Extreme Beauties

Just a little side note. The internet connection here in the south is very slow, one could also say shitty..... hence it's possible that we can't upload our reports daily, but we are still writing diligently. So don't be surprised when we upload them all at once.

Yesterday, we left all the other viewpoints behind in favor of the 12 Apostles. We have to make up for that today, of course. Once again, we are the last ones to leave the campsite and drive back 10 km to London Bridge.

Until 2009, it was a proper bridge that could be crossed on foot. Then, without warning, a part of it collapsed. The tourists who were on the part cut off from the mainland had to be rescued by helicopters.

Next stops: "Arch"

followed by "Loch Ard Gorge",

"Gibson Steps"

and "Twelve Apostles" during the day.

We leave the coastal road for a detour to a Tree-Walk. It goes through very hilly terrain.

Hidden in the rainforest of the Otway Tree-Walk, with the possibility of also riding a zip line (a kind of cable car with a harness around the waist) through the rainforest. Carsten would have preferred that, but I'm more of a scaredy-cat when it comes to that kind of thing (but I can live with it), so we only did the walk.

The Tree-Walk is something like our treetop walkway. Actually, it's silly to run down the mountain just to go back up to the treetops on a steel structure, and then go back down the steel structure to climb up the mountain again.

But it was pretty cool, with giant ferns, trees that "shed" their bark,

and then walking on the grating up high. The tower is the highlight of the Tree-Walk.

It was quite windy today. Did the tower sway? I was always on the lookout for which of the surrounding trees was closest. Parallel to that, I thought about what to do if the tower fell. Thank goodness it held. It was also cool to have an extension they built there. Hanging freely in the air, you could swing the extension quite nicely. That was fun.

The return journey was once again very adventurous. Somehow our navigation system always leads us on strange paths. So we drove on a narrow, very very very curvy mountain road through the rainforest. You never knew what to expect after the next curve. Luckily, no one was coming towards us.

I was already pretty tense. It felt like the road would never end. But Schahaatz managed it super well and brought us safely back to the coast and to the campsite.

Oh, I haven't told you anything about the state we are currently visiting.

Victoria, the smallest state on the mainland in terms of area with the highest population density, is located in the southeast of Australia. The capital is Melbourne. There is diverse work being done here, including in the service sector, the automotive industry, brown coal and gypsum mining, agriculture and livestock farming, wine production, and more.