Geriwerd djambis

Hello hello! On goes the story - from Warrnambool and Port Fairy Laurie the car was finally being directed NORTH, in the direction of sun, heat and summer! 

First we stopped by at the Tower Hill just north of town, and as I walked up I remembered I'd been here before, with Matt&Austin&Anna.... how awesome is it to retrace my own footsteps like that!

The emus there didn't mind us walking past close by

Further north we drove until we saw the impressive shape of the Grampians appear on the sunset horizon...

The Grampians, or in the local tongue Geriwerd, is a beautifully wild landscape with jagged rocky sandstone mountain ranges and deep valleys and lakes in between...

And SOOO many roos, they are just everywhere, hundreds

In Halls Gap, the town in the middle of the ranges, there's a cultural centre called Brambuk, and because cultural centres are always worth a visit, we walked in there and met Bill and Jidah, two indigenous fellas who work there.

We chatted about Rainbow Gatherings, the Grampians, our journey, had a cuppa tea, played Didgeridoo (Yidaki) and spontaneously were invited by Jidah (it means young warrior) to come and stay at his place.

So how do you know there has been a hippie staying at your place?

He's still there!

Haha, joke, but it is acutally often true :D Pumpkin, Jidah and me enjoyed the time together to much that we ended up staying for 5 days - way longer than we had intended to!

There was jamming every night - electric and acoustic guitar, drums, tin whistles, Jidaki and clap sticks - yarning by the oven in the living room, cooking up feasts...

One night we helped the neighbours who got their car bogged and had some great chats and a trip to MacKenzie Falls with them - they were Capuchin Friars and there was so much interesting stuff to learn from them.

We cleaned up the whole house, went walking and climbed Mt. Rosea, and in the end we even wrote a little song about our time with Jidah to say Thank you ...

MacKenzie Falls, a traditional women's site

When Pumpkin and me reached the top of the "Cliff" lookout, there was a rainbow down in the valley - of course.

And then Jidah gave us and our friends the friars a exquisite guided tour to the anciet rock painting 'Bunjil's shelter' - it's about 33 000 years old and has even survived being overpainted with contemporary paint by some **** silly people.

Bunjil is one of the central creating ancestral beings from the Dreamtime in the indigenous culture. In this cave he found a shelter, with his two companions, the dingoes.

After we eventually left the Geriwerd and Jidah, we made our way over to the famous Naracoorte Caves - South Australia's only World Heritage Site and wow, so deserving it!
I always loved caves.... they're mysterious, stange and yet beautiful, it's like you are entering a whole new world, and it gets my imagination going.
And then look at this.

Wow, I was so happy we made this detour. From there, our route took us to Adelaide, where we couchsurfed with a groovy English lady called Marion for 4 days.
Marion's got the most wonderful dog, the purriest cat, an abundant garden full of vegies, olives and chickens, and she is the master of bin diving! She gets insane amouts of awesome, absolutely fine food out of the bins at Woolworths and Coles... it's unbelievable! Bread that's been baked this moring - into the bin. Vegetables that are not even near going off - into the bin. Whole roasted chickens who gave their lives to be food for us crazy humans - into the bin!!
 After this experience, I never want to buy food again. The waste is just absolutely insane and incredible.
Needless to say we had the biggest feasts with all the great food from the dumpster, and when we left we were urged to take more with us than we could ever eat.

On the beach in Adelaide, we met Edgar and Jane, a German-British couple who migrated to Australia. 

After a beachwalk of good chats they invited us to stay at their place the next day, and wow, they have some good stories to tell, being travellers themselves. They cooked us dinner, we played some music and (of course) had excited and extended talks about Rainbow Gatherings etc....

There has never been a Gathering in South Australia, is has to be a project of the near future! The Rainbows are definitely already there!

From Adelaide, we headed further north and finally towards the desert. On my birthday, we spent the evening in Port Germain, on the longest jetty in the Southern Hemisphere. Nearly 2 kilometres far it reaches into the Spencer Gulf, and we sat at the end of it with a bottle of liquor, the almost full moon rising to the left and Venus and Jupiter shining bright and closely together to the right.

This day is getting older
fading light, it's beautiful
This wind is getting colder
and too soon I feel its pull

Still I took all my chances, earned myself an even score
Tried to learn my lessons well
And I don't have the answers for those questions anymore
Only love can be both heaven and hell

So sturdy up, sturdy up your heart
for the road is long ahead
I'll be with you even though we're apart
but your road is yours to tread
And so it goes
And so it goes
And so it goes
Slows your mind, mind, mind...

Seaside serpentines

Hello out there,

first of all things thank you to everyone who sent me some sweet loving birthday wishes...

22 years and it rather feels like I'm getting younger than older. Also, it seems absurd that it's been two full years since I made the jump onto that plane without return ticket... no way, two years?! That was nothing, there is simply too much to see and do!

However, let's continue the story for those who want to hear it!

After that wonderful day in Wilsons Promontory I was excited to greet Melbournetown again. It's been more than a year since I'd been there for the first time, and back then, we were hurrying across the country on a scheduled road trip and I didn't know anyone around the place. Now there was a whole bunch of people who I'd met at Confest and the Rainbow Gathering, and I was keen to catch up at least with some of them.

Look at that! Rainbow people having a dinner in a living room in the city. Everyone and everything so clean, so warm, and so confined in this box-like thing that we call house. And no fire to circle around... still, we circled and sang Rainbow songs, making it as Food Circle-like as we could. The most beautiful and weirdest thing ever.

After a while that strange feeling made way for all the happiness in seeing the people again, feasting and making music. As if Rainbow had never been really over! The Rainbow people with their bare feet and their music instruments and their untamed hair are scattered, but still there, and when they gather, everything is coming back - even if it's on a living room floor in the city.

Tess even wrote a play about Rainbow, which we spontaneously performed that evening. It was funny, it was deep, it was genius, we had so much fun. What a super talented writer she is!!

One week in Melbourne went by so quickly, with silent disco dancing at the Victorian Night Markets, with a brain-frying but endlessly interesting visit to the Melbourne Museum, with contact dance and 5 rhythm dance, with poetry slam, with lots of walking around and observing the crazy city life, with reversing-a-manual-with-trailer-lessons, with meeting old and new friends and with many visits to the famous Lentil As Anything pay-as-you-feel-restaurant. Yum, yum, yum!

http://lentilasanything.com/

The gut feeling I had had proved to be only too true: Melbourne with its colourful, vibrant yet laid-back arty-fartyness is alluring like a Black Forest cake. Of course it tried to pull me in and make me stay - even in winter, when it's cold (and I had enough of cold now!) it was tempting me to throw all my road trip plans over board and keep playing and forgetting time. Definitely the grooviest city I've ever been in! And the first one I could actually imagine myself living in.

But the road trip-with-Laurie-dream has been my goal for too long too just get lured off track. The Great Ocean Road was waiting. So I left, and despite of all the failed travel buddy team-ups from the more or less recent past, I didn't leave alone.

Pumpkin decided to take his chances and venture with me!

He had a massive load of stuff with him that he wanted to drop off at his Mum's place in Warrnambool, which is on the other end of the Great Ocean Road, so things just seemed to be flowing in the right direction for both of us.

And for me as a young traveller from overseas, what is better than having a local Aussie bloke showing me around the Great Ocean Road and teaching some bush skills?

Affectionate/hungry white cockatoos in Lorne.

The Great Ocean Road! Truly deserves its name. Since I've been travelling along it on Matt&Austin's road trip in 2013, I've been wanting to come back and explore every little bit of its beauty. 

A most scenic serpentine road snaking along the coast west of Melbourne, from Torquay through the dreamy beachside Apollo Bay, over Cape Otway and along the limestone coast with its famous and unique cliff formations, all the way to the vast green cow paddocks of dairy capital Warrnambool.

We spent whole mornings climbing around rocky beaches and admiring crashing waves, snail shells and oysters in the shallow water

The lighthouse at Cape Otway

Just too touristy, but still worth a short visit - the Twelve Apostles

This time, although wintertime, it was sunny!

It's not coming out on the photos (of course) but the white-orangey-reddish-brown of the lime stone and the colours of the sea that were everything from green to blue to turquoise and in between... hmmm.

The Grotto, such a magical place. If there are not some fairies living in those rock caves...

After this first week of travelling together on the Great Ocean Road, Pumpkin and me gladly discovered that we were still friends. So we agreed to give it a try and do the whole road trip together - Grampians, Adelaide, into the Red Centre, hiking the Larapinta Trail west of Alice Springs, and then travel over to Townsville - knowing what a social challenge that could be. Hoping for the best -I'll try to be nice...

Pumpkin's groovy friend Sean recorded and photographed us jamming at his place in Port Fairy. That makes even me look very professional!

On Promontory peaks

G'day you much appreciated readers! :D

I've been flat out diving into new adventures - remind you, to my greatest delight, I happen to be on this road trip right now that I'd been wanting to go on since tender teenage years. But here is this two hour time frame that I got to recall another event of the past that I feel deserves a report.

What happened after the Rainbow Gathering?

There was a little group of Rainbows that didn't want to end the dream just yet, or simply didn't have anywhere better to be, or rather both. After the Paradise Valley was completely cleaned out and only the bare wooden structures of our shelters were left behind, there were Pumpkin, Mystery, Esteve, Jemma, Jelmer, Tess, Max, Sue and my humble self who kind of stranded at Trevor's place.

You have no idea how absolutely wacky it felt to be in a house again. So warm in there! So clean in there! Where are all my layers of jackets? No need to wear them, what is this strange feeling of mobility I got now? And cooking in a real kitchen? Internet? And having a bathroom - a HOT SHOWER?! Crickey Jeez, it was truly sensational. So much appreciation, I didn't know what to do with it.

So we had a couple of days of Rainbow decompression at Trevor's place - just easing back into the "normal" world. Cleaning up Trevor's house and backyard, going for walks around beautiful Tambo River and up the hills, making up our minds where to go next, watching Game of Thrones and playing boardgames, and cooking up the most ridiculously scrumptious dinners every night. Day after day we just found it too hard to leave, because a life like this and in such good company is very hard to abandon. Once more, thank you Trevor, and everyone else.

Eventually Jelmer got on his motorbike and said Goodbye; Esteve, Mystery, Jemma squeezed into one car and Pumpkin joined me in Laurie and we drove down to Lakes entrance to catch up with Rowan and Nelli.... and nooo, now I realize I got no photo of Nelli at all :/ However, another night of playing boardgames and making clay stuff and feasting....

The scars of a hero - Esteve with his impressive (burned) thumb. He pulled a sleeping bag out of the campfire

Beautiful sea shells on 90 Mile Beach.

Pumpkin's artwork in the sand.

And there! A rainbow, of course!

But then it was time to stick to my own path - Wilsons Promontory was where I steered Laurie to. I stayed with Steve, a friend from ConFest, who lives in Inverloch near the Prom, and together, we went on a day trip to this absolutely stunning peninsula of National Park where beauty of nature is raised to a new level. Seriously it blew my mind!

And all the animals living there seem to be really comfortable having humans around - well, there are a lot of tourists. On the day we went it was relatively quiet - a Tuesday in winter. I had some amazing chances to take a very close look at some native animals. Emus

A sleepy blacktail wallaby

A wombat that had a quite special fair colour... he walked so close to me I could have touched him, and he wasn't scared at all

Lorikeets and Rosellas that went berserk when they spotted the bread we had - soon we were in a swarm of them, landing on us and fluttering all around, just trying to grab a bite...

And there, a Steve in his natural habitat ...

Squeaky Beach... yes it really squeaks.

... and has some grand rock formations to climb around on!

To watch the sunset we climbed on Mt. Oberon. I've never seen anything as drop-dead gorgeous as this. I'm running out of words here, I was just flabbergasted. We had brought instruments with us, and with the help of a young Melbournian lady who filmed us we played a song in front of this grand scenery. It's for my Sri Lankan friend Arqam who just got married -