China- Melbourne – Great Ocean Road -Grampians

(päätettiin kirjoittaa matkan tervehdykset englanniksi, kun menoamme seuraa kenties jotkut jotka eivät osaa suomea…)

We left China on Friday. And not a moment too early, I may add. During the whole week, all evenings were fireworks and bombs. Even though we received a notice from the housing company, that fireworks are allowed only after 23.1. (that date 24 hours, 27.-29.1. from 7am to 12 pm. And then on 9.2. 7am-12pm). It seems that the Chinese didn’t get such notice, or if they did, their version also listen the fines for getting caught firing them anyway, and the punishment just didn’t compare to the excitement… That’s the Chinese thinking, not black and white what is allowed and what is not. Apparently the local driving test questions do not ask whether it’s ok or not to drive through the red light, but how much is the fine for that…

There is a good availability of fireworks on sale too, on Thursday they put the fireworks-selling tents up literally on every street corner. Who wants to walk more than 50 meters to get fireworks? Or new fireworks after shooting up some in the previous corner?

Anyway, we fly via Shanghai to Melbourne which surprised us with the weather. It was cold, around 18 centigrade and we only had summer cloths with us… Otherwise the city seemed nice, like a great place to live in, lot of restaurants, bars, parks and enough shopping, but not too many people. We spent the day strolling around, eating in as many places we could (the restaurants were really good and food prepared with love) and shivering from cold.

Even though Melbourne was nice, we wanted to get on the road as quickly as possible on Sunday morning, to get to my friend’s Meri’s place the Great Ocean Road. The views on the road were spectacular, we stopped in Torquay to see the surfers’ paradise, and then continued to Meri’s home on Separation Creek (seemed like another surfers’ paradise for us). The night and the following few days were spent on intensive catching-up, getting to know the people in Separation Creek and Wye River (everybody knows everybody there, and there were only few possible hangout places (an excellent General Store/restaurant, pub restaurant (=Wye River Hotel, with excellent wine selection and great pub food), and the beach) so we got to meet the same people every day. We also spent there the Australia Day, with the traditional festivities, had the barbi and drinkies from the esky. The weather was getting warmer everyday and we managed to get to the waves (there were waves there every day, and some nights they were really loud up to Meri’s house, but if that’s the price you have to pay for amazing view on the sea, that’s not too bad…). The life there seemed different, people move to the place because they want to live there on that spot, and thoughts on what they could do there to make a living seemed secondary. It was difficult to leave the place, but there was a long road waiting ahead of us still.

On Wednesday, we drove from Separation Creek to Port Fairy, stopping on the must-see places on the Great Ocean Road (Port Campbell for lunch (the Waves restaurant had wonderful salads), Otway lighthouse, 12 apostles (which had all the Chinese that were not firing up in China…) and Tree Top walk ( great way to see the rain forest in Otway, even though with my fear of heights it felt bit wobbly).

Port Fairy old town was touristic, funny combination of old houses and wide streets (made it look like a façade city from Western movies… ) It had lot of upscale restaurants and boutique accommodation, a really picturesque river and island for walks, and now we got some heat as well…

During the day it was clearly over +40 and that made us rethink the routes for the next following days… But we cannot complain, we came here for the warmth, so just bring it on... Anyway the Finnish mind is built in a way that sunshine is always good weather, even though it would be too hot to do anything! On Thursday morning at 9.30, the temperature was already 36 with a strong hot wind from the north, we decided that instead of trying to drive up to Barossa Valley (500km) we decided to take an alternative route towards Mildura, through Grampians National Park and stop for 1 night in Halls Gap, in the middle of Grampians. Here we saw the first kangaroos (koalas were abundant on the eucalyptus forests near Meri’s place). Amazing, how close you can get the wildlife here! Also otherwise we were happy with our choice to choose this route there were some amazing nature in the National Park.

The internet availability has been poor so far (of course compared to Finland, but even to US and China), so getting these greetings published will not happen as often as we would wish…