The legs are not quite as sore today. We have had a couple of bus loads of boys staying at the park, even though they did quieten down at night they have made big messes in the toilet block every day.
We started off a bit earlier today, we headed back up the road we came down last night, the sign at turn off from the Great Ocean Roads says to Beech Forest. We stopped at Hopetoun Falls, which is our favourite, does have a quite few steps so is listed as Moderate, only 1km. There is a viewing platform 20m from the carpark where you can see the falls but it’s best to do the walk as they are amazing. The falls fall into a pool which then flows down over mossy rocks, surrounded by tree ferns. Very pretty falls, we got a lot of good photos going to be hard to choose. There were lots of fungi on the walk to so we got lots of photos of them including some tiny little blue ones. Why oh why are they always so low to the ground? I took a plastic bag to sit and kneel on but I still get muddy. We have worked out the falls are taking us 2-3 hrs to complete by the time we stop and take photos of things along the way, we still walked over 9kms today.
Next we stopped in at the Otway Fly Tree Top Walk; we didn’t do the walk as we didn’t have enough time as at this stage we were having so much fun checking out the free things, we have heard it is very good though. We had lunch there Fish, Chips and Salad was very nice.
From there we continued 3km’s past the Tree Top Walk to Triplet Falls, a 2km loop, moderate walk but with loads of steps. There is a recommended direction for the loop, which starts downward, with steps and boardwalks, the falls is towards the other end of the loop, the climb back out is rather steep up steps, where you follow the creek along. It is if fact shorted to the falls to go the opposite direction if you only want to see the falls but you would miss out on the whole walk, which again is very pretty through spectacular rainforest along an old logging line. Again lots of fungi, which had us just about lying down on the rainforest floor with the leaches and mud. People walking past must have thought we were nuts taking photos of what they can’t even see as some of the fungi were tiny. It rained just as we were finishing the walk; we had a quick cuppa at the car before moving on.
On the way back to the van we stopped and checked out a few free camps along the way ready for us to move to and have a few days break over the Anzac long weekend, to avoid the crowds on the roads.
We had done some washing before we left and hung it out on the clothes line set up at the front of the van on the A frame. We thought we would be faced with wet washing when we got back, when we pulled in the washing was gone, first thought was someone took our clothes, but our nice neighbours had brought it in for us and had it lying flat underneath their annex, very kind and thoughtful of them.
