Grampians and beyond

Crossing into Victoria it didn’t take us long before we hit the Grampians National Park. Windy roads and spectacular views had us “oooing” and “ahhhing” at every bend. The topography meant the park was much bigger than we expected and it took a lot longer to cross than we originally thought. This first day we were blessed with fantastic weather and managed to knock out a few quick hikes before setting up camp in the park.

We were expecting a thunderstorm that night but luckily it skimmed right past us. We instead sat in the Troopy, overlooking the valley and watched the lightning show below for hours before going to bed.

The next morning we were up early to tackle the Mt Rosea peak. It was a challenging but extremely rewarding hike to the summit at 1009m.

We headed into Halls Gap, a town on the edge of the Grampians where we planned to stay for the next two night as the weather was taking a turn for the worst.

The next day the rain was unrelenting with it raining non stop for about 36 hours. We decided all the rain would be good for one thing, waterfalls. We had done a couple of waterfall hikes the previous day but they were all dry.

We put on our raincoats and headed towards Beehive Falls. It wasn’t looking good as we were hiking up with the creek being dry but we decided to push on anyways. We were rewarded at the end by a beautiful roaring waterfall. We were grinning by ear to ear as it felt pretty spectacular. As we were wet anyways from the rain, we dunked our heads into the icy falls.

Soaking wet we headed back for the car and to one of my bucketlist places, the Giant Koala. In the middle of nowhere is a tiny, unassuming town called Dadswells. There wasn’t much going on expect for one thing, a massive bronze koala, one of Australia’s iconic “big things”. The thing that makes the koala so special though, is how ugly it is. Seriously this thing looks demonic. And someone paid to have it built. It’s brilliant.

We moved on from the Grampians and headed to the coast. The weather still wasn’t fabulous but we stopped in at Port Fairy and made our way to Warrnambol. We spent two days in Warrnambol with the highlights being the massive antique stores, Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village (which was a village done up how Warrnambol would have looked in the early colonial days) and the reason we came to Warrnambol, the Hot Springs.

The Hot Springs were located at a hotel so we treated ourselves to a night stay. The hot springs themselves were a divine experience. 18 different pools at various temperatures in caves, channels, waterfalls and more. We did the evening session and were able to watch the eclipse blood moon from the hot springs.

Next we hit the start of the Great Ocean Road while making our way to Geelong. We did the first half of the road (we will do the second half post Tassie) and made sure to stop in at the famous 12 Apostles. Or as we call them now, the 12 Imposters.

Rocking up at the 12 Imposters you are greeted with a massive, heaving car park. The crowds at this place were insane (in the middle of a day on a weekday). We battled our way to the viewing platform through the masses of international tourists and just looked at each other, both with the same confused looked. We hightailed it back to our car, offering our help to some tourists who had driven into over the barricade into a ditch on the way back, and both said the same thing “WTF”. We are both nature people and rock people. Rocks usually make us very excited. But the 12 Imposters, we didn’t get it. We think there are much more impressive rock formations to see than some limestone columns in the sea. But the tourists SHOULD DEFINITELY keep going there.

12 Imposters

From there we headed on to Geelong to catch the ferry to Tassie and managed to catch up with a friend who was also there at the same time!!!

We are on the overnight ferry on our way to Tassie and couldn’t be more excited.