Day 4 – Jenolan Caves
The weather forecast for 30 Nov called for record highs in Sydney (42 C), with temperatures up in the mountains even expected to be in the upper-30s. Sounds like a great day to go into a cave! The drive to Jenolan is about 2 hours and change, and it’s certainly a handful. The main road into the Caves resort area is under construction, and it followed a very tortuous path. We did 2 different cave tours, and came away pretty impressed with the operation
(picture). My wife and I both like cave walks (we’ve done a fair number here in the US, and we’re planning to do a ‘wild cave’ tour (no pre-made trails, squeezing through tight spots, etc) at some point soon). If you’ve got a day to head up there, it’s definitely worth doing. That night after getting back to Leura, we headed back to the Three Sisters so I could get a
few night-time shots.
Jenolan Caves
Day 5 – To Canberra…
Once again, the geniuses who did all the roads for NSW reared their ugly heads. There’s no way to get from the M4 to anything heading south without a trip onto surface streets. Regardless, we made it to Canberra in about 4.5 hours along the ‘scenic’ Hume Hwy. Well, it’s more scenic than say, driving I-57 from Chicago to Memphis… We made our way into the city and decided to make our first stop at
Parliament House. It’s very interesting because of its relative newness (opened 1989?) versus all of the government buildings in, say, Washington DC. The House was in session that afternoon for Prime Minister’s questions (although without the PM, since he was at an ASEAN conference). It’s not too different from the Saturday Night Live skit that pokes light at the British Parliament, so it made for a good half-hour of entertainment and political orientation to Australia. Since a good deal of the building is underground, you can go up to the roof
below the flagpole to get some nice views of the rest of Canberra.
Parliament House
Lying on the grassy roof of Parliament House
After leaving Parliament, we wanted to head to the Mint, but we arrived 5 minutes before the 4pm closing. So, we retired to the hotel for the evening. I tried to figure out how cricket worked (with a Test match on), but was unsuccessful.
Day 6 – Canberra, then on to Thredbo…
We started our day grabbing a croissant at a nearby bakery, then heading over to the National Museum of Australia. As far as museums go, it was pretty good. Personally, I thought a few of the exhibits were a little too ‘conceptually high-minded’, but that’s just my opinion. YMMV. Overall, it was worth spending a morning checking everything out. We did walk around the grounds a little, since the weather was agreeable, with nice views across the lake. Next up, we crossed town to the Royal Australian Mint. My grandparents and my father-in-law are all coin buffs, so they’d have enjoyed this. We enjoyed the displays as well, saw the minting presses running in both the proof area and the circulating coins area, and availed ourselves of the gift shop to pick up souvenirs for the coin collectors back home.
My wife requested (and got) a stop at the Hyatt just down the street from Parliament House so she could check out the tea buffet they serve every afternoon. It was a bit more than we wanted to drop on tea and small sandwiches, though, so we opted not to partake. I’d seen a picture of Parliament house and Anzac Pde that I liked in the Lonely Planet book, so we drove over to the War Memorial to
take the same shot. I’d wanted to spend some time here, but I didn’t want to rush it, and we still had our drive south to Thredbo to contend with.
ANZAC Parade
Out in the parking lot, I programmed Thredbo into the trusty Jag’s navigation system. The expected routing was spit back out, with an expected travel time of 5:10. Five hours and ten minutes to go 210 km? I know MapQuest usually overestimates drive times by about 10% (of course, that’s usually about what I exceed the speed limit by in the US too), but that’s kind of ridiculous. After reviewing the manual, I think the Jag’s navigation system (and whereis.com.au) just assume certain speed limits (60 km/h and 30 km/h for typical ‘streets’) that don’t correspond to reality (mostly 100 km/h up to about 20km out of Thredbo). We made the trip in 3.25 hours with a grocery stop in Jindabyne. Our accommodation for the night was the Thredbo Alpine Lodge, which was nice, even if the off-season rates seemed to be about 15-20% higher than I though they should be for the room we had. Couldn’t argue with the location, though – right across the street from the chairlift.
Day 7 – The Top of Australia
The day didn’t get off to the greatest of starts – low, dense fog. There’s not much point in climbing a mountain if you can’t see anything. We chatted with a couple of the locals as we got breakfast that morning, who indicated that the morning fog usually lifts pretty quickly. This was a very easy hike – you take the chairlift from 1300m up to around 1900m, leaving the vertical gain to the summit of Kosciusko a nice easy 325m. To protect the alpine tundra, the hiking trail is actually an elevated steel-grate walkway. My wife and I have hiked a lot, but this was unique versus US hiking trails above timberline. It was a good day up on the summit, with temperatures around 5C and only moderate winds. As predicted, the skies were only partly cloudy and the views from up top were excellent.
(picture 1) (picture 2 - there's us!). Just for kicks and grins, I pulled out my cellphone and called home to say hello ‘from the top’, returning a favor my dad did when he called from the top of his first 14-er (14,000 ft+ summit) in the States. Amazingly, call quality was great – he said I sounded no worse than if I was on the cellphone back home. Naturally, the hike downhill was easy, although the steel decking was definitely harder on the knees than a conventional trail.
Ben and Marcie on top of Australia
Day 8 – Road Trip the First
Once again, I showed callous disregard for the travel times indicated by whereis.com.au and the Jag’s navigation system. Both predicted the drive from Thredbo to Apollo Bay (on the Great Ocean Rd) would be in excess of 14 hours. Once again, sadly mistaken. 9.5 hours. Many people would cringe at this sort of drive, but not me. Driving vacations in my family netted me 40 of the 50 US states, and my wife used to live in Memphis, a 9 hour drive from Chicago. It’s a long day and I’m certainly tired at the end, but it’s quite do-able. The drive down out of the mountains was quite scenic, and we were able to see a few emus and kangaroos as we made our way north towards Wodonga along the Murray River Hwy. There we rejoined the still-exciting Hume Hwy down to Melbourne, where the geniuses of Australian traffic planning struck again.
Engineer 1:
“Hey, let’s have the Hume end outside Melbourne without any direct freeway connections!”
Engineer 2: “Brilliant!”
That rant aside, we found our way to the Great Ocean Rd. All I can say about that drive is WOW. I’ve always liked the ocean, and being a Midwesterner, I don’t get to see it as often as I like. So, we both enjoyed the views winding along the coast as we drove to Apollo Bay. Our pad for the night was right across the street from the ocean, with a small patio looking down onto the beach. We opted to grab some takeaway and ate on the beach as the
sun set. (really, you should look at that picture!!) A great end to a long day…
Sunset over Apollo Bay, VIC
Day 9 – The Great Ocean Road
We got an early start down the road. Our first stop was at a short rainforest walk between Apollo Bay and Cape Otway that had some very interesting foliage…trees where there was room for a person to walk under the roots, more of the giant ferns we’d seen in the Blue Mountains, etc. Then we visited the Cape Otway lighthouse, which does have some nice views from the top looking
back towards Melbourne and
west to the Southern Ocean. On the return drive, we stopped and saw a group of koalas sleeping away the day in the
treetops. This satisfied my wife’s “trifecta” for wildlife in Australia (kangaroo, emu, koala).
Sleeping koala
After a quick lunch stop at a roadside café for a lunch pie, we made the obligatory stops along the coastline to see the
Twelve Apostles and the many other rock formations along the coast near Port Campbell
(picture 1) (picture 2) (picture 3). I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to trying to make my pictures look nice, so it was a bit of a feat to work around the hordes of people on bus tours shooting video footage so I could just get the shots without half of someone’s head in the frame. Looking at how some of the ocean shots turned out has convinced me of the benefit of always keeping a circular polarizer filter handy.
The Great Ocean Road (after a little cleaning in Photoshop, I've been selling this one, even!)
More of the Ocean Road
On the drive back to Apollo Bay, we stopped off at a couple of beaches to get a little more walking in, then grabbed takeaway and ate
by the beach as the sun set again. There’s something to be said for a beach with no one else there…
To be continued...Melbourne, Philip Island, another road trip, and Sydney...