Friday, March 30th, 2012: Portland - Cape Bridgewater
Bob: In the local area tourist book, we found several interesting walks on the Cape Bridgewater peninsula, so we drove along the shoreline past a truly magnificent 4-kilometer long beach with waves gently lapping at a wide, white sandy shore. It was as picturebook perfect as Horseshoe Bay in Bermuda or any other beach I have seen, but almost deserted although I suspect that a lot more people come to enjoy it on the weekend. As attractive as the swimming looked, our main goal for the day was to walk out along Cape Bridgewater to the very tip and hopefully find a colony of seals out there. The sign for the walk at the trailhead estimated 2 hours total time for the walk, and we found out that was probably a bit on the conservative side as it took us more like two and a half hours of pretty solid walking. The main part of the trek that slowed us up was a climb from the shoreline up to the crest of a 150 meter high headland in the middle of the walk. The peak gave us great views out over the Southern Ocean, however, so it was almost worth the climb up! |
Monika: On our second day in Portland we planned to go to Cape Bridgewater, the second of the two capes south of Portland. Here we were promised a seal colony and we were hoping that there would be more seals than there had been whales or gannets. The walk to the seals was a cliff walk. It reminded me of the cliff walk we had done on the coast of Wales during Wanderung 25. Here too we had to go almost down to the sea, where boat tours to the seal colony started. After that it was all the way uphill until we got to the highest cliff in Victoria. |
Bob: But the main attraction was the seal colony out at the end of the peninsula. It turned out that rather than being a breeding colony, this colony consisted of old bull seals who were no longer strong enough to defend harems in the breeding colony, together with a bunch of adolescent seal pups who were basically growing up and too young to be full-fledged members of a breeding colony. Sure enough, we saw several big old bull seals, noticeable by their size as well as white frosting on the fur around their throats, and a bunch of much smaller youngsters. The bulls, for the most part, seemed contented just to laze around in the sun and, anthropomorphizing a bit, enjoy the golden years of their retirement. The youngsters, however, acted a bit like adolescents in many different mammalian species. They larked about in the water, playing with each other and apparently having the time of their lives. One thing I saw that I had never even known seals would do, is that some of the youngsters would just spontaneously jump out of the water just like young dolphins do. In fact, I looked very hard and took enough pictures that I could ultimately be sure that it was the young seals that were jumping and not a couple of stray dolphins. So that was a first. |
Monika: A little further on was an observation post and, glory be, there were actual seals down below. On a sign we read that this colony consisted of those seals that had not been accepted in the breeding colonies, either they were too young or too old. And you could see both of these types of seals. There were old timers sunning themselves on the rocks and youngsters playing in the water. At the next observation place we saw a whole group of youngsters playing in the water. They were definitely having a good time, even jumping out of the water a time or two. There was a third observation platform for blue whales, but it was still not the time for blue whales, and we started walking back. |
Bob: Another first that happened as we started our walk back was not nearly so pleasant. My inbuilt "snake detector" had me stopping, and when my conscious mind checked out the danger signal I saw a 1.5 meter (that's BIG!) brown snake in the grass right beside the trail in front of me. For all you non-Australians, brown snakes are quite poisonous (15 minutes to death) and highly dangerous. I flung out my arms on either side to keep Monika from walking by and accidentally stepping on the thing, as that could easily have been disastrous. We carefully backed away while I got her camera and made a snapshot. The snake had his head up and was eyeing us balefully, so I was considering turning around and walking the long way back around the headland, but finally the snake decided to leave the trail to us. What was astonishing to me was the speed with which he zipped off the trail--he was way faster than a walk, at least at a jogging pace and might have equalled an all-out running pace, which made me really wonder if I could have outrun the thing if it had decided to attack rather than retreat. Since Monika does not have "snake detectors" in her visual system, I took the lead for the rest of that trail and for the remainder of our walks in Australia. She has almost stepped on snakes several times, and since all the Australian snakes are poisonous, we just couldn't take any chances. Aside from being super-cautious, our walk back to the car was uneventful. |
Monika: Suddenly Bob just yelled stop, and I stopped. There was a brown snake on the path and Bob quite wisely was not going to pass it - remember in Australia all snakes are poisonous. I gave him the camera and he did get a picture before the snake slithered off into the grass. It seems that there are two types of people, those who have an atavistic snake detector sense and jump before they have consciously registered 'snake' and those who could possibly step on a snake without noticing. Bob belongs to the first group, I to the second . Yes, I almost stepped on a snake before Bob yelled and pulled me away. That was in Germany where it would not have been dangerous. But now that we are in Australia, we have a new rule: in natural terrain, Mr. Snake Detector goes first. After the snake had disappeared into the grass, we went on. Going back was a lot quicker since most of it was downhill. On the other hand it was getting warmer and the sun was shining down on us. So we were glad when we got back to the car with real good air conditioning. |
Bob: We drove on across the cape to see the blow holes and "petrified forest" on the opposite coast. Fortunately those two sights were only 200 meters away from the car park (American: parking lot), as we were pretty tired by that point. The blow holes were really steep cliffs with deep Vs eroded into them where the waves would concentrate and burst up into the air. Seeing the huge clouds of spray thrown into the air was both impressive and fun to watch. I amused myslef trying to predict where and when the next burst of spray would occur in order to get the camera focused and ready for a decent picture, and that was enjoyable too. |
Monika: It was almost lunch time, but there were two more stops on Cape Bridgewater, rocks that formed blowholes and a petrified forest. Since we wanted to do lunch in town where I had seen a place that had stuffed baked potatoes, we decided to do those two stops first and then head back to town. Both trails started from a parking lot in a landscape that could have come from the moon. The blowholes were a set of rock formations where we saw waves breaking and spraying over them. In rough seas it might be quite spectacular, but in the relative calm seas we had it was merely interesting. |
Bob: Down the path another 200 meters or so was the "petrified forest". We saw formations that looked like the petrified remains of the tree trunks of an ancient forest, and apparently that's how the place originally got its name. However, a plaque explained that the formations were actually the result of minerals crystallizing in a type of drain pipe in the ancient lava beds, so in actuality there were no ancient forests being petrified at all. Still it was a very weird and evocative landscape--it looked so rocky, barren, and free of all vegetation or signs of life that I thought it looked like a lunar moonscape. Eerie. |
Monika: The petrified forest however, was quite interesting. This was not really a petrified forest as we have seen it in Arizona, i.e. trees that are infused with minerals as they decay in the ground. Here we had some mineral pipes, cracks in the lava that got filled in by minerals. But boy did they look like trees! |
Bob: By that point we were both getting ravenously hungry, but we took the scenic way back to Portland past some pretty coastal ponds and a big old cave in a hillside. Too hungry to stop and look, we hustled back to park the car at our B&B and walk over to a spud place for a nice, fully-loaded baked potato. With butter, sour cream, chicken, chilli sauce, and cole slaw those potatoes ended up being HUGE but we were both hungry enough to eat every morsel. Predictably, I was comatose for a bit after that, but we finally stirred ourselves again before dinner to walk down to the harbor and take a look around. We had been told by an Aussie couple that some seals were hanging out right next to the fish cleaning stands at the end of the dock, and sure enough we found them there. I suppose seals as well as humans are attracted to the idea of a free lunch, and the seals were persistently bobbing their heads up from the water next to the tables in hopes of a discarded fish or parts. We also saw a huge manta ray also slowly cruising around, apparently in the hopes of fish scraps, so what with all the activity of the boats being pulled out of the water for the day and the fish being gutted and cleaned, it was quite a beehive of activity and surprisingly entertaining. From the docks we wandered back into town to pick up some groceries at Aldi as we had been informed that there were no Aldi stores in South Australia. I was irritated that I had not purchased the GPS for $50 that I had seen at the Aldi near Bendigo, but the other Aldi stores we had visited had apparently sold out their stock of those. I was curious if the units would have the hiking trails and contour lines on them like the Aldi unit I had purchased a few years back in Germany, because that would make them great positioning units for hiking, but I guess I'll never know. (Postscript: I did find an Aldi GPS later on our drive and it was very nice for driving but did not have contour lines or hiking trails.) We did get enough drinks, soup, and crackers to last us a while and then went back to our room to have a light supper and put our feet up and read and write in our journal for the rest of the evening. |
Monika: Back to town we went and found the baked potatoes and had them filled with butter, cheese, chicken, and coleslaw. We took them up to our room and boy were they yummie! After resting a bit we decided to go down to the marina where the sports fishermen were cleaning their fish. We had been told that a seal family was hanging out there ready for a quick meal. Indeed they were there and we did enjoy watching them as they carefully watched the cleaning crew, apparently hoping for a quick meal. Although there were signs prohibiting the throwing of fish remains, people routinely did it, so the seals got their meals. |
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