adelaide - melbourne

Hi everybody.

Here is another part of my Australian journal. It covers the ride from Adelaide to Melbourne. In between I visited Kangaroo Island, Coorong NP, Grampians NP and the great ocean road.

On friday, december 23rd, I left Adelaide. I wanted to catch the ferry to Kangaroo Island that evening. It promised to be a long ride of 130km with some hills and in almost 30gr. I make it a little bit harder by taking the wrong way and so I add another 10km. This dispite the good map my host had drawn for me. Ali thank you very much for that. This way was very scenic but also hilly just like you said.

I made it with even an hour to spare. On the ferry I meet Stanley, a cyclist from Taiwan. It is nice to share some stories. He takes a restday on Kangaroo Island so the next morning we say our goodbyes.

I travel slowly so I can phone home on christmasday in the last village before the Flinders Chase National park at the western end of the island. It is almost midnight when I call but back home the party is not started. My mother is very pleased with it.

The next day I start my 3 day hike in Flinders Chase NP. Once very known for its beautiful forest with a lot of wildlife especially koala's. Unfortunally the forest was destroyed by a fire in 2007 or so. No all the vegetation is about the same age and height. I did not see one single koala. I guess because they move slowly they are very vulnerable for fire.

The hike is unique to me because it is my first really bush hiking : no trail just find your own path. It is basiccally following the coast. When there is a peninsula I decide to take a shortcut. It turns out to be a bad decision. Soon the plants are that big I have to push with my whole bodyweight to get through. I soon give up and go back to the coast orientating myself on the sun. Here at noon the sun is in the north and not in the south so I go in the wrong directions. I see my mistake and find the right way but this means that after 5 hours of hiking I am 1 km further than where I left the coast. I can assure you it was a hard kilometer.

I reach the campsite when it is getting dark so I have to camp here. I need to hitchhike out here and that want go in the dark.
There is very little traffic and it takes me 2 hours to get a ride. My looks did not help in this situation. I refuse to shave because as a nurse I have to do all the time back home. So a guy with a very rough beard and dirthy from hiking (and smelling) has to have some patience. At the rangerstation the ranger was about to look for me but I met him just before she leaves.
The coastline is very beautiful with high cliffs and than beaches. I do enjoy that.
On the other side of the island I see a colony of New Sealand seales and also pinguins. They escaped the fire and are thriving. It is nice to watch them.

It is very hot with some days reaching 40gr and here I encounter some nice Australian hospitality. A car stops and gives me a very COLD can of beer. The beer itself is not so good (sorry) but the fact that is COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD...........

Every now and than I experience my English is not yet perfect. On a campsite while I am coocking pasta I see that I do NOT have pasta sause with me but just tomata sauce. It is too late to go shopping so that was my meal that evening. Not so good.
But the sunset made up for that.
On new years eve I take the ferry back to the mainland and camp near the lighthouse. I try to stay awake but I am to tired. I sleep before midnight. I did think there would not be much fireworks anyway because of the risk of fire. Back home it would be huge.

On monday, january 2nd, the heatwave stops but the change comes with very strong Northern winds. I am cycling north but have to quit after an hour. For the next 5 hours I am doing nothing just waiting on a small rest area. In the late afternoon I can cycle again and enjoy it. I am cycling around Lake Alexandria to get to the Coorong NP. The views are good and it is just rolling country side with almost no traffic. Almost every day ends in taking a swim in the lake or ocean. One evening while still in the water in the dark a pelican swims slowly by less than 10m from me.
In the moonlight it is a magnificent experience.

The Coorong NP is a 100km long lagoon between the ocean and land. It is very fertile land with a lot of wildlife so once inhabited with a large Aboriginal community.
They have a museum and culture centre here. I visit it and meet an older male volunteer. We get talking and it last for hours. Having coffee on the veranda.
He tells about his walkabouts, his 10years in the navy and service in Vietnam for a country that also took several of his brothers and sisters away to give them a white traditional education. This is the so called lost generation. He found some of them back but does not have a real connection with them. He could stay with his parents and had the aboriginal upbringing. His brothers and sisters do not understand that culture and he does not like their lifestyle.
I learn too that Aboriginal still have a life-average that is 15 years less than whites. There is also one of the highest level of death of infants in the world. Levels which are like the ones in countries as Somalia and Ethiopia.
After World war 2 a lot of veterans did get some land from the goverment to build farms and so on. In this way more remote areas were settled. But aboriginal veterans were excluded from this benefit. Even when land of their old missions was divided they did get nothing. The missions seems to be a polite term for reservations. The aboriginals were forced to move here and were obligated to act like Europeans. Clothing and religion included. The pictures of this are very moving.
My friend also fears that his culture will be lost soon because not many elders still know it and they are now dying of old age.

( one small note : the things I just wrote are confirmed by an aboriginal centre in the Grampians. Similar stories but they were from an other language group. Aboriginals look at them selves as part of a language group and not a tribe. The term Aboriginal is an European term but I have not found another term to use)

Diane Bell wrote about this language group and I hope to be able to find a book about her. Archie Rock also made an protest song about the lost generation. " they took 'm away"
So far it is the only aboriginal protest song ever recorded in English.
All of this makes a very deep impression on me.



After this I cycle to the Grampians NP. I do some hiking here. Go to Mount Difficult but Australians do use the term mount very loosely. It is a hill of 808m high. I do some more hiking including a 2 day hike but because of extended storm damage of last year multiday hiking is limited to only 1 trail.
The grampians are also known for aboriginal rock paintings. Most of them are protected and not open for tourists but I am aloud to visit two places. Childrens hands painted in red and human and animal figures in white. Very basic designs not special to see till you realised they are 25 000 to 30 000 years old. All the knowledge around is lost. So nobody knows if they are part of a religious site or just drawnings painted when somebody was bored. It is a shame but that is the way it is.

Most of the roads here are gravel roads and very bad. More spooks break and I am obligated to cycle to the nearest bikeshop. Still 40km away and so I loose a day with this.

Than I cycle back to the coast to follow the great ocean road into Melbourne. It is a scenic road along a coast made of sandstone rock. Sometimes I am 200m above sealevel and than only 10m. Great views. It is also a region with temperate rainforest. A great place to camp in.
Itis high season now so a lot of traffic which spoils it a bit but it also means you meet a lot of other people. I have a nice and long conversations with 3 girls on a road trip from Sydney to Alice Springs to here. They drove 6000km and are pritty much beat by the heat and broke by the high gasprices. When I tell them I also did 6000km on my bike they complain less. Claire, Heidi, Gillian I really enjoyed your company and stil a bit sorry that the meet up in Melbourne did not work out.

Later they tell me that on the very hot next day they were looking for me to give me a cold bottle of water from the fridge. Unfortunally we did not see each other. I took some long breaks.
Sandstone is a soft stone which erodes easily and so you can see rochs in all kind of shapes. It is great to see. There are also little islands. Some are called the 12 apostels. Only there are only 7 or 8 left. The others eroded away.

Than I reach Melbourne but I will tell about that and Tasmania in the next part.

greetings.

nico