2015/11 Australia trip - Tower Hill |
|||||
Thursday November 19th
We headed east on a cool and calm morning, with dunes and lagoons eventually giving way to the vineyards and tree farms of the Limestone Coast.
Sandie had a scary moment. We were on a four lane highway and there were a couple of cars at an intersection waiting to cross, turn right, and join our traffic stream. In the UK the car is supposed to turn into the slow lane whereas in North America it’s the nearest lane. The trouble was that that we had one of each and they turned at the same time, one into each lane, leaving Sandie no alternative other than an emergency stop. Sandie’s question was, if she couldn’t have stopped, which one should she hit? My guess was that the driver in the right lane was at fault, as it’s likely that Australia follows UK rules.
We picked Robe for a coffee stop as it is a seaside town. We drove all the way up to Rome’s Beacon Hill lookout tower only to find that the timber boardwalk to the tower had collapsed.
Our lunch in Mount Gambier was a bit more successful. The town is famous for its Blue Lake. It occupies a volcanic crater, thought to be Australia’s most recent eruption just 6000 years ago. The lake is blue in the summer but a murky grey in the winter, and it was already a shade of blue on this spring afternoon.
We crossed into Victoria and headed for Tower Hill, another extinct volcano, and now a wildlife reserve. Somehow we both missed 
the narrow track that leads down into the crater. We drove the roads around the volcano looking down at the view but gave up; we’d come back in the morning.
There are no rest areas or park campgrounds we could use so we camped at the nearby Kuroit caravan park, a place we’ve used before. We don’t much like caravan parks, but this one looked to be empty except for the hosts; we were the only paying customers. Our first hot showers in over six weeks felt good, though not without some tension. When I entered the men’s bathrooms I could hear two women talking. A quick check: yes, I was in the right place. When I unlocked the door to the showers the voices got louder. I was in the right place but were they in the right place? Then I heard music and realized that talk radio was being piped into the shower. After all those weeks in the bush I’d been fooled by technology!
Friday November 20th
After another shower we went back to Tower Hill and this time we found the sharp downhill turn from the parking area. The night’s thunder and rain had eased to a steady drizzle but the place was surprisingly busy, a dozen cars and a school bus, reminding us that w
e were no longer in the wilderness.
Much of the crater floor is under water; wetlands and a good sized lake, popular with ducks and black swans. The central cone is covered by woodlands, home to emus, kangaroos, and wallabies. And this superb fairy wren. (The ones we saw in Western Australia were splendid fairy wrens.)
We’ve seen koalas there in the past, but not this time. We had time to walk one trail, a boardwalk through the wetlands. 
There were wallabies in amongst the reeds but all we would see was a head checking us out, and then we’d hear squish, squish, squish as it bounded away. Terns love to line themselves up in geometric patterns. Who decides which way to face?