Roadtrip part 3 - Lorne to Adelaide

 

This is a big drive, but we did it in only two days. We didn't get far on the first day because we did a lot of detouring through Great Otway National Park. The rainforest there is spectacular and there are  several waterfalls, including the beautiful Erskine Falls. I wanted to go and see them all but James allowed me just this one! We also did the Otway Fly Treetop Walk through the rainforest. There is a similar treetop walk in Walpole here in WA but it was interesting to see how different the Victorian forest was. The stretch of the Great Ocean Road we drove on the first day was amazing, too - the road is right on the edge of the cliff and you have a sheer cliff-face on the other side of the road, too, and it just winds around and around - a lot like the Amalfi Coast road in Italy...but with less insane drivers! We had a pretty hairy drive through the national park, too, with lots of blind corners and tiny windy roads. For some reason I had volunteered to drive that day! One of the most spectacular sights along the coast was the Twelve Apostles. These enormous rock islands are the result of incredibly sheer limestone cliffs eroding over the last 10-20 million years. The forms are constantly changing as the erosion continues, meaning that in time these "apostles" will disappear and new ones will form. Originally the rocks were named the "Sow and Piglets", and I rather like that name :)


We stayed in a nice place in Port Fairy, which is a sweet little town, and then headed off early the next day. One of our only stops on this big day of driving was at the Princess Margaret Rose Cave in the Lower Glenelg National Park. I battled my claustrophobia to explore this amazing underground cave with stalactites, stalagmites and helictites galore. One of the highlights was seeing the roots of a tree (which in itself is pretty amazing because we were a long way underground) and then seeing the same tree up on ground level and realising we had stood right underneath that spot...pretty amazing. The countryside along this drive was beautiful - lots of farmland and lots of animal life! In that one day we saw another fox, a beautiful eagle, a couple of emus, a kangaroo (narrowly missed!), lots of cows and lots of sheep with sweet little frolicking lambs! An amazing sunset accompanied our drive through the Adelaide hills and we spent that night and the next morning in the capital. I hadn't been since I was nine so I was interested to see what the city had going on. I thought it was a really pretty city - it looks a little like a really big country town because the main street is so wide and lined with amazing old buildings. We didn't have time to venture out of the city centre but did do a bit of exploring there before heading off on another big day of driving...