Monday 19th January

No blogs for the last fortnight - either no internet or no time to write. So we're now very reluctantly back in the UK. You may have noticed that we haven't so far used the words "grim, bleak, dreary..." well that's all changed now. But we'll do a quick whizz through the last couple of weeks if only to remind ourselves that somewhere in the world the sun's shining and it's -generally warm. We certainly had a great finish to the trip.

Sunday 4th January
A beautiful, hot day in Ballarat, and we didn't do a great deal. A very pleasant morning tea session in a Ballarat cafe with Erica and Andy - the importance of the morning tea institution in Australia and NZ cannot be underestimated, you won't catch teachers there setting up their Smart boards or giving out books during their morning break. And the middle of Ballarat must be one of the pleasantist places to keep up the ritual. We also had a couple of walks around some of the many little parks and lakes in the city. There is a long-term drought there, so one of them focused on water-saving methods, wished I had Eco-Schools with me! (Really.) A very good, very relaxed evening having dinner in the local pub by the big lake in the centre of town. We noted that they'd mown the lake... it was the venue for the rowing events in the Melbourne Olympics, 6.5 k to walk round - but only a tiny puddle remains after 2 years of drought. They have to mow it or the lake catches fire. It sounds funny , but is really worrying for a huge area of Victoria, and we were to see many such dry lakes over the next few days - some of them really enormous. We finished off with a drive round the millionaires' palaces surrounding the lake presumably all of them waiting for the ater to return so they've got that lakeside view again.

Monday 5th Jan
A difficult morning saying goodbye both to the family and to Ballarat. Erica and Andy were off to Moruya, but we lingered in the town reluctant to leave - another couple of hours in the Art Gallery, where an elderly man saw us closely examining the paintings of Athur Streeton and other 19th century Aussie artists and gave us some interesting info on the Heidleberg school, as they're called. There are certainly some stunning works in the gallery. After lunch by the lake - in the Boathouse, next to the stranded paddlsteamer which hasn't been afloat since the lake began to dry up- we tore ourselves away and headed down to Lorne on great Ocean Road. A decision we began to regret, as after a couple of hours driving through almost empty countryside, we found ourselves in what felt like an English resort in high season, a real shock. We did find a very pleasant little reserve a bit further along the road, Sheoak Reserve, where we walked up to a waterfall, miraculously still running, and an amazing sandstone cave called Swallow Cave, and inhabited by..what sort of birds? Well, martins of course. But best of all we also saw another koala, great walk. We then drove along the Road, which was as stunning as we remembere it from our last visit in 1982 - but very crowded everywhere. It gradually dawned on us that our plan of finding somewhere to stay in Apollo Bay was looking a little naive, as was proved when we got there and found not a room free in the town. The quiet, quaint little village we remembered from the winter of '82 has been transformed into Blackpool, a real shock when we had such clear memories of a tranquil evening on the beach looking at the stupendous hills of the Otway Range. In the end we had to drive 60 k back to the main road to find a motel in Colac - but it was a gorgeous drive through the sunset in the beautifil Otway Forest (surely one of the most beautiful in the world?) so we didn't feel too hard done by.We remember being devastated when we heard the forest had been pretty well burnt out a few months after our last visit - but this is Australia, where of course bushfire is necessary to clear and regenerate the forest, so it has completely grown back and the new vegetation makes it more beautiful than ever.