Doing Epic Shit Down Under

  Last Tuesday morning we were picked up in Melbourne for our Great Ocean Walk trip, an iconic 105km walk along the southern Victorian coast west of Melbourne (for those, like me, who didn’t pay attention to the metric system in elementary school 1.6 kilometers = 1 mile).  Advertised as a tour with a maximum group size of 12 guests, we were pleasantly surprised to find that there were only 3 of us on the trip: Melanie, myself, and John – a retired prosecutor from Perth in his ‘70s (I continue to be amazed by the fitness and stamina of the older participants who occasionally show up on these type of trips - I thought we were old!), along with our 2 guides (more about them in a moment) .   The benefit of doing this trip late in the Australian autumn (the last departure of the season) was that not many others (i.e., people who actually understand the seasons in Australia) were interested in doing a late May trip.  We ended up crossing paths with only a couple of ot...

  Just back from our week long Great Ocean Walk, catching up on our time in Melbourne prior to the walk....  On May 17th, post our stay on Kangaroo Island, we flew to Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, and the the 2 nd largest city in Australia with a population of over 4 million.   Australia has a landmass roughly comparable to the U.S. (excluding Alaska and Hawaii), but a population of just 26 million (compared to our 336 million) – I think that in and of itself explains a lot of the differences between the two countries!   Over 50% of the Australian population lives in just 5 cities:   Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide (we have, or will be, visiting all but Brisbane on this trip).   Like most big cities, Melbourne was filled with skyscrapers and mobbed with a true multicultural blend of people.   Our AirBnB overlooked the famous Victoria Markets and was on the edge of Chinatown, which had every variety of Asian food you could possibl...

  About an hour and a half drive down the beautiful Fleurieu Peninsula south of Adelaide, and a 45 minute ferry ride southwest across the Backstairs Passage, lies Kangaroo Island (or “KI” as the locals call it), the 3rd largest island of Australia.  Congrats to “Anonymous” who correctly identified Tasmania - one of my personal favorite spots in the world - as one of the 2 Australian Islands larger than KI; the other is Melville Island in the Northern Territory. If you were to sail south and miss the Island, your next landfall would be Antarctica! KI was discovered in 1802 by the British explorer Matthew Flinders.  While I am usually reluctant to say European explorers “discovered” places that already had thriving indigenous populations, KI was actually uninhabited when Flinders landed. There is evidence that there once was an aboriginal population on the island, but for unknown reasons they were gone by the time Flinders arrived.  Nearly 20 times the size of Martha...