In Search of the San Andreas Fault

Australia is a land of gorgeous turquoise water, pounding surf, mountains, cosmopolitan cities and  rolling countryside.  It’s also a land of great food and wine.  After I asked David about taking a food tour in Melbourne, our last stop, I realized we had created our own fabulous food tour of Australia!  In our attempt to learn as much as we could, we sampled the food and wine everywhere. No winery or cellar door, cheese maker or chocolatier was neglected. We sampled both Haigh’s Chocolates and Koko Black in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, chocolate from a small town called Dunkeld near the Grampian Mountains and Tasmanian chocolate, not to be confused with the Tasmanian Devil.  These “golf balls” and “tennis balls” are  a testament to the skill and creativity of the Aussie chocolatiers found just outside of Torquay.

Australia cherishes its local purveyors.

The wine maker, cheese maker, chocolatier, farmer, and fisherman are all supported by local shops and restaurants. Local artists are also thrown in to the mix. In the Barossa Valley, as an example, we noticed the same beautifully crafted, colorful pitcher at many local shops and restaurants.

Locally sourced food was offered with a sense of pride. Wine is everywhere. There are a multitude of wine regions and we managed to try several. Even small cafes had delicious food. A place you’d expect to have something like burgers and hot dogs or tuna sandwiches would have beautifully crafted plates. In a tiny town in the state of Victoria, we found a gourmet food shop filled with local foods. National park cafes and restaurant served food in a similar style.

At the Tasmanian chocolate factory, we bought big bars of chocolate. How could we not?  The chocolate shop was on the map, just as if it was a local sight to see.

We ate local cheeses in the Barossa Valley, Kangaroo Island, Timboon off the Great Ocean Road,

and almost everywhere else.

Wine, wine everywhere, Riesling, Shiraz, and Pinot Noir are the big grapes in the southern part of the country.  It was easy to sample different wines in Australia.  Like the US, it boasts a number of different wine regions. But alas, we could not get to them all.

We managed to pull ourselves away from this wonderful bounty to see amazing sights, beginning with the Sydney Harbor Bridge and the Opera House, then to wine country around Adelaide, Tasmania, Kangaroo Island, the Great Barrier Reef, the powerful Southern Ocean from the Great Ocean Road, and last, but not least, Melbourne.

We saw gorgeous orange and beige cliffs falling into the turquoise sea on the Southern Ocean Road, with blow holes, sea arches and caves carved into the cliffs.

There were beautiful white sand beaches and coral reefs filled with purple rimmed mammoth clams and iridescent fish in The Great Barrier Reef.

Bucolic vineyards

spilled over rolling green hills and in the MacLaren Vale ran down to oceanside cliffs.

We walked on a mile long steel walkway 100 feet above the ground that crossed through the rainforest in Cape Otway National Park,

hiked to several waterfalls, experienced small towns and the bustling cities of Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. We drove over winding roads in South Australia and Tasmania, and swam in the Great Barrier Reef. We walked in ancient caves with 50,000 year old dirt, fossils, stalagmites and stalactites near the Coonawarra wine region.

We were never far from the ocean, the Coral Sea in the Barrier Reef, the Southern Ocean in the south and the Tasman Sea off Tasmania. We experienced howling winds and angry waves in Tasmania.  I can only imagine how difficult it is to sail in the Sydney to Hobart race through the Tasman Sea. There’s pounding surf everywhere. Huge waves roll in from Antarctica, 2000 miles to the south. South Australia, by the way, is about the same distance from the South Pole as San Francisco is from the North Pole.

Wild animals were out for our viewing pleasure. Kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, possum, huge seals, echidnas, technicolor tropical fish and gorgeous birds.

Our first sighting of a kangaroo, unfortunately, was a dead kangaroo, feet splayed out in the back. Wildlife becoming road kill is a huge problem in Australia. The kangaroos and wallabies tend to come out at dawn and dusk to feed. Nighttime presents the biggest challenge. When we ventured out to pick up Indian food in the town of Hall’s Gap, we saw one kangaroo cross the street in the dark in the middle of town. A few minutes later, two kangaroos were on the road in front of us. We stopped, they stopped and then decided to head back into the fields. They were  the “kangaroo in the headlights.”

The kangaroos were by reception when we pulled into Hall’s Gap and dining outside our room as we checked in.

We waited for them the next night, but they grazed further down the field. The next morning when I awoke, David told me to turn over slowly. The kangaroos were grazing right next to the window!

The owner of the inn on Kangaroo Island took drove us around after dark through some fields so we could see huge numbers of kangaroos and wallabies.

But perhaps one of the best sightings was of the wallaby who had a baby in her pouch. She and her baby were both grazing at the same time. The baby’s head popped out of the mother’s pouch and as the mother bent over to eat grass and leaves, the baby was also grazing.  You can see the baby’s head in front of the mother’s stomach and below the front paws.  The lower part of her pouch is the gray portion between her tail and back legs.

Another fabulous site was the “clam wall” in the Great Barrier Reef. This was a huge reef with mammoth clams. When I say mammoth, I mean mammoth. The clams were easily 3 feet across and had a dark purple material rimmed with green inside the shell. Little clams had attached themselves to rocks and when we swam over them, the purple material “clammed up.”

The fish were amazing, dressed in technicolor turquoise, blue, yellow, black, and pink.   I kept saying OMG into my snorkel.  Everywhere we looked there were gorgeous fish.

The wind and the waves created by the bad weather in Tasmania felt like it was straight out of a movie, except it was real.

MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, was unlike any other museum experience. Located in Hobart, Tasmania on the grounds of a vineyard, the museum is built into the side of a cliff. The beautiful, sheer sandstone walls of the cliff formed one side of the museum.

The grounds were spectacular with its vineyard, outdoor performance space, restaurant and wine bar. But one of the best parts about the museum was the ride to get there.

A catamaran, decked out with a bar, fun stools, a cow, and a plastic sheep or two, sailed up the Derwent River from the downtown docks to the museum. It was the most unique means of getting to a museum that we’ve experienced.

Dining out in the bush with kangaroos right next door was also another fun experience. Our tour around Kangaroo Island included lunch in the bush while kangaroos grazed on their food nearby.  We suffered through chicken salad, Kangaroo Island wine, cheese, honey, and olives while the kangaroos foraged for leaves and grass.

The arches,  cliffs, caves, and blowholes along the Tasman peninsula were spectacular.

I loved meeting so many people who were fun to talk with like the guy who worked at his brother’s  funky cafe and winery, Basalt,  outside Port Fairey.

More great hits:

When you use a GPS to locate something like a large park, remember it will locate the park for you, but it may not be an entrance to that very park. We loved following the GPS when it sent us to a park, but apparently the park was at the bottom of a cliff below a farm! We got to drive by a whole lot of cows and get chased by a dog, but then had to backtrack about 7 miles to the main road and start again to find an entrance.

Before the Naaracorte Caves, we zoomed through the Coonawarra stopping at a winery in the district.  We stepped into the old world and had a bit of France with us.  We  picked this particular winery because we had had a bottle of their wine the previous night and it was memorable or so we thought.  The owner graciously welcomed us into the shearing shed, now winery.

David talked about the great wine vintage 2006 we’d enjoyed the previous evening.  Later we realized the winery had started in 2011, so we had stopped at the wrong place!  It was still a fun and the winery owners were totally gracious and never said a word!  So much for memorable wine.

Naaracorte Caves:  Standing on 50,000 year old dirt in a cave encrusted with ancient seashells, now miles from the ocean.

Laneways and Arcades:  The charming and bustling laneways and the elegant arcades in Sydney, but particularly in Melbourne.

Marriages at the Registry in Melbourne: On a Thursday afternoon I encountered brides coming and going.  The first bridal party had family and friends posing with the happy couple on the steps of the registry.  There was a sea of wedding gowns in the nearby park.   Several couples had just married or were on their way to tie the knot.

The fresh abalone, oysters, scallops and mussels we enjoyed while freezing under the tarp covered patio in the rain at the Freycinet Marine Farm in Tasmania.

The two nights in Otway National Park at the Lightkeeper’s Cottage that had no WIFI, or food available.  But the best part was the lack of central heating!  Fortunately David’s scouting skills are intact and he was able to light a fire.  Nature was not allowed to call those nights.  There was no way I was getting out of bed.

The feisty pelican in Adelaide who happened to be the biggest pelican I’d ever seen.  Then again, I haven’t met very many pelicans in my life!

There’s more, there’s always more, if I decide to write a little more about the different parts of Australia.  But I will publish a post called “Australia from the Ground Up” and another called “Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign in Australia.”