Australia 2007 - Adelaide to Melbourne

A section of The Great Ocean Road. Southern Australia.

From Alice Springs I flew to Adelaide on the south coast, and after the remote interior it was nice to be close to the ocean again. In this area I saw my first drive-through bottle shop. These are liquor stores where you don't even have to get out of your car! Seems like a bizarre idea to me, given that drinking and driving go together like oil and water. Adelaide is my favourite city in Australia after Melbourne. It's easy to navigate, has good beaches, and is close to the Barossa Valley wine region. A group in the hostel were planning to hire a car and drive out to the Wine Trail, which involves visiting a number of wineries and sampling their produce (some poor fool had volunteered to be the designated driver of course). The group included a girl from New Zealand, and the morning we were due to set off she asked me if I was ready. I replied that I needed a minute to iron my shorts, which she found hilarious and commented, "that's exactly what I thought an English person would be like." We got on well, and before leaving Adelaide she invited me to stay at her family home in Auckland. That's how I came to visit NZ for the first time, but more on that later. Next I travelled the Great Ocean Road all the way back to Melbourne. A particularly memorable stop was Naracoorte Caves National Park. It looked great in the brochure with people standing looking at stalactites and stalagmites in the huge warmly lit caverns. But to get there you have to leopard crawl through many metres of dark claustrophobic spaces deep underground. I took my helmet off because it was annoying me, and the leader immediately told me to put it back on because, "if the helmet doesn't fit through, you don't fit." I panicked and told him I wanted to go back, but he ordered me to calm down because I was scaring the children in the group. It wasn't possible for him to escort me out, so I turned back and made my own way. As soon as I was facing the opposite direction to the others, all I had was the light of my headlamp and although it was only about twenty metres back to the entrance, I was terrified the whole time. I've never been so happy to see the sky as when I emerged from that cave.

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