Chasing Waterfalls
This past Saturday my dear friend Billie came up to visit. She used to live in this area but since moving several hours East she hasn't been out this way in years -- usually I'm going over there to visit. But she was going to attend the airshow that's in this general area (well that's still an hour east of me) on Sunday she decided to come visit me. We decided to go visit some waterfalls.
She arrived at 0800, and I think we talked over coffee for at least an hour before heading out. Then our first stop was the magic book shed in the next little hamlet over -- it literally just looks like a nondescript shed but has a "BOOK SALE" sign out by the street and when you go in it's densely packed with shelves of books! I bought a Bill Bryson book (A Walk in the Woods) and Billie bought three books -- we're both big fans of books. (:
As for waterfalls, I thought I'd been to all the publicly accessible waterfalls but had more recently noticed one I hadn't been to -- "Sabine Falls," so we headed that way. To get there we a fair bit down a road I hadn't been down before deep into the Otway forest. The trail itself is official so it was well maintained, but because it's one of the lesser known waterfalls we didn't see anyone else there and it seemed much less trafficked, so that was nice. It was about a kilometer through thick foliage to get there. At the end there was a little viewing platform looking across across a foliage filled gorge to the waterfall. It was hard to get a good picture of the waterfall from there so here's the picture from my "Waterfalls of the Otways" book. It's apparently one of the tallest in the Otways.
After we got back to my car we wanted to find another waterfall from the book, which has the details of 226 local waterfalls in it ... but the damn book, while it does have maps in it, it doesn't have the waterfalls MARKED on the map. It just has a generic regional map. And the waterfalls have their GPS coordinates (in a kind of weird half decimal notation without punctuation (that is without the degree symbol or the decimal dot) so it was hard to figure out how to input even one waterfall into the phone to find its location and not really feasible to figure out which waterfalls were where from leafing through it. But by looking at a different waterfall brochure I had (I've got all the waterfall stuff!) we determined there was another waterfall we hadn't been to not too far away, just off the Great Ocean Road (the GOR).
So we drove down to the GOR and to the carpark for this other waterfall (Carisbrook Falls). The only other vehicle in the parking area was a van of the type people living the #vanlife live in, and moments after we parked a young man climbed out of the back pulling his shirt on followed by a young woman fixing her hair ... we suspect we interrupted their sexytime. It was a very short walk to this waterfall, during which Billie pointed out several interesting things about plants that I've already forgotten. Like Sabine Falls, this one also one couldnt' get very close, here's the picture I took from the viewing platform.
Then we crossed the road and poked around the tidepools a bit before continuing on.
We drove to the town of Apollo Bay and had a light lunch of prawns and scallops at a fish and chips place (actually the "fisherman's co-op" just by the marina). The view from here was really nice:
The guy sitting next to us overhearing us talking about various trips we've either taken across Australia or want to take, joined our conversation with some recommendations of his own. He apparently has a youtube channel about his sailing adventures.
From there we headed to a waterfall that we both actually had been to but not in a few years -- Marriner's Falls. My big book and all online sources reported it as closed, but we both had been there after the alleged date it was closed so were confident we could get in. I had stumbled upon it rather by accident I think and just stepped over the gate at the time.
It was at the back end of the valley Apollo Bay is located in, at the end of the road. Even though it's been closed since 2011, the carpark is still maintained. One can no longer simply step over the gate, there's a tall fence, but we found one just needed to cross teh river (I kept my feet dry stepping across stepping stones, Billie just sloshed through it), and there was a decent trail on the far side. The trail was obviously not maintained by the Parks Department, there were fallen logs one had to step over or crawl under and blackberry brambles closing in on the trail enough to pluck at passersby -- but someone was obviously maintianing the trail enough that there WAS a trail through the blackberries. We suspect the landowner just beside the trailhead, who appears to host people in yurts on his paddock, is probably happy to keep the trail maintained as his private trail due to it being officially closed. Anyway the fact that some bushwacking was required made the journey all the more fun.
Like all the best of these waterfall trails it led through a narrow gorge full of moss and ferns. The picture at the top of this entry is Billie during one of several river crossings. When we finally got to the waterfall, it was gorgeous -- a good flow of water coming down a solid cliff face like a wall, with moss and ferns on it. The waterfall fell into a pool of crystal clear cool water -- we took off our shoes and stood in it, it was very zenful and serene.
By this point it was around 7pm, fortunately it's still light out late and it was still pretty well lit but we realized we'd have to hurry to get food before most kitchens closed at 8. So we hurried back out of there. It was after 8:00 by the time we got back into Apollo Bay but fortunately the pub there keeps its kitchen open till 8:30. It was a lovely evening and we sat in the outdoor area looking out at the rising moon:
Unfortunately we still had to take the curvy road up through the forested mountains in the full dark of night, and me with only one working headlight. But that went without incident -- I did actually see a koala starting to cross the road from the other side, but there was nothing for it but to wish the fella the best of luck.
Fortunately my housemate Trent had moved out literally the day before, so I had a guestroom for Billie. She departed at 6am for the airshow and I spent Sunday doing beekeeping stuff, and trying to recover my voice from all teh talking I'd done on Saturday! The end.
This upcoming Saturday I'll be on a major Melbourne radio station garden show (talking about bees obviously), and Wednesday next week I'm presenting at a Melbourne beekeeping club meeting. That's all the latest!