After driving down the East coast of New South Wales, we headed West through Victoria towards Melbourne. Here we planned a two-day stop before heading to the Great Ocean Road.
South Coast of Victoria
Coming from the Sapphire Coast to Victoria we followed the A1 through beautiful National Parks all the way to Sale. Since we haven’t spent any money on accommodation on the road trip we wanted to continue to keep the trip as cheap as possible. In Sale, we left the highway and made our way towards the coast. After a quick stop at the 90-mile-beach, we continued to our free campsite for the night at the Reeves Beach. We tried to enjoy the oceanside a bit but the wind was too cold and too strong so we head back to our campground. Even though the campground is protected by dunes, we had strong wind currents hitting our tent at night, which interrupted our sleep, but that’s camping life and we love it anyways.
Wilsons Promontory National Park
One of the highlights of our road trip was “The Prom”. Due to my sprained ankle, we couldn’t enjoy the park to its fullest because we couldn’t do any hikes. However, we could still enjoy some lookouts and shorter walks. First, we did the Cotters Lake Walk and were a bit disappointed because we didn’t see a lot of the promised wildlife. At least on the way back, we saw two kangaroos and a wallaby.
To give my foot a little rest after that first walk, we drove to the Tidal River campsite to cook some instant noodle lunch. On the way there, there are plenty of lookouts over the stunning, rough coastline.
On the way back, we did the Prom Wildlife Walk and we were right away greeted by three emus at the car park. Further along the way, we saw plenty of wild kangaroos, a lot of them are tagged for research purposes. Wallabies and emus were also around to admire, but we were still missing one of the typical Australian animals, the wombat. So we continued walking and after another twenty minutes, Ale saw something on the side of the path. You are guessing right, it was a WOMBAT. After it disappeared in the bush, we followed it with some distance and got the chance to have a little photo session with it. After this amazing encounter, we continued happily to our campsite.
Originally, we had planned to camp directly in The Prom but there are only two campsites; each charge around 50 AUD a night which was way over our budget. So we stayed 45 minutes outside the park at the Franklin River Reserve for free. It is a very basic campsite but has running water and shelter. Being close to the highway it was the perfect stop for us between Wilsons Promontory NP and Melbourne. We heard some strange grunting that night and weren’t sure what it was, and to be honest, we weren’t too curious to find out in the darkness, but we found out later that this noise came from koalas! So we hope to actually see rather than just hear them, further along the road.
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