Apologies, dear reader, for the long pause since my last post. Apologies also in advance for the tone of this blog post—I just finished Quichotte, by Salman Rushdie, and I’m sure I won’t be able to keep some of that literary-ness from seeping into my writing. I’ve always thought of myself as a clever writer and I’m in the mood for self-indulgence, so you’re just going to have grin and bear it. (Don’t worry, it wears off pretty quickly as I slog through this update.) Also strap in because it’s going to be a long one.

Anyway, it’s been a minute! I’ve covered a lot of ground! Happy new year! I had a great new year’s day in the general area around Port Augusta, SA. First I went to the Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The aridity of the experience was enhanced by a hot and sunny day, and my stroll around the grounds was a sweaty one. It was nice and peaceful with basically no one else there. I got to spot lots of cool critters, including a sweet lizard, lots of birds, and buckets of kangaroos. So lots of playing with my camera. After that I went for an absolutely delightful hike at Dutchman’s Stern, so named because the vertical cliff face of the peak looks like the vertical stern of a Dutch ship from back in the day. Beautiful forest, another cool lizard, tons more kangaroos, and a handsome goat were the highlights here, beyond just the beauty of the forest and the hills themselves. I had a great time.

After that it was time to head towards Adelaide. I spent the night at a beautiful free camp and went for a nice hike the next morning in a place I can’t remember. I’d been stressing out about trying to get an oil change for my van during the holidays but after a couple of calls was finally able to book it in with a very friendly mom-and-pop (technically pop-and-son, in this case) shop, so that was a big relief. After a couple of hours of driving I was on the outskirts of Adelaide and ready for some food. If you ever find yourself in the very far northern suburbs of Adelaide do yourself a favor and eat at Mama Rashida’s African Cuisine. Mama Rashida herself was incredibly nice and my fried whole Barramundi, rice, and plantains were divine. I ate way too much and didn’t regret it one bit.

The next day I took the van in and hung around a couple of cafes. They were quick with the service so I said my goodbyes to Adelaide and headed out of town towards Mt Gambier, in the very southeast corner of South Australia. This area is perhaps unimaginatively known as the Limestone Coast and is known for a string of sinkholes, including some filled with crystal clear water. The first one I visited was Umpherston Sinkhole. This one is right in town, and it’s famous because some crazy rich guy back in the day wanted to turn it into an attraction, covering the walls in huge mats of ivy and planting tiered gardens in the bottom. He did a great job! It’s beautiful! I especially enjoyed it because I hadn’t looked it up beforehand and only stumbled onto it while looking for a bathroom, so it was a delightful surprise. After that I went to walk around Blue Lake, which is exactly what it sounds like. The color really is a tremendously deep blue and very beautiful. Lastly I went a little ways out of town to check out one of the dormant volcanoes in the area, Mt Schank. It’s pretty neat because it is really clearly a volcanic crater. A short hike up gets you to the rim, which you can walk around. When I got there I could see dark clouds and rain on the horizon and coming fast, so I packed my dry bag and decided to hustle. Sure enough the storm moved faster than it seemed like and I ran the last third of the crater, getting caught in the deluge for the last bit of the descent. It was really nice.

That was it for South Australia. I spent the night at a beautiful free camp next to a waterfall which I checked out the next morning with my morning coffee, friendly neighboring farm dog in tow. Now I had a few days to check out Grampians National Park and the Great Ocean Road before I needed to be in Melbourne to meet up with my dad and his girlfriend Jean and to watch some tennis. I went to the Grampians first. I have to say, I’ve been pretty annoyed with my experiences at visitor centers so far in Australia—they seem to be oriented entirely around convincing you to stay in stupidly expensive caravan parks and trying to scare you out of doing any substantial hikes. The Grampians Visitor Center was a delightful exception to this rule. The ranger gave me great advice about where to camp and which hikes to do, and I left feeling good about the few days I had planned. Since I’d gotten there in the early afternoon I headed for camp and went for a short stroll to check out a few waterfalls cascading over beautiful red rock faces.

The next day I headed out to hike Mt Gar, dubbed much less poetically by the white people as Mt Difficult. It was an absolutely stunning hike. I don’t know the geology of the area but the rock formations were just astounding. One in particular was a large face made of black rock perfectly criss-crossed with cracks. I don’t even know why I’m trying to describe it, and the pictures certainly don’t do it justice, but I just could not stop staring at it. I also got to spend some time hanging out with a decidedly unbothered echidna and saw a nankeen kestrel crying from a cliff edge, so that was cool.

I changed campsites that night to a slightly more isolated one in the middle of the park. My reward was a morning coffee stroll looking at approximately a million billion kangaroos grazing away. Once I was properly caffeinated I headed to a lookout, which turned out to be completely clouded in, but still a nice spot. Then I went over to Mt Rosea for my first hike of the day. It was really nice, beautiful forest and rocks, and a great view at the top. After that I headed into Halls Gap, the town in the middle of the park, for lunch and to agonize over whether to continue south or stay another day in the park. Ultimately I decided to stick with my original plan, head south for another hike that afternoon, and then call it for the Grampians.

The next hike was Mt Abrupt and Signal Peak, and it was great. They’re neighboring peaks at the very southern end of the Grampians, so in one direction the view is mostly farmland, but looking the other way shows the whole sweep of the Grampians rising away to the north. I started up Mt Abrupt, following stone steps up the ridge right to the top. I was a bit tired and daydreamy but a brown snake suddenly slithering away between the rocks right next to me snapped me to attention and got me staring at my feet the whole rest of the way up. After a quick snack at the summit and with afternoon slowly turning into evening I started to head down, excited to check out Signal Peak and then get to a campsite at a reasonable time. Some combination of fatigue and this wanting to make sure I made the right move made me perfectly susceptible to the absolute worst trail sign I’ve ever seen, which guided you through a fork in the road not by signaling to either take the right or left trail, but rather by seemingly indicating the actual angle of each trail, which functionally made it look like three arrows pointing in the exact same direction. I looked hard at it and even thought “that’s weird, those three trails shouldn’t be in the same direction”, but who was I to question the sign? This wrong turn ended up having pros and cons—it added a bit of time to my hike, but going down the much less traveled back side of the mountain let me cross paths with several more cool snakes, which I managed to snap a couple photos of. The forest back there was also just tremendously beautiful with the late afternoon light filtering through. I laughed at myself for taking the most obvious wrong turn in history, laughed at the sign for how unbelievably ill-conceived it was, and double timed it towards Signal Peak. That section of the hike was also beautiful, and I got treated to a couple of sightings of some beautiful parrots (or rosellas, I’m not quite sure), but at that point I was pretty tired and it was pretty late so after a quick look around the summit I scampered on down to the van. The short drive to the campsite saw me nervously pass about a dozen kangaroos or wallabies staring at me from the side of the road, never letting on whether they were going to suddenly bounce out right in front of the van. Luckily I made it without incident and the campsite was beautiful.

The next day it was time to head to the famous Great Ocean Road. Being just a couple of hours from Melbourne this is a huge tourist attraction and I simply was not ready. The traffic. The crowds. The tour buses. It all took some getting used to. The coast was beautiful though, cliffs and sea stacks carved by the wind and sea. It reminded me a bit of the Nullarbor but the cliffs were yellow and orange rather than white, and, again, the crowds! I spent the day poking along slowly, pulling into each viewpoint. Besides the cliffs the big attraction in the area is the Otway National Park, which has towering Mountain Ash trees mixed in with lots of waterfalls and ferns galore. I spent the night at Beauchamp Falls, where there’s a short walk through absolutely gorgeous forest to a beautiful waterfall. I went in the late afternoon and got to enjoy a bit of tranquility in spite of how slammed the campsite was for the holidays.

The next day I got up and headed to Triplet Falls, another gorgeous walk through damp tree fern and mountain ash forest to a thundering waterfall. This walk is a little bit more out of the way and I had it completely to myself in the morning. After these tastes of the forest it was back to the coast—the plan was to finish driving the Great Ocean Road and then cross Melbourne to go stay with my friend Georgia’s parents. Georgia and I met out in WA but she grew up next to Melbourne. When I said I was heading that way she told me her parents would be happy to host me for a bit. Sure enough, they gave me a very warm welcome, with a delicious dinner waiting when I arrived and lots of good conversation over a drink or two. The next day I got myself, my van, and my laundry all clean, and had a fun night hanging with them and a few friends they had over for dinner. It felt great to get a little bit of that family feel and social interaction again.

And then it was off to the airport. Luckily dad and Jean’s flight got in without a hitch and airport pickup was as smooth as can be expected. We got checked in at the hotel and thankfully the parking situation they’d promised did in fact work out, even for my annoyingly tall van. The next week was a bit of a blur—I pretty much overdosed on tennis by going four days in a row and lost all bedtime discipline, staying up late watching the night matches on TV when I wasn’t there myself. The weather was a blessing, a bit cooler and decidedly more overcast than usual at the Aussie open, which frankly was the only reason I made it through four days in a row. We took full advantage of the hotel breakfast and I very quickly lapsed back to caffeine consumption at my usual city levels, minimum 3 cups a day. It was great catching up with dad and getting to know Jean for the first time, and we had lots of good meals, enjoyed the tennis together, went for a nice trip out to a sculpture garden where Jean’s cousin has a piece, and generally just soaked it all in. Jean was also gracious enough to take my haircut to its final destination, full mullet. It ended up a little shorter and more bogan (American translation: redneck) than I’d necessarily meant to shoot for, but hey, go big or go home right?

And before we knew it that was it. I dropped dad and Jean at the airport and then headed to the library to get my life in order a little bit. I had thought I might leave Melbourne that same day but ended up having a few extra things to do, so I stuck around. This gave me the chance to hang out with a friend from Sydney and her beau who were also in town for the tennis. It was great catching up and I got to see a couple of trendier, cafe-ier neighborhoods that I hadn’t checked out. She was also gracious enough to help measure me for a custom freediving suit that I just ordered and can’t wait to try out in Bali, so that’s exciting. These days I’m quite frugal and find myself mostly interested in nature when I travel so it was nice to have a few days’ reminder that it can also be nice to go to a new city just to enjoy a few great cafes, a stroll, and a book.

And that finally brings us up to the present day. I managed to tear myself away from Melbourne and was stoked to break in a bunch of my new hiking gear that dad had graciously brought over to replace what was stolen in Alice Springs. Holy cow did it feel good to hike with a good, light, properly-fitting backpack. Good gravy was it exciting to hike in shoes with actual tread rather than soles worn completely flat. Sweet lord how I had missed my hydration reservoir, I can’t even tell you. The hike I did, Mt Saint Leonard, was decidedly underwhelming, and I was draggin’ ass after a bad’s night sleep, but I’m still stoked to get back to it. After the hike I spent the night last night at a ski/mountain bike resort that lets you sleep in the parking lot, and since it’s been raining all day I’ve just been hanging out in my van, finishing my book and composing this astonishingly long post. There’s a short walk to a summit lookout from here which I’m planning to do later this afternoon, though with the clouds being as they are I can’t imagine I’ll have much of a view. For simplicity’s sake I’ll probably spend the night here again tonight, and then tomorrow I’ll have to decide where to go next. The plan is to do lots of hiking in the Victoria high country for the next week or two, scoot over to Canberra to see a friend from way back in my Microsoft days, and then just head straight to Sydney to catch up with friends and sell my van. My flight to Japan is in exactly one month, which feels crazy. I’m excited to try to get the most out of my last month here in Australia and really looking forward to the next step as well. You can find videos for this post here. I highly recommend this edition—we’ve got terrifying ants, hiking views, echidna trundling, and health and safety fables, among others.