Melbourne to Adelaide

Benny and I

Our first stop was visiting an AT hiker friend of mine at Geelong: Benny or Daisy (the latter one being his trail name). Daisy and I had met on the AT where he had been a true advocate of hiking in Australia by giving me a 2 hour long presentation of hiking the Bibbulmun Track. And it has worked as I have hiked it now, too. At Benny's place we were treated with about the most luxurious meal I have had in a long time: Roast lamb with various sides. Benny's mom is a great cook and I got about 5 seconds....plus there was a delicious desert! Benny looked after us very well giving us directions how to get in and out of town.

12 Apostles

So the next day we were on the Great Ocean Road, which should be called Good Ocean Road. It was nice, but not overwhelming. The road is narrow and winding with a lot of tourist traffic, but fortunately tourists are not in a hurry so cycling was not too bad. We saw same very interesting rock formations out in the ocean, like the 12 apostles or London Bridge. I think they chose these names to attract tourists... The 12 apostles are one of the biggest Australian attractions, so I was a little bit overwhelmed by the size of the car park and the amount of tourists. Although the rock formations are quite impressive I still think the sight is a bit overrated.

In South Australia

We continued on to Adelaide passing and camping in Tower Hill Forest Reserve, that turned out to be a volcanoe crater. I was quite surprised to end up in a crater instead of on top of a hill. Unfortunately, I got real bad diarrhea when we got closer to Adelaide. I still continued cycling, but I was hardly able to eat anything and knowing me you can now assume that I was pretty sick. On the other hand John put on even more weight because he now had to eat my part of the dinner, too. He eventually convinced me to take some Immodium and the situation improved. And in Adelaide I was back to normal.