Tuesday, Sep 29th, Hall's Gap

Greetings!

Throughout these past many years, I’ve probably driven enough miles to make it all the way around the world.  Most of those miles were on highways, however well-maintained.  But a healthy amount were on backroads, as Pat and I enjoy exploring, and are willing to take risks.  Australia has quite a lot of roads which they will never bring up to the standard where they are safe at all times.  “Unsealed” is what they are called, and very often they pose serious hazards in bad weather or when fallen trees or rocks block the way.

Today, we chose to take several of those roads to circumnavigate the lower section of the park.  It was a real test of our Nissan Almera, clearly not made for rugged area driving.  The route was necessary in order to visit some caves where stone painting told the stories of local aboriginal origins.  The distances were great, and we had several maps and the Garmin. 

Pat and I have always agreed that we would check each other’s eagerness to risk a little danger in pursuit of our adventure.  I have to admit, however, the stories of travelers becoming stuck or lost in the semi-wilderness did flash in my mind as I drove out of the valley this afternoon.  

An hour earlier, on a narrow mountain road, we encountered one of those tractors you see using a large wedge blade to spread dirt across half the road when they construct highways.  He was coming toward us, and had spread dirt across half the road ahead of us, and I had no idea what we would find in a few minutes.  

Slowly, my side of the road became narrower, and the pile of dirt in the middle of the road grew higher.  Then, on a downhill grade, I could see my lane width disappear.  I chose (my decision alone) to drive across (and through too quickly) the center pile in an attempt to get into the other, wider lane.  Unfortunately, the pile contained more than dirt, and my cross took longer than expected.  Fortunately, the undercarriage of the car, and we survived the collision.  Unknown at the time, the front left tire rim didn’t.  

How we made it home in the next two hours will remain a mystery to us.  For when we parked in our spot in front of our room, we found the tire half-deflated.  Within a minute, it sat on the rim.   A post mortem by the roadside emergency service from a neighboring town’s tire shop indicated that the rim had taken a solid hit, creating a leak only when the smashed rim was at a 6 o’clock position, and stationary.  I was sure glad we didn’t stop up on the valley road. 

Tomorrow, we drive the spare over to the tire shop, pick up our repaired original, and head on the Ballarat.  Much thanks to Stephen and Peggy Odgers of Kookaburra Motor Lodge for their support.

Here is a link to the photos we took today.

Tuesday, Sep 29^th, Hall’s Gap

Monday, Sep 28th, Hall's Gap

Greetings!

I've been checking out park visitor centers along the way because Stewards is both raising funds to save the Jenner Visitor Center, and considering planning for a new visitor center at Armstrong Redwoods State Reserve.   The Brambuk National Park and Cultural Center in Hall's Gap is one more example of the designing a center which embodies the spirit of a place. Built like a large bird, wings spread out on the ground, the story of aboriginal life is revealed in a series of presentations as we move within.

Local shelter caves hold stone-painted right hands, animal tracks, birds, and other designs which support the belief that aboriginal peoples occupied this area for over 20,000 years.  One of the longest continuous cultures on earth, Australia's Jardwadjali and Djab Wurrung people are working together to preserve and protect its physical and cultural resources.  Tomorrow, we'll explore more of it.

Here are the photos we took today.
Monday, Sep 28th, Halls Gap

Sunday, September 27th, Portland

Greetings!

What a great day so far.  After some wonderful breakfast treats at Mahalia's Coffee headquarters in Robe, we took a drive out to a coastal point where the town had erected an obelisk long ago to alert passing ships.  A loop trail provided craggy cliff views, and we met some bicyclists for a stimulating conversation on New Zealand, surfing, and being Americans traveling.

Following the closest coastal route, we've begun to see animal protection signs for koalas and wombats on the side of the road.  We've yet to see either, but did nearly miss a kangaroo.

We're in Portland, just a little ways down the road from Robe.  The ocean stretch from Robe to Portland is called the Bonney Upwelling.   The winds here blow from November to March from the southeast, causing surface waters to drift away from the coast. They are replaced by cold, nutrient-rich water from deep off the coast, originating in Antarctica, which feeds phytoplankton, which feed the krill, the favorite meals for pygmy blue whales.  When Pat was last here, she took a photo of a pygmy blue whale (gorgeous wall-size shot in our closet, showing two seagulls in the whale's plume) in the harbor off Albany, surprising many onboard who had never seen one outside of this area.

I've posted several times since the last I put one up on Facebook and Google Plus.  Thought it was a bit too much to put each one up, so I waited for a while.  You can always see them all by going to the general website (http://gfpktravels.blogspot.com).  Here's a link to the photos we took today.
Sunday, Sep 27th, Portland

Saturday, September 26th, Robe

Greetings!

We have the best luck exploring the coast. Taking a scenic route which was mentioned in a guidebook, only found through Pat's great reading and insistence that we could find it, we stumbled upon a Pelican Breeding Lookout Blind.  Of course, we had to brave a half-kilometer of attacking flies, which found every open eyelid, nostril, ear, and mouth-slit until we got to the structure.  A  network of spider webs covered the windows and doors, displaying victims of past attempts to follow those who entered.  

Across the lagoon was an island, and on top of the island sat pelicans nurturing the young.  Every once in a while the parents would leave the colony and fly back across the lagoon right over our heads in search of food.
 

We ran over our first animal today.  I thought it would be a kangaroo, and I thought I'd be the one hitting it.  At dusk, they cross the road in great numbers, and tourists are cautioned not to drive at night. Each morning, their bodies are scattered all over.   But it was a snake, which we saw only at the last minute, and Pat had very little time to react.  We felt bad, as some of the snakes are actually endangered.    But I'm sort of glad the first one happened.  We're better prepared for the kangaroo.

The second semi-final of the Australian Rules Football League are being played right now, and it sure is exciting.  It's fast and complex and the whole country seems hooked on it.  We had dinner tonight during the first half in a local bar, and had as much fun people-watching as watching the game.  A group of guys had come from a party where they all dressed up as tennis players or golfers.  What a hoot seeing how they dressed.  They would have fit in very nicely in the 1950's.  I asked the bartender if he thought any of them had ever played either, and he thought not.

Here is a link to some photos we took today.
Saturday, September 26th, Robe

Friday, Sep 25th, Murray Bridge

Greetings!

Starting into our fifth week, we've got the next three weeks sorta planned out.  This next week, we'll be doing some flowers, beaches, mountains, and historic towns - Wait, isn't that what we've been doing?

Yes, but Australia has some spectacular examples of each in every part of the country.  On October 4th, we fly to Tasmania, pick up a rental car and explore the island for a week.  Then, Melbourne for a week, driving up to Sydney over two weeks, and a final week there.

But just so you don't think we've lost our interest in community, Australian politics are undergoing a deja vu moment.  The newest Prime Minister yesterday took the occasion of his first policy announcement to create a $100 million fund to address domestic violence prevention and response.  After raising the number of cabinet ministers from two to five, he framed the major initiative by saying he wanted to make it "Un-Australian" not to respect women.  The media is surprised by the move, and are asking the leaders of local domestic violence programs all the right questions.  And their responses seem to be arguing for most of the program and client service innovations that Pat and Donna and the DV movement brought about here in California.  Except for distributing new free cell phones to victims to avoid being cyber-stalked. That caught me by surprise.  It is refreshing, however, to listen to leaders address issues clearly and directly.  I hope it catches on back home.

The next few days will be shorter drives, more walks, and more photographs.

Here is a link to the few photographs taken today:
Friday, September 25th, Murray Bridge

Thursday, Sep 24th, Quorn, Australia

Greetings!

At the suggestion of local friends, we drove north from Adelaide to Quorn.  It's about as classic a small town as you can get, with a street plan spanning 48 city blocks.  The name was given to it by Governor William Francis Drummond Jervois in 1878, whose private secretary was from the Parish of Quorndon, England.  Today, we had breakfast at a local cafe (Emily's), and we're back after a long day driving up in the Flinders Range - to upload photos through their wifi.

A few minutes later, twenty horses came down the street with riders.  Sally Brown, the owner (her sister is Emily), commented that it was a group who had come to town for a meeting. There are tourists in town, as we've seen in the two hotels where we ha dinner.  But this isn't a town where tour busses stop.  It's one of the last places to stay in a hotel before the Flinders National Park, and is a good day's drive from Adelaide if you stop frequently to look at flowers.

Flinders National Park used to be an ocean seabed.  And like a lot of national parks, it's mountains are composed of sandstone and limestone from the elements found a long time ago (500-600 million years) in the sea.   But the mountains seem unusually wave-like in design, like ripples across the landscape.

Here's what the official explanation is: The Flinders Ranges are largely composed of folded and faulted sediments of the Adelaide Geosyncline. This very thick sequence of sediments were deposited in a large basin during the Neoproterozoic on the passive margin of the ancient continent of Gondwana. During the Cambrian, about 540 million years ago, the area underwent the Delamerian orogeny where the geosynclinal sequence was folded and faulted into a large mountain range. Since this time the area has undergone erosion resulting in the relatively low ranges today.

Most of the high ground and ridgetops in the Flinders are sequences of quartzites that outcrop along strike. The high walls of Wilpena Pound are formed by the outcropping beds of the eponymous Pound Quartzite in a synclinal structure. The same formation forms many of the other high parts of the Flinders, including the high plateau of the Gammon Ranges and the Heysen Range. Cuesta forms are also very common in the Flinders.

The Ranges are particularly renowned for the Ediacara Hills, South-west of Leigh Creek. This was the site of discovery in 1946 of some of the oldest fossil evidence of animal life. Since then similar fossils have been found in many other parts of the ranges, though their locations are a closely kept secret due to the risk of sites being desecrated. In 2004 a new geological period, the Ediacaran Period was formed to mark the appearance of Ediacara biota.

That one feature described above (Wilpena Pound) which looks from the air like a collapsed volcano, is a natural amphitheater called a syncline, a folded sedimentary rock laying on its side.

It looks like this from space.  It's the main entrance at Wilpena, and the visitor center and bus ride up to near the top is great.  We. however, were going to drive for five more hours and had to get back to Quorn before the kangaroos came out - so we passed on climbing up to look into the actual amphitheater.

Further along the park road, we got to see some of the rich geology of the Flinders Ranges.  Pat and I love wild rides on roads where we really ought to have taken a big powerful jeep, and the upper section of this park contains some of those roads.   Click on Flinders Ranges to learn more about this fascinating region.

We'll head south tomorrow to Murray River, Australia's longest river, on our way to the Great South Highway.

Here are links to recent photos (not as many on long drives):
Wednesday, Sep 23rd, Quorn
Thursday, Sep 24th, Quorn

Tuesday, September 22, Adelaide

Greetings!

Adelaide is a great city.  It feels a little like San Francisco, mingling new transient workers and businesses serving mostly tourists in a beautiful bay environment, surrounded by hills and valleys containing upscale homes and long-time residents.  The guidebooks make a point to say the city was not built on convict labor (like Western Australia).

Well, whoever built all these parks and is paying for free buses circulating downtown among free museums has my thanks.

The Botanical Garden, Central Market, Aboriginal Culture Institute, and the Southern Australia Museum were great stops since we arrived.  Our hotel is centrally-located, and we've showered and eaten and slept well.  

We're taking a detour north to the Flinders Mountain Range on the recommendation of two friends who we were linked up with by a couple we know back home.  They invited us to dinner last night in their home in the hills, and were delightful.  We share almost every interest, and can't wait to have them stay with us when they come to California next year.

There probably won't be much wifi for the next few days, so don't look back until about Saturday. Here are the photos for the last two days.

Monday, Sep 21st, Adelaide
Tuesday, Sep 22nd, Adelaide