Silk Hill

We left Geoff's place to do the one thing he told us would be a waste of time: travelling along the Great Ocean Road. To be honest, by now our expectations were also not that high anymore, but we still wanted to have a look at this part of Australia. With all our belongings on our back we made it to the tram. After a switch of trams in the city center, we reached the van rental place in Airport West after about 1,5 hours. Melbourne is big.

Having jealously looked at all the people with vans in New Zealand, we were excited to finally get our own. We got the paper work done and then got an introduction into our rental van: how to check cooling water and oil levels, how the sink works, etc. Only when driving away we slowly realised that we didn't really believe this van was from the claimed year 2010. It doesn't even have electronic windows or airbags and looks surprisingly similar to the 20 year old van Susanne owned in New Zealand 10 years ago. We also really had to get used to the manual transmission, especially given that the shifter is on the left and had seen better days. But after awhile we got used to it.

After some stops for grocery shopping, lunch, and a few navigation mishaps, we made it to Geelong. A couple of nice retired volunteers gave us some booklets and tips about the region. We decided on a free campsite near Lorne. On the way we stopped at Bells Beach to look at surfers catching some quite big waves. Then in Lorne we first had a stop for buying ice. This supermarket in particular had an 'ice room' where you could pick up your bag of ice. ❄️

The campsite was pretty great for a free one. In a quiet forest they had plenty of camping spaces, and toilets too. The forest also had some mystic atmosphere with the clouds hanging in the trees. It was time to prepare our van bed for the first time and find out how to cook with the stuff we got. We got one of these suitcase-like gascookers. They seem more wind resistant than our hiking stove, so that was great. We found storage space for our backpacks, found decent pillows and a bed sheet. Together with our sleeping bags that made the bed. The mattress itself wasn't that amazing as it was quite thin. Also, the curtains looked like they had a bit of mold everywhere. So that wasn't that great either. Nonetheless we fell asleep early.Read more