Mozzeenet

Andrew and I soon realised that South Australia is the land of the big, both natural and man-made. My friend Annie, who we caught up with in Adelaide on the way back, confirmed our theory saying that South Australians make up for the small population and sparseness of their state by building big things including the Big Rocking Horse. We were welcomed to South Australia by the Big Lobster at Kingston which was rather bizarre.

From Mount Gambier to Adelaide, the scenery is deadly – flat as a pancake to the horizon and the road is as straight as a rod for hours and hours of hellish driving. It was grey and bleak too so we relished a snack break at a replica oil rig by the road side later on. We wondered why anyone would bother to build a replica oil rig in the middle of nowhere. It looked so incongruous but did provide us with hours of amusement afterwards. Annie, Andrew and I decided that building more strange things on the side of that road might be a good strategy to relieve bored drivers from the monotony.
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On Sunday July 10, Andrew and I headed off from Melbourne on a ten day road trip through south-west Victoria and Central Oz including South Australia and the Northern Territory, armed with an esky, a library of CDs, 12 litres of water and a couple of backpacks.

No-one, especially us, was surprised to find out that we departed several hours later than planned that day. We are optimistic and ambitious but definitely not early-morning types.

This was my second trip along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria (I visited the area in 2004 with Amit and his family too). Andrew had also traversed the route a couple of times before. It’s somewhere though that one can never tire of because it is different each time. And this time it was actually physically different - with one of the twelve apostles having crumbled and fallen into the ocean a couple of weeks before our trip. The photo on Amit’s blog shows the now non-existent apostle and here is the photo I took this year where you can see the mound of rubble where the apostle used to be.

There are now only eight left standing of these amazing pillars of rock, the products of eons of sea and wind erosion. It is eerie to think about how long it has taken to create them and how quickly one can disappear. The unpredictability of the elements and how this changes the scenery and atmosphere is fascinating.

At a morning stop at Lorne, we ate pumpkin soup overlooking the sun-lit turquoise ocean, for lunch we ate sandwiches from our esky under a park shelter in the middle of a heavy downpour and later in the afternoon we viewed the rugged coastline around the apostles with a backdrop of sun streaming through grey and a magnificent rainbow.
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