I came down from the mountains smelling like a rutting goat, not having had a shower in over a week whilst engaging in sweat inducing exercise. One of the first towns that you come across when driving south is Port Augusta. When Matthew Flinders first came exploring this part of the world he decided to take a trip in a rowboat and see how far north he could get. He soon got stuck in the mud of Port Augusta, and they have a small monument where he was forced to spend the night. I don’t think that very many interesting towns have a similar creation story, and Port Augusta is no exception. The factories chuff away on the outskirts and trucks barge through the centre 24 hours a day. I have proof of this because I got a cheap hotel room for the night, mainly to clean my stinking skin, and it was the least restful night of my trip. It reminded me a little bit of the hostel in Rome, which was located next to a non-stop road. Going to sleep to traffic noise, and then being woken by it in the morning, is not very restful, and I continued my journey wearier but cleaner. The main reason that I stayed in Port Augusta was sentimental. It is the place of my Grandfather’s birth and I wanted to have something to talk to him about when I saw him.
Adelaide has never been on the list of places that I want to visit, and it’s not a particularly hard list to get on, but I thought that since I was in the area I might as well have a look. It reminded me of Melbourne, but smaller. It has a river, a hospital and a cricket oval, more than that I cannot say. The afternoon that I spent there didn’t distinguish itself in any way. I’m sure that if you know people there, or if you spent a couple of weeks there, Adelaide’s flavour would show itself, but I remain hazy about the character of the city and couldn’t even tell you whether I liked it or not.
I have firmer opinions about the Barossa valley, one of Australia’s main wine producing regions, not because I sampled any wine while I was there, for some reason my tastebuds rebelled at the very thought, but because any place that has wine producing vines as far as the eye can see holds a special place in my affections. I spent the night parked at the base of a small hill, the top of which supports the Seppeltsfield family mausoleum, a Roman looking structure which is unfortunately not open to the public, but which shows commendable dedication to be born and dying on the land. The next day I drove north a little way to the Clare valley, another notable wine producing region, where I once again did not imbibe the bacchic bounty, but it was a lovely drive, with the rolling green hills and the happy cows on them reminding me off England.
Despite the good scenery I felt a sudden desire to leave South Australia. These moods come on me now and then, quite often resulting in international travel, but unfortunately for my car and thankfully for my bank balance, I could simply drive for a while to get some different scenery. I’m probably going to sound like Mr Fussy Pants, but I didn’t see a lot in the south east coast of South Australia to get excited about. I can tell you where to get some good fish and chips in Kingston, but that experience was soiled by the huge amount of seaweed extending 50 metres from the shore. It looked like the sea had become sick and vomited everywhere. Mount Gambier is the largest city in the region, and is located inland. It would be extremely dull if not for the Blue lake, which is housed in the crater of an extinct volcano, and really is an attractive blue.
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I like lighthouses. In fact, if I had been around before they became automated I would have thrown my hat in the ring for a light keeper position, despite the privation. I love the idea of sitting underneath a giant light that is keeping ships safe from peril while I peruse some absorbing reading material with a purring cat in my lap and some shag slow burning in my pipe. No distractions apart from the occasional foggy morning, or a busy time rescuing survivors, but that would just break up the routine. It’s with no small measure of curiosity that I look at lighthouses and the surrounding countryside and imagine that I’m the only person for miles around.
This is why I especially liked the area around Cape Nelson lighthouse, near Portland. I went for a walk through the dense scrub that grows around the cliff, keeping you hemmed in and enclosed until you burst into the open with the sky stretching overhead and the sea churning far below beneath sheer, smooth cliffs. You can walk along a path next to the cliff and imagine that you’re the first person ever to be here. The sea spray floated up from the sea and the wind blew it over the land, making it look like a fine fog.
I spent the night in a sheltered spot, protected from the winds but not from the roaming lighthouse light, which lit the sky like flashes of lightning at annoying intervals. I would have trouble getting to sleep in an isolation tank, so this spot was no good at all. I crawled out of my sleeping bag and drove, with bare feet and wearing nothing more than a pair of underpants and a grumpy expression, far enough away from the lighthouse for it not to be a distraction. I crawled back into my sleeping bag and lay there while the gale force winds rocked my car from side to side and the squalls hurled rain against the windows. I quite enjoyed it at first. Let the winds do their worst, I thought smugly to myself from the comfortable warmth of my sleeping bag, but I discovered that it’s not easy to get to sleep when it feels like you will soon be blown off a cliff. So I crawled out of my sleeping bag and with bare feet, and wearing nothing but a pair of underpants and a sleepy expression, I drove back along the narrow coastal road as the vegetation clung grimly to the soil, until I arrived back at my original parking spot, by which stage the flashing didn’t seem so bad and my eyes welded themselves shut against the tempestuous night.
The tourist coast starts once you get past Warnambool and start the Great Ocean Road drive. I had always wanted to tackle this road on a motorcycle, or failing that a fast car, failing that a decent car, failing that the car that I have. The Great Ocean Road rambles around the Victorian coastline and you soon come to one of the many cliffside attractions. The rock along this part is easily eroded by the constant barrage of the Southern Ocean, resulting in strange rock formations that have been given cute names such as London Bridge, The Arch, The Grotto, and most famously, the 12 Apostles. I quite liked them all but I was turned off the experience by the overwhelmingly touristy feeling I got from getting out of my car with my camera, thinking ‘Ooh, there’s an interesting rock’, taking a picture, then getting back in my car, driving two minutes down the road, and repeating the whole process. Maybe it was the helicopter taking people on scenic rides that pissed me off, or maybe I wanted to walk along the crumbling cliffs with the danger of falling into the frothing surf below, rather than walking along carefully manicured paths while being warned about the danger.
It wasn’t only the touristy nature of it all that put me off. I’ve been to plenty of places that have been crawling with tourists yet still maintained an impressive aura. I think that the 12 apostles simply failed to live up to the hype. A place like the Grand Canyon can still knock your socks off, despite you knowing exactly what’s coming. The 12 Apostles got no such reaction from me, they just looked like pillars of rock standing in the water, which is exactly what they are, so I wasn’t surprised or amazed, which is the reaction I was looking for. Besides all that, I only counted ten of them. Perhaps a couple of them sank into the sea under the weight of their own mediocrity. The way the whole experience had been carefully sanitised and controlled I was surprised that they hadn’t taken the next logical step and turned the apostles into a multimedia extravaganza, perhaps with rejected pop idols doing dance routines on them.
Thankfully, further down the road, around a couple of bends, the landscape changes dramatically. From barren hilly cliffs you enter lush forest with tree ferns and a steep winding road. It was on this road that I had a driving experience similar to a religious ecstatic moment. If you floated up to heaven and said ‘Hey God, let’s go for a drive’, he would put on a stretch of road like this for you, although I think God would have a better car than me. Shafts of sunlight pierced the foliage to my left, rain lightly fell towards me, my feet were being warmed, and my face cooled by the air rushing in the window. The moment only lasted a few minutes but it was the most fun I’ve had in a car.
After my underwhelming experience with the 12 apostles and other associated rock formations I was feeling a bit put off tourist attractions. I decided to go along to the treetop walk near Laver’s Hill anyway. I wouldn’t describe myself as a greenie or a hippy, mainly because I don’t like associating with any one ideology, but I have hugged trees before and I am an unashamed nature lover. The walk is through a temperate rainforest, and luckily it was raining on the day I visited, with a light mist moving through the trees like a ghost. The only sound was the quiet dripping, and all the kids running around. When I say a treetop walk you might be envisioning rope ladders and creaking wooden bridges, but this is eco-tourism at its finest with a gleaming metal walkway rising above the valley. It’s disconcerting to make a closer examination and note that the pylons are somehow anchored in mud, with support from some cables that don’t entirely manage to stop the structure shaking. There is a lookout, to get to the top of which you climb a spiral staircase. Being at the top must be what it feels like to be atop the mast of a ship on a totally calm day, for it only sways a little, much like the surrounding trees which compete with each other to reach the sunlight, smooth straight trunks heading for the sky.
I don’t know for sure that hippies come here to die, but it seems likely. There is greenery as far as the eye can see – forests, ferns, hills, fields, waterfalls, the ocean, and more rainbows per square metre than anywhere on earth.
Dave out
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