Tag: Mt Gambier

Great Ocean Road

It’s been a while since the last post so I’ll be putting some of our days together in a feeble attempt to catch up with the blog and get the narrative back on track. When I last left you, we were just finishing with the oddness of Mt. Gambier and heading out along the coast towards Melbourne.

Our target for this second day out of Adelaide was to get to Port Campbell, a 250km drive along the coastal route, but scheduled to take 3 hours, according to Google Maps.

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En route, we stopped first at Portland to see the Gannet Colony at Point Danger. Our journey over the next few days is partly characterized by detours to see birds, so get used to it.

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We generally combine these stops with a coffee, but this time we wanted to press on to our next stop: Port Fairy. This town was named in 1828 by the crew of the whaling ship, The Fairy. The reason we wanted to stop here was to try to catch a glimpse of a Short-tailed Shearwater. There is a colony of these birds in Port Fairy estimated to number over 30,000 so we reckoned we had a pretty good chance.

We were wrong. Shearwaters, of course, spend the whole day at sea fishing, returning to land only at sunset. So we had no chance of seeing one arriving there in the middle of a scorchingly hot day. Nevertheless, we had a pleasant walk around the Griffiths Island Reserve.

DSC_0523.JPG After our walk, we got back in the car to carry on towards Port Campbell. We were receiving regular updates on the mileage ahead from the Great Ocean Road signage.

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We knew we’d be getting to Port Campbell in good time to relax for the evening and see what the town had to offer. The rest of the journey was nice and straightforward and we checked into the Southern Ocean Motor Inn early in the afternoon.  This gave us a chance to play our instruments for a while. We’d been neglecting our practise a little recently so it was good to pick a couple of tunes again.

Early evening, we walked through the town, which didn’t take long, and picked out a place overlooking the beach where we had dinner. After dinner, we had a brief walk along the beach and admired the local male and female dragon boat clubs practising in the surf just offshore.

We had an early night since the following day we had our final, 300km drive to Melbourne ahead of us. We were up and out the door nice and early to get some miles under our belt but our first stop was just a short way down the road at the Twelve Apostles visitor centre. We wanted to get a look at these shoreline structures, carved by the elements and, sadly, now somewhat fewer than twelve.

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The day had started gloomy and overcast and by the time we got to the apostles, there was a steady drizzle falling, all of which served to make the view more dramatic. It also reduced the time I was willing to spend lingering there, despite Ishbel’s famed imperviousness to the elements. We compromised and wrapped up the visit once she had the shots that she wanted and we were once again on the Great Ocean Road.

The road itself is a lovely drive, winding its way along Victoria’s southern coastline and presenting spectacular views ahead and behind (weather permitting). The day brightened up as we ate up the miles although the nature of the road, carved as it was out of the rock faces of the coast, means that there is a constant program of repair and maintenance which necessarily slows progress on the drive.  The road is a remarkable testament to the people who built it. Ex-servicemen returned from the battlefields of World War 1 built the road between 1919 and 1932 as a monument to their fallen comrades. Today, it constitutes the world’s largest war memorial.

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Before getting to Melbourne, we stopped for a coffee in Geelong – a name I only knew previously as an AFL team, so it was interesting to see the town itself. After this, we made  the final, short press into Melbourne and settled in to our AirBnB. Our Great Ocean Road journey was over, and it was time to explore an Australian city neither of us had previously visited.

A tale of two lakes

We set off early from Adelaide on Monday morning on our eastward coastal journey to Melbourne. We had taken the direct route on our way across to Adelaide but we had decided to take our time on the way back. Our target for the day was to cover the 460km to Mount Gambier where we had booked a night at the Old Gaol. We were driving the coast road, so turned off the main road at Tailem Bend and made our first stop for breakfast at Meningie, on the shores of Lake Albert.

From there, we struck out for Robe driving along The Coorong, a long coastal lagoon. This route also took us past the Pink Lake – or one of Australia’s many pink lakes. The coloration is the result of…

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The lake was looking more dried out than pink when we visited but it certainly wasn’t blue.

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After this brief stop, we climbed back into the car and carried on to Robe. I’m glad that we ended up with a Mitsubishi for this long drive, as all of the controls were in the same place as the Outlander we have at home. I had spent a lot of time in South Africa switching on the windscreen wipers every time I wanted to indicate a turn, which resulted in a lot of annoying squeaks and a smeared windscreen.

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The drive to Robe was straightforward and we stopped here for a coffee and a wander around the town. It’s quite historic (for Australia) with many of the buildings over 100 years old. After Robe, we set off on the final leg of today’s journey to Mt Gambier.

Mt. Gambier is…odd. We visited two of its main tourist attractions and they were both odd. I found them simultaneously comforting and unsettling, which is a contradictory reaction but..they were odd.

First stop was the Blue Lake. I approached this with a lowered expectation after the faint pinkness of the Pink Lake earlier in the day. But this was different. This was BLUE.

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Despite the day being overcast, the lake was the kind of blue you get in a child’s paintbox. Apparently, it retains the blue colour during the summer months then from March to November reverts to the kind of steely grey colour we’re more used to seeing in British inland lakes.

After the startling discovery of the lake, we went down to put ourselves in gaol. The Old Mt Gambier Gaol was a working prison from 1866 all the way up to 1995. It spent some time as a halfway house before being redeveloped as a hotel. Ishbel and I have stayed in the Malmaison Oxford, which is also an old prison, but very luxurious with only a faint air of its previous use.

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Malmaison, Oxford

The reverse is true of Mount Gambier. Every part of it screams gaol. We had managed to book one of the two double rooms. There are only two of them because most cells are too small for a double bed.

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Cell 20, Old Mt Gambier Gaol

In Oxford, they had knocked cells together to create modern hotel room sizes. The reason that some of the Mt Gambier cells were bigger than others?

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We were in Cell 20. If you find yourself in this part of the world, get yourself into gaol.

We had a quiet evening in Mt Gambier, grabbing some fast Mexican food in town and drinking tea in the common room at the gaol before retiring for the evening. The next morning we were tackling the 250km drive to Port Campbell and the start of the Great Ocean Road itself.  But before we left Mt Gambier, there was another attraction we wanted to see. One that looked…odd.

The Umpherston Sinkhole just doesn’t seem like it should exist. It is a sinkhole caused by erosion of the porous limestone that is a feature of the area’s geology. But, in Victorian times, a Mr. Umpherston decided to turn it into a feature garden. And although it fell into disrepair in the middle of the 20th century, it was renovated by volunteers a couple of decades ago and has regained its innate strangeness.

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It’s difficult to convey the scale of this place, which is why I am sitting on the bench in the distance. This thing is huge. And lovely. But very strange.