From Sydney I flew to Melbourne. I met up with my friend India again in Melbourne and we spent five days driving along the Great Ocean Road and through the Grampians. Our first day we drove to Apollo Bay. We stopped at Bell’s Beach, which is famous for great surfing, at a nice waterfall called Erskine Falls, and in the town of Kenneth River, where we saw koalas sleeping in the trees and lots of parrots and cockatoos!
From Apollo Bay we drove to Port Fairy. We got to see the 12 Apostles which are beautiful (and famous) rock formations. There aren’t actually 12 though. Someone just thought apostles should come in sets of 12, so that’s what they got named. We also saw a bunch of other cool rock formations along the coast.
After Port Fairy we went to the Tower Hill Reserve. We saw emus and koalas with their babies! From there we headed to Dunkeld. When we got there, we noticed that pretty much everyone in town was very dressed up. When we asked what was going on, we discovered we had arrived on the day of the Dunkeld Races, the local horse races that are held once a year! So, we went to the races and I placed my first bet on a horse race, on a horse called Toodle Pip (I didn’t win). We felt very underdressed but we had fun! We drove through Grampians National Park and stopped at the Brambuk Cultural Center which is an educational center about the aboriginal people of the area. I learned that within 60 years of the arrival of the white settlers, 98% of the aboriginal people had been wiped out. So horrible. But I think it is really good that now the aboriginal people are given control of their own artifacts and the education campaigns are presented in their own words. After we checked into our (crappy and unheated) hostel, India and I got dinner in town and we saw a kangaroo run by while we were eating!! So cool!
We had planned to spend the next day hiking in Grampians National Park, but it was very rainy, so we headed on to Ballarat instead. I went to the art gallery where I saw an exhibition of the nominees for the Archibald Prize, an annual award for the best portrait painting in Australia. I had a walk around town as well. Ballarat is famous for its many victorian buildings which were built during with money from the gold rush. We stayed in ANOTHER crappy hostel with no heat! We were so cold!!
The next day was the last day of our road trip. We went to Sovereign Hill, an open-air museum that depicts life in Ballarat after gold was discovered there in 1851. It reminded me of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. There were people dressed in costume and lots of recreated buildings from that time. We went on a tour of the gold mine and saw someone heat and pour $100,000 worth of gold. I really enjoyed it.
