Alright, alright alright!
I hope everyone has recovered from their Turkey comas and I also hope that Santa was very generous with his time.
Can confirm that I’ve learnt my lesson from last week’s edition and we shall not be crashing and burning this time round.
This week has been very up and down for us.
CURRENT STATE OF PLAY
Currently we are shacked up in the middle of Melbourne with my brother (DL) and his housemates. So we are very grateful for them taking us hobos in and letting us run their hot water cold every day.
For those that haven’t been keeping too much of a tab on us, this is our second stint with my brother. Post the chundering shenanigans, we boosted here pretty quickly. We needed somewhere to recover some energy and beat the weather. But, it did mean we were in Melbourne a little earlier than what we all expected (surprise Samuel L Jackson style). We didn’t want to spend about 3+ weeks in Melbourne scabbing off my bro et al, so we decided we needed to squeeze another adventure in prior to the Christmas festivities.
The Grampians called our name.
Before we headed back out in Frodo, we did a bit of socialising. The one thing about being on the road is you realise how important close friendships and relationships are. Even though we’ve met a lot of people whilst travelling around the country, and I would like to hope we've made a few actual friends, a lot of those are only fleeting. So, it was so very nice to catch up with some old friends.
Back to the Grampians.
What I didn’t realise about the Grampians was the adventure hub they are.
I initially thought it was another nice mountain range to boost up and down. I was quite wrong.
On leaving Melbourne and rolling into Halls Gap, about 3-3.5 hours later, we saw adventure vehicle after adventure vehicle drive by.
Mountain bikes, hikers, canoes, kayaks, 4x4s, caravans, backpacking-vans, caravanning-vans - you get the picture.
To us, a little slice of heaven dropped down to Earth.
The initial reason we wanted to go to the Grampians was for hiking. I had read, before we left on our trip, a new multi day hike and been opened across the Grampian ranges and it looked epic! 164kms and 13 days of mountain hiking - got me dribbling in anticipation!
That was the plan anyways.......
And like everything we do, things never go to plan.
The most unexpected thing about the Grampians, not the length of the hike, or the crazy angles the mountain range sits at, but the camping situation. I don’t believe there is anywhere else in Australia where you can camp on two opposite ends of the spectrum so dramatically.
As with every place we go to, we scope out the camping situation. How far the camps are from where we want to adventure. What’s the cost build up i.e. free, donation fee, National Park fees or caravan park fees. It was while researching up our options for Frodo camping and then the hiking camping, we stumbled onto this wild situation.
The Grampians are littered with free car camps. I don’t think we’ve seen so many free camping opportunities since the Pilbara (in the North-West WA). It took me by surprise. Most other National Parks we have been to in Victoria, mainly along the southern coat, have had no free camps. So this was a nice bit of unexpected news. On the other side of the coin, though, I then looked into the hiking camping. This is where the shock factor roared its ugly head. A a neat wake up slap across the face from Vic Parks.
$50 per night.
That is how much it cost to book a campsite on this Grampians hike, or as it’s called, the Grampians Peaks Trail.
$50 per night, for a goat track, a patch of dirt, maybe a pit toilet in some places.
If you hiked the entirety of the Trail, you would spend $600 for 12 nights on trail.
F***ing wild.
Max of 2 people per campsite - so it could be $25 per night for the two of us. But I feel for you if you are a solo hiker.
I know a few of the other 'Great Walks' throughout Australia that are $25 per night per person. As a group, that gets closer to the price above, but if you are going solo, I don't understand why you need to be paying more than double everywhere else for the privilege. I also know in Queensland, camp costs for overnight hikes are between $5 and $10 per night.
Why is there such a massive disparity in costs to hike a goat track and pitch your tent on a patch of dirt across the county?
Anywho, you may or may not investigate this further. You may or may not have a look at the Peaks Trail. You might then read a few lines and go ok, they’ve put a few million dollars into the trail, they are just trying to recoup their money or keep it serviceable or whatever. I get this. But, as a Government entity, who is trying to create tourism opportunities and events for their parks and places, I really do disagree with the current modus operandi to spend millions of tax payer dollars ‘for betterment’ (betterment usually means swanky new visitor centre or silver plated walkway) and then up the cost of entry or camping fees. It’s pandering to those with cash or who come from overseas. I don't care if you are private and upgrade facilities or whatever. But I firmly believe that National Parks should be open and accessible to all, on all cash levels, to enjoy. I don’t think that you should be paying anywhere close to $40 (WA) or $50 per night for a public campsite.
You might have guessed from this that we didn’t end up doing the Peaks Trail. Which is a bit of a shame.
We did do some epic day hikes.
First hike up was the Pinnacles Loop. A tick over 11kms, and essentially straight up and then straight down. Well the first half was more of a gradual up that followed a river through a valley and up the arse end of the range. The second half was just straight down. And I mean straight down. We did a section of stairs where KL said if she stopped her legs would cramp up. She said they already starting to shake 😂.
The Grampians have a very unique geology. They are very different to what we’ve seen anywhere else. The mountain ranges are razor sharp, on a lean and encapsulate big valleys that have rivers and lakes running through them. It’s almost as if a giant has thrown a massive rock into sloppy mud, but the explosion of mud away from the rock was then frozen in mid explosion. They then took the rock away to leave the wacky mountain and valley ranges. Very cool.
The second hike was a 12km waterfall loop. The first part of the hike took us deep into a gumtree forest before twisting back out onto Mackenzie River and up several falls to the epic Mackenzie Falls. The gumtree section was a bit meh, but the stretch along the river was beautiful. The ultimate killer were the stairs at the end. Halfway up I told KL that I was glad we did the loop rather than up and down the stairs like most others. Knowing, going down, that we had to go back up them would have been a major buzzkill.
Besides the gold plated hiking campsites, the biggest surprise to me was the 4x4 tracks.
So many!
Our entire first day was just driving around and doing the Grampians Loop. Not an official 4x4 track, but one that’s made up of many other 4x4 tracks and roads. It was an absolute doozy. We hit a few spots that were so gnarly we had to back track. Some steep, some water crossings and some proper switchback gravel tracks. Thankfully there had not been any rain around for a few days, because if these were wet, we would have been in some trouble in places - especially without a functioning winch!
We spent 4 days mooching around the Grampians and then we decided to head back to the Great Ocean Road for round 2!
Our first experience of the GOR was breathtaking. It was windy, it was rainy and there were sullen clouds floating around. This combo made the road along the coastline very dramatic. But, we wanted to experience it in slightly better weather and we wanted a lazy day at the beach - in the beach, out the beach and mango smoothie.
Can confirm there was a very quick turnaround between jumping in and jumping out. The water was ice cold. It didn’t take too long before us tropical mammals needed to get out for risk of losing a digit or two.
The other reason we wanted to head back along GOR was to get some sweet drone shots of Frodo driving along the road.
What we didn’t plan on was one of the locals having a crack at us for renting some of their airspace. When I saw the talons coming at me I got the dreaded stomach turns and my instant reactions was she is a goner. No way I was fishing her out of the wild Bass Straight. Fortunately, wee dronie is a tough nugget and we didn’t even have to make any running repairs.
BRING ON CHRISTMAS!
Food, bevvies and festivities.
How lucky we are!
This is a different type of Christmas.
We stayed in Melbourne and did a very small household Christmas. DL went full Chef mode and we got treated to a proper 3 course bonanza. Well to be fair, Brodie set up the entrees, DL set up the big old leggaham and tators! While KL and I went full conk on dessert.
I’m so incredibly proud of how our cheesecake turned out. Turns out you can whip out a 5 star cheesecake from the back of a car 😉.
LOOKAHEAD
The next week or so sees us mooching around Melbourne.
We’re going to spend some quality time with my bro and sightsee a bit of Melbourne.
Potential plan of attack will be to head down to Wilsons Prom for a few nights. We want to hit the Southernmost point on the mainland! Another one of our key bucket list items for the trip.
This will either happen before we leave or afterwards.
We are also in the process of setting up our post Expedition Australia situation. We shall leak more details about this in the upcoming weeks and months, but it is quite exciting 😁.
Hopefully better luck next week! Anyways, keep on keepin’ on, and, as always;
Thanks for reading 🙂
Love KL & GL.
Key Travel Stats:
Distance travelled: 30,706kms
Wild animal of the week: Santa Clause
Current Map posi:
