Tropical thunderstorms in the night and rain in the morning. Unperturbed, we make our way along the coast through the Otway rain forest. It's a great road. One minute you're driving along a beautiful coast, the next, twisting your way through giant trees and ancient ferns. These two scenes fight for dominance for miles, then we reach our destination - a tree top walk deep in the rain forest. But being lazy we don't walk through the forest, we fly! Well, zip-fly. See this video to have an idea what I'm talking about:
Zip fly video
I couldn't take a camera on the lines and the official snaps won't get published for a day or two, but we strapped ourselves to these:
Hooked onto these:
Which were attached to steel cables 30 meters up in the canopy. Sarah was attached to me, but Tom was on his own and he did brilliantly!
Walking to our first 'cloud pad' we came face to face with our first deadly animal (Tom very excited). It's a carnivorous snail (run for your lives!!). Apparently it eats other snails and grubs by using its tongue to inject an acid into its victim's body, turning it to mush which it then sucks out. Lovely.
There is a tree called the Myrtle beech with small round leaves that has been around for the last 160 million years. On it lives a spider of similar vintage that only lives on this particular tree. The view in the canopy is stunning, miles of straight vertical eucalyptus trees stand tall on one side (must get the beast in our garden trimmed if the specimens here are anything to go by). The other has dense Mountain Ash.
No need to fear the snakes, it was too wet, but this brought out the lychees (no victims in our party).
The rain held off until the last zip - the photo op line. Oh well. Caitriona discovered that her new raincoat is not as advertised ;) As a result of the rain, the trees started to produce foam that rain down the bark, looked very strange.
To sum it up, not as scary as you might think, but the trees do sway about a lot in the wind which can be a little disconcerting.
After our 3 adrenalin packed hours we head to the 12 apostles in the rain and mist. Ever hopeful that we would actually get to see them. With the mist enveloping the car, we could easily have been driving in Cornwall or Kerry. As soon as we arrive, the clouds parted and we had blazing sunshine. All very well, but all I could do was moan because that meant taking photos became a pain due to having to take them into the sun. Sunrise or set are the best times to go, but I should be able to work a little HDR magic on what I have when I get home.
It was very windy on top of the cliff. That's what Tom is moaning about in this pic.
After this it's a long drive into Melbourne. We made excellent time due to being the only car on the road. More sun and as an added bonus, cheery kids singing Christmas songs.
We are now in the bright lights of the city at another YHA and this one is ram-packed with the intended clientele. I'm writing this whilst unwinding, but won't upload it until the morning. Looking forward to the pyjama party!
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