Thursday, March 28th, 2012: From Ballarat to Portland with a Stop in the Grampian Mountains
Bob: We had reserved a hotel room facing the ocean at Portland, Victoria, about 250 kilometers from Ballarat, so our main order of business for the day was to make that drive and set up in Portland for the next couple of nights. |
Monika: Time to move on. Our next stop was the town of Portland on the coast near the border with South Australia. This was a 250 km drive, so we decided to break it up in the middle. We started driving on empty roads into the fog. Our first stop was a little lake. The water was mirror still and a grey heron was intently watching the surface, looking for lunch, but her flew away when we got too close. |
Bob: Monika discovered, however, that our route took us past the southern edge of the Grampians National Park, so we decided to take a driving loop up into those mountains if I still had the energy when we passed by. Well, when I saw the Grampian Mountains loom up on the horizon, my curiosity was definitely piqued, so we stopped at the Information Centre at Dunkeld to see if they could recommend a short walk in the nearest mountains. As it turned out, they could, and the young woman there showed us where the easy "easy" 2.5 kilometer Piccaninny trail was. Since the time listed was one to one and a half hours, we decided that was about right and headed off to find the trailhead. |
Monika: On the map I had noticed there was a large area called Grampian National Park just north of our route. When we got closer to it, it was easy to figure out that the Grampians were a mountain range, that just seem to rise up out of nowhere. I find this one of the fascinating things of driving through Australia, it seems so flat most of the time and suddenly there are mountains. We stopped at the information center at the south end of the park and found out that there were quite a few walks in the Grampians, most of them in the middle and northern section. But a 3 km walk to the top of one of the smaller mountains in the south seemed to be just right to give us a little exercise. But before we set out we admired the memorial that was across the street. We also decided to eat at the little restaurant next door. I had a hamburger with "the lot", which I thought only included fries (or chips). However, here is a warning: a deluxe hamburger in Australia includes the basic beef, cheese, tomato, lettuce, then, of course, you need some bacon (English bacon, i.e. ham), a slice of beet and pineapple to add the fruit, and finally to top it all of, an egg cooked over hard, all of which is crammed into a sesame bun. [Americans: Picture a "Dagwood" sandwich version of a hamburger.] Try getting that into your mouth! I asked for knife and fork and ignored the bun in order to do justice to the rest. As Bob said, we easily could have shared that. Bob had a chicken sandwich but it also included bacon and lettuce and tomato and was quite large. |
Bob: I missed the turnoff to the trailhead, however, because all I saw was a steep, rutted track strewn with rough, jagged rocks, and I just couldn't believe that it was really the driveway to a parking lot for our trail. But after backtracking to fix the point, I found that the track was indeed our road and I very gingerly edged our car up the side of the hill across the ruts and stones that pounded the suspension and continued on into the parking lot. Putting on some sunscreen and taking some water and a compass, we started walking up the trail and for the first quarter mile or so it was an easy ramble through the brush. But then the trail started to zigzag steadily up the side of a small hill. I got surprisingly winded surprisingly fast, and there was enough sunlight filtering down through the eucalyptus trees that we were both getting hot and sweaty, too. Still the eerie scenery more than made up for the discomfort--the burned stumps from old forest fires, the odd parrots screeching in the trees, the bare, naked limbs of the sycamores reaching up to the sky, all these gave us the "We're not in Kansas, anymore, Toto!" type of feeling. That was confirmed, of course, when we saw a kangaroo timidly watching us from the screen of some brush, but we never got a decent picture of him. |
Monika: Afterwards we were ready to do some serious walking. We missed the turnoff for the car park for the walk, but when retracing our steps, it was right there, an unpaved rutted trail. But the Huyndai made it up all right and we started walking. The walk to the top was of course up, up, up. It was through a forested area but the trees did not give much shade so we did get hot. We even saw a kangaroo, but it was shy and we only could see its ears through the grass. A flash of red landed in a tree in front of us, our first glimpse through the leaves of a pair of rosellas. We really were back in the Land of Oz. |
Bob: From the top we had a great view over to the Grampians to the North and the plains of southern Victoria to the South. Both views were powerful, but in completely different ways. After chatting with an Australian couple on the summit a bit, we wound our way back down the hillside to our car and then continued on our loop drive around the southern section of the Grampians National Park. We actually crossed over that southern spur of the mountains through a low gap, and then retraced our way back to Dunkeld to rejoin our route to Portland. |
Monika: Up on top, we had a really nice view of the northern Grampians and the area to the west of the mountains. Back at the car park, Bob carefully drove back down the rutted track to the road, and we decided to take a loop through the southern edge of the Grampians. There were a few turnoffs were we could get nice pictures. At one of these, a guy from West Virginia who had come the opposite way told us that there were emus among the sheep in the pasture at the bottom of the hill. So we kept a close eye out, and indeed saw the emus. These flightless birds look enormously arrogant with their long necks. With my 30X camera I could get quite nice pictures but they were a little blurry, but when Bob tried to take a picture, the emus started to walk away. But on the next pasture the emus were closer and I did manage to get some nice pictures. Slowly we are accumulating pictures of all the different varieties of Australian wildlife. |
Bob: I was starting to get tired on the long and somewhat monotonous drive down to Portland, and I really hit the wall after we checked in at the Sandilands Hotel. But still we moved in, went shopping at the IGA food store across the street, and had boiled eggs on toast for dinner before we both just got to the point where we couldn't see straight and turned in for the night. |
Monika: Unfortunately we had to go on. But now that we know about the Grampions we may want to make a point out of coming back and leaving more time for sightseeing and walking. Bob had to drive another hour or so before we finally reached our destination, the Sandilands Hotel in Portland. I had booked the room over the internet and was curious what I had booked. We found the place easily enough, a two story house with a restaurant at the bottom. A sign directed us to the Holiday Trailer Park next door, and another sign at the office directed to the first trailer. I was starting to get dubious, but there at the first trailer was a pleasant manager who gave us the key to our room. A staircase outside the house led up to the second story and there we found a very nice large room with a refrigerator. Outside in the common area was even a hot plate, oven, and dishes. Across from the hotel was an IGA grocery store. We decided to buy a dozen eggs, hard boil them for the evening meal and keep the rest in the refrigerator for consumption on the following days. |
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