous in these parts, although for what reason I'm not really sure! We thought it rather strange, but the Aussies didn't bat an eyelid at it - I mean, this is a 50 foot tall, bright red, fibre glass lobster AND they've given it a name!?! More kilometres and we jumped across the border from the state of South Australia to Victoria. There was nothing really to show that you'd changed states, no checkpoints or anything like that, but we did have to add half an hour to our watches. Now, this also struck us as a little odd - half an hour? What'll happen when we move to another state, perhaps they'll tell us to add ten minutes or maybe even seventeen? All this done, I'm sure, just to confuse the TV guides! The Great Ocean Road begins to follow the coast in Victoria. The road meanders along the cliffs awarding us with amazing views. There are numerous geological wonders along the way, the most famous being the Twelve Apostles. Twelve chunks of colourful rocks in the sea all slowly being eroded. We had heard an Aussie bloke earlier in the day refer to the seven apostles, but maybe he just got the disciples mixed up with a certain bunch of dwarves?! After a night in Apollo Bay we headed for Bendigo in the Goldfields. This had obviously once been a very prosperous town. All of the public buildings were great works of architecture, even the public toilets were amazingly elaborate! The reason for our detour to the Goldfields was to do some gold panning, but our trip out to the Central Deborah Goldmine proved to be a whole lot more interesting than that. We ended up hiring a guide called Bob who took the two of us 60 metres underground, along tunnels and up and down ladders - all kitted out in the full miners gear of overalls, hardhat and headlamp. I must say we really looked the part! We even got to drill a hole in the tunnel wall with the biggest noisiest drills you've ever set your eyes on! And then, to round our afternoon off we had a miner's lunch of cornish pasties and red wine in the tunnel (no doubt, this wasn't quite the luxury the average miner enjoyed!) When we surfaced we did a little gold panning, in the hope that perhaps we would come up trumps and find enough to finance a little extension on our trip, but all we found was fools gold. Australia, up to this point, had been just chock-a-block for us so we decided to slow down the pace a little and spend a few days in Melbourne. We rented an apartment right by the botanical gardens in the classy area of South Yarra. So, for five days all we did was eat, drink cappucinos in pavement cafes and laze around the botanical gardens. We were told that South Yarra is the place where all of the famous Aussies hang out and so we kept an eye out for Rolf Harris, Dame Edna and Emu as we stuffed our faces, but sadly didn't spot any of these megastars! Finally, before we headed East to Cairns, we spent a couple of days on Phillip Island just south of Melbourne. Phillip Island is famous for its penguins, which we gave a miss, and a giant earthworm museum built in the shape of an earthworm. The museum itself was a bit of a disappointment as all of the earthworms were under tonnes of mud and didn't dain to make an appearance, but the outing was redeemed by the giant walkthrough worms intestines complete with gurglings, groans and boxes you had to delve your hands into for the 'feel factor'!! The highlight of the island was yet another strange marsupial, an echidna. We took a walk out to Cape Woolamai and one of these fat prickly anteaters shuffled across our path. He hurried his pace a little when he saw us coming, but still kept his nose to the ground, snuffling for food, and eventually disappeared into a clump of bushes. My, Australia really is full of the weirdest things!!