Hall's Gap - Port Fairy

'You must see the Grampians' says EVERYONE it seems. Being slightly contrarian by nature this almost made me NOT want to see them (I still haven't see the movie 'ET' for this reason!), but I'm not as dumb as I look, so off to Hall's Gap we headed. Fantastic caravan park full of kangaroos with joeys - so I'll include a photo taken by Isabella who was very taken with them.

We did a couple of short walks and of course it is very beautiful, or perhaps 'majestic' is a better word. My favorite part was actually the 'Venus Baths' rock pools at the base of the moutains where Isabella, like all the other kids, stripped down to her 'smalls + shirt' to have an impromptu dip. And on the walk back we were very excited to see an echidna on the path - we stood right next to it and watched it snuffle around for ants for about 20 min, then it waddled up to us, sniffed our shoes, and slowly ambled back into the undergrowth. Of course this was the one time I didn't have the camera, so no proof of our 'close encounter of the monotreme kind'.

We are now in Port Fairy which is such a beautiful little town. The weather has been rather 'English' but it cleared yesterday long enough for us to walk out to the lighthouse. Today we drove to Tower Hill, which is an old volcanic crater and the first national park in Victoria - here we saw emus wandering around in the flat area of the crater and were able to get quite close to a mum and babies, and then we rescued a turtle which was on the road.

I haven't seen 'Australia' the movie yet, but I feel like we are seeing the real thing - we've seen so many native animals now in 'the wild' so to speak, and such beautiful and diverse scenery. Port Fairy is the furthest point of our travels, so it's 'homeward' from here I guess - still 3 weeks to go though! Tomorrow we head east along the Great Ocean Road to Apollo Bay, which will be a trip highlight I'm sure as I've always wanted to see it.