Our Great road trip Tasmania and the GOR

Peter and I are back home, Louie has been reunited with Peter and is constantly bringing him toys to be thrown. He was extremely well looked after by Rachael and David Ouwejan who gained a new addition to the family while Louie was there ( little Jeremy John).

We had a great trip – Tasmania was cold but it didn’t rain when we were actually travelling and we had some beautiful clear days. Didn’t hit any of the wildlife, although travelling near dusk was a bit scary – wallabies along the side of the road quite often, didn’t sight a Tasmanian Devil in the wild but did get to see a few in a Conservation park, beautiful white sand up the East coast especially at the Bay of Fires, deserted beaches except for the odd person walking a dog, magnificent pink granite outcrops and bluffs,

lovely old stone churches and buildings around every corner, beautiful little Fairy penguins as close as two feet on a freezing cold night,

and down in the south west of Tasmania were snow capped mountains, rainforest as good as New Zealand, Mining devastation the likes of which I had never seen before, magnificent gums – the tallest and straightest I had seen, serene mountain lakes and a really wide variety of scenery.

Adelaide was freezing the day we landed, worst day they had had in three or four years with lots of much needed rain. But it gradually cleared up. I had a couple of good visits to universities while Peter drove up through the Barossa and took photos of the Jacobs Creek winery for proof. After a couple of major catch up sessions with Shirley and Gio ( my cousin and her partner) we drove up to Moonta on the Yorke peninsula to see my other favourite cousin Barry who is still a great pianist. Moonta is part of the “Cornish triangle” where tin mining occurred in the late 19th century ( there is still subsidence from underground tunnels in the area) and the whole Yorke peninsula is acres and acres of flat barley fields – they had had enough rain to get it sprouting, so I hope they get some more rain in time to make it really grow.
We then set off to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road – with the first stop being the mouth of the Murray River to see first hand the catastrophic effects of drought and irrigation run amuck on the upper reaches of the Murray Darling river systems.

Everything we read about was there – the river was hardly flowing and the magnificent fresh water lakes where the Murray meets the sea looked like the tide was out. Really sad. I had heard so much from my mother about the area known as the Coorong, a 58km long freshwater lagoon with a completely unique ecosystem. I wished I had seen it in its prime. But further around, the Great Ocean Road lived up to its name and the rock formations were majestic with beautiful golden beaches.

We watched three crazy Norwegians swim in the Great Southern Ocean, saw a whale from the cliff top, magnificently plumed emus, grass that was much greener than I had ever seen in Australia (well yes it is the middle of winter – what did I expect), and eventually arrived in Melbourne happy that we had fulfilled another of our – “must go there one day” road trips.