Feeling the heat in... Lincolnshire?

In march 1774 Matthew Flinders was born in the Lincolnshire village of Donington. Although expected to follow in his father's and grandfather's footsteps to become a doctor, the boy, inspired by Robinson Crusoe, decided that he wanted the life of an explorer. A natural aptitude for mathematics allowed Flinders to teach himself navigation, and by the age of 16, he had been made midshipman in the Royal Navy.

Flinders established himself as a fine navigator and cartographer on his first voyage to Australia (then known as “Terra Australis” or “New Holland”) aboard HMS Reliance in 1795, arriving seven years after the first European settlement at Sydney. For his second voyage to Australia, in 1801, Flinders had been promoted to Commander of HMS Investigator. Under his command, Investigator became the first vessel to circumnavigate Australia, with Flinders charting much of the coastline with unprecedented accuracy.

And so it came to pass that 200 years later, two landlubber yellow-bellies (that's Lincolnshire folk, to the uninitiated), should find themselves among familiar names in a strange land. Though the region could hardly have been more different from his native Lincolnshire, Flinders must somehow have been reminded of that far-off place as he navigated the waters around the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia, for many a fenland town is there commemorated. Our first overnight stop in Flinders' Lincolnshire tribute act was quiet little Louth bay, with its white-sanded beach that provided a taste of things to come.

From Louth we skirted Boston Bay before pulling into Port Lincoln. We arrived just in time for the annual “Tunarama” festival, which celebrates the town's history as a tuna-fishing port (though I suspect they don't actually bring in much tuna there any more, not least because we failed to see tuna on sale anywhere at the festival!). The festival kicked off with an impressive hour-long parade, with every local organisation and society seemingly being represented. The local Celtic Society wheezed out a rousing bagpipe rendition of “Waltzing Matilda” as they marched past, which was, shall we say, a novel experience.

Perhaps the highlight of Tunarama was the boat-build challenge, in which teams of two people built a boat out of plywood in two hours before throwing their trust (and themselves) into their craft for a race around the harbour.

On the starter's gun the teams carried their “boats” to the water.

Needless to say the result was carnage. Several vessels sank at the starting line. Two craft were sufficiently buoyant to make a good fist of the course. The spirited battle ended with our favourite (the boat nearest the camera in the previous photo) just pipping the other to the post.
The other big event was the tuna-toss, where competitors sling a (plastic) tuna as far as possible. Randomly, Robson Greene of “Soldier Soldier” fame put in an appearance, tossing off a respectable 6.5 metres.

After the excitement of Tunarama, we retired to the scenic serenity of nearby Lincoln National Park for a couple of days. We camped in a fantastic spot above Spalding cove on the Donington Peninsula.

We took a hiking and cycling tour of the peninsula, and to Stamford Hill, exploring one expansive white-sand cove after another.

Moving out of Little Lincolnshire, our next port-of-call was Coffin Bay National Park, where we camped with heath goannas (the lizard in the pic).

On a hike around the bay we encountered a great many emus, all of whom were too quick for our old camera to catch, though their footprints were not. At six-foot plus, the emus leave a tread reminiscent of Jurassic Park's residents. On the right is that of a chick, its mother is in the middle and my size-5 is on the left.

For the last couple of days, we had noticed that it was mighty hot and sticky. When we got back to the main road and into radio-range, we found out that South Australia was in the grip of the hottest week for 100 years – no wonder we were feeling a bit toasty! On the hottest day, the state capital Adelaide was at 46 Celsius, dipping to just 33 at night. Phew, what a scorcher! Somehow on those hot hot days we would come across a beachy cove with a cool breeze, else we'd visit a local air-conditioned library. So that's how we got by.

Near Streaky Bay, we came across Murphy's Haystacks – colourful weather-sculpted granite outcrops known as inselbergs. We couldn't bear to hang around for long though – despite it being 8.30am, the temperature was well into the 30s, with only a hellish hot breeze to take the edge off.

After checking out a sea-lion colony near Murphy's Haystacks, all that remained for us to do in South Australia was to make the epic journey across the Nullarbor plain to Western Australia. On the only road through the Nullarbor - the Eyre Highway – it's 1200km from Ceduna (the last town in SA) to Norseman (the first town in WA), as this sign at the border-town of Eucla points out. The several “towns” marked on the map along the road, are actually just roadhouses, which are glorified (and very pricey) service stations.

“Nullarbor” comes from the Latin for “no trees”, which turned out to be a fair description of only a surprising short stretch of the journey. The road actually skirts only the southern edge of the true Nullarbor, which, being near the sea, receives sufficient rain for trees to grow in most places. The other surprise was that the plain was blissfully cool, providing welcome relief from the blistering hetawave.

Where the Nullarbor meets the sea, you can get a hint of the geology of the plain. The Nullarbor is an ancient limestone seabed, 300 metres thick in places. 20 million years ago shells and other marine organisms settled on the seabed. Some 3 million years ago, the bed was gently raised to form a huge plateau, 700kn long and 300km wide. Beneath the surface are Australia's most extensive cave systems, all of which have now been closed to the public due to the high mortality rate among explorers.

The Nullarbor also can also claim Australia's longest stretch of dead straight road (147km), which Andy found he could quite happily traverse hands-free!

After a couple of days solid driving, we were thoroughly bored with all the songs on our iPod and and slightly sickened from watching prodigious quantities of road-kill zoom past, but otherwise we made it across with body and soul intact. The next instalment will follow our journey along the south coast of WA.

On the road again

Edna (our new camping wagon) required some last-minute attention before we could hit the road. The mechanic to whom we took her spotted a cracked inlet manifold and dodgy thermostat, which were duly replaced. Then we bade our fond farewells to Melbourne and the Bowers clan and jumped on the Princes Freeway heading southwest. The road met the coast at Torquay, where it became The Great Ocean Road. At the outset, the scenery was rugged yet serene.

Our first night in the new accommodation was spent in the small seaside town of Apollo Bay. It's the first town along the coast that is sufficiently far from Melbourne so as to be spared the commercialisation that comes with weekend mass-tourism. Indeed, an evening stroll revealed the beach to be nearly deserted.

As we continued along the Great Ocean Road, the serene seascape gave way to furious waves savagely pounding at a scarred shore. At around Princetown, we came upon The Apostles – the much-photographed megaliths that stand stubbornly in the surf, receiving a relentless beating for their troubles. As the name suggests, there were once twelve Apostles. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their unending punishment, there now stand only six.

But don't weep for the loss of the Apostles. As is the nature of such things, new ones are being born all the time. For instance, this formation known as “London Bridge” was until recently joined to the land by a second arch. That arch fell in 1990, leaving two alarmed tourists to be rescued by helicopter from the newly formed island.

Not all of the sea's erosive handywork is obvious from the shore. Around 100 metres inland from London Bridge is this huge blowhole. It was formed by a roof-collapse in a section of a tunnel that has been carved out by the waves. We were told the tunnel stretches 200 metres inland from the sea, with this being the only open section.

Along the way we took a brief sojourn in Warrnambool to repair a heater pipe elbow that was leaking coolant.

Further west, our passage through Portland coincided with a stock-car and sprint-car race meeting. The racing happens on a well-watered speedway track, so that we (and Edna) received a decent caking of mud as the cars sped around the arena. The racing was surprisingly competitive and professional, considering we out in the sticks.

The next day we took a drive out to Cape Bridgewater. Among the standard jumble of ruggedly beautiful coves and headlands that we had by now come to expect, was a rock formation that the guidebook described as a “petrified forest”. Puzzlingly though, the formation consisted of clusters rough, hollow, vertical tubes, which little resembled trees. In fact, these rather unprepossessing structures turned out to be a bizarre phenomenon known as “solution pipes”. An info panel informed us that a pipe is formed when an acidic solution puddles at the base of a plant growing in limestone sand. The acid then seeps downwards, dissolving minerals as it goes. This mineral solution then cements the sand to form a hard trunk-shaped pipe under the ground, which becomes exposed when the surrounding sand is eroded away.

As we continued along the Prince's Highway, we stopped to ponder the improbable blueness of aptly named Blue Lake, located in a volcanic crater in the town of Mount Gambier.

At Canunda National Park, we encountered our first taste of Australia's truly wild coastline. Though lacking conventional attractiveness, we came to appreciate that the scrubby, arid shore, with its giant (almost impenetrable) sand dunes and pungent salt lakes has a magic all of its own.

Passing through Kingston Southeast, we just had to stop for a photo with Larry the Lobster.

After blasting north past Adelaide (in case you hadn't noticed, we're not really "doing" the cities on this trip), we found ourselves in the Southern Flinders Ranges. Away from the coast, the weather is pretty bloody hot, to be frank - well into the 30s celsius. So we took a short walk through narrow Alligator Gorge, before heading back to the coolth of the coast.

At Port Augusta, we took a pleasant stroll through the recently opened Arid Lands Botanical Garden. To be honest, to our untrained eyes the garden resembled much of the surrounding countryside. Funded by major polluters and land-users in the area (like mining companies), the garden has a strong conservation mission. The collection is attempting to preserve the exquisitely adapted scrubland plants from all over Australia that introduced species and development are rapidly wiping out.

At Port Augusta our route turned south into the Eyre Peninsula. We stayed a blustery night at the appealing seaside town of Arno Bay.

In the morning we battled high winds to take a stroll on the boadwalk through the nearby Mangrove forest. Mangroves grow along the brackish water where streams meet the sea. They are able to tolerate daily tidal immersion by projecting pneumatophores (the twig-like structures in the photo) up from the roots to "breathe" above the water's surface. They cope with the high salinity of their situation by exuding salt from special glands in their leaves (we couldn't resist a lick!). Often considered as wasteground good only to be cleared for industrial plants or shrimp farms, mangrove forests actually perform important ecological functions such as sheltering juvenile fish and stablising coastal land. Thus, widespread destruction of mangroves (particularly in Southeast Asia) has contributed to collapsing fish stocks and coastal erosion. Some scientists even suggest that the destruction wrought by the 2004 tsunami would have been significantly less had mangrove forests not been cleared from vast stretches of the affected Asian shorelines.

Of course, a week in the wilds of Australia would not be complete without spotting some wee beasties. As well as emus, wallabies and kangaroos, we spotted a number of these bobtail lizards in Coorong National Park, south of Adelaide.

We also spotted some cuddly-looking koalas along the Great Ocean Road, though they apparently didn't want to come down for a hug (I apologise for the crappy nature photograpy, we only have 2x digital zoom!).

Our next leg will take us past many a familiar-sounding town (Donington, Sleaford Bay, Louth Bay, Boston...) to Port Lincoln.

An Aussie Chrimbo

On landing in Melbourne on 22rd December, our chauffeur (Dad) conveyed us to our lodgings, namely my aunt Gill's beautiful house in the leafy suburb of Ivanhoe. The photo also shows Banjo in the foreground, one of the two adorable Jack Russells in residence.

A couple of days later Gill and husband Rob hosted the Bowers family Christmas, laying on a marvellous spread for some 21 people! Unfortunately, we don't seem to have taken any photos during the feast, just some afterwards when I've decided that wearing the table decorations is a good idea (nothing to do with the excellent local vino).

On Boxing Day, we jumped into a rental car with Dad, his girlfriend Catherine and her son Jonathan and toddled off to Guthega in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales for a few days. After the 10 hour drive we arrived at Doorak - the ski lodge where we were to stay (of course it's summer here at the moment, so there's no snow).

As we climbed into the mountains, the lowland bush gave way to sparser forests of snow gum, one of the 700 Eucalyptus species that dominate the Australian flora. The gnarled trunks embrace emergent rocks and huddle low to the ground in an effort to cling to the unforgiving mountains.

Bush fires in 2002 stripped huge stands of snow gums of their greenery. Being infrequently subjected to fire, snow gums regenerate more slowly than their lowland cousins. The new shoots of the snow gums grow from the roots, leaving the defoliated limbs as a spectral reminder of the old forest.

In places the extent of that fire is starkly obvious, like here at the boundary between burnt (right) and unburnt (left) forest.

Over the following days we did some gentle hiking through the bleak landscape of Mount Kosciuszko National Park, in which the lodge is situated. The weather changed by the hour, bouncing from fierce sunshine to rain and even sleet at times.

To cross the Snowy River on one walk, the menfolk gallantly pulled the ladies across on the “flying fox” (well, we do have to make them feel needed in this liberated age).

Further up-river, we crossed again on a wobbly old suspension bridge.

Our evenings were spent at base (there's nowhere else to go!), either having a barbeque on the balcony or being fed like kings by Catherine from the communal kitchen.

One chilly and blustery day we climbed Mount Kosciuszko - the highest peak in Australia, again crossing the Snowy River en route. The first European to climb the peak named it after an admired compatriot, the Polish freedom fighter General Tadeusz Kosciuszko.

At just 2238 metres (7310 feet), it hardly ranks among the highest peaks in the world, but the haunting beauty of the landscape makes the diminutive Kosciuszko a fitting crown for this ancient continent.

We arrived back in Melbourne from Guthega late in the afternoon on New Year's Eve. Andy and I quickly showered and changed and headed into town for the fireworks display. We arrived at the Yarra river in town in time for the first round of fireworks at 9pm. Having realised there was no booze allowed in the the streets, and no chance of beating the scrum to get into a pub, we decided to head back to Ivanhoe for midnight, where we shared a very civilised glass (or three) of wine with Gill and Rob, and watched the hugely entertaining fireworks in Sydney on TV!

As we couldn't start our van search on New Year's Day (being a public holiday), we headed out on the tram to the beach suburb of St. Kilda to do some sightseeing. The photo shows the famous entrance to the Luna Park funfair.

Our van-hunting started in earnest on Jan 2nd. After 3 or 4 days of viewing the good, the bad, and the oh-so-ugly (we even blew one up on a test drive!), we settled on a commercial Ford Transit (an empty van) with 145,000km on the clock. Andy beat the dealer down to a good price, and we drove it away, complete with roadworthy certificate and registration.

The Salvos (that's the Salvation Army in English) supplied us with wood with which to construct an interior for the van, in the form of a wardrobe and bookshelf unit.

Andy toiled tirelessly for several days to construct an elegant and functional interior, in which a table and bench arrangement collapses to form a bed.

There is also a kitchen unit with lift-up work-surfaces and built-in stove (a photo should appear here soon...). Using Grandma's sewing machine, I ran up some cushion covers for the sections of sponge mattress that make up the bed-cum-bench seat cushions, as well as some curtains. And hey presto, a camper van is born! We call the van Dame Edna because she's an Australian Tranny. Ha ha.

You'll be pleased to know that getting the van together wasn't a case of “all work and no play”. One weekend, Gill and Rob took us out of the city to their lovely vineyard for a picnic.

Another night we went to see my very talented cousin James (Gill and Rob's son, on the left in the photo) playing keyboard with his jazz/funk band.

We hope to hit the road in a day or two. We'd really like to thank Gill and Rob for their awesome hospitality – it was so good we'll be back for more when we return to Melbourne in June!