Great Ocean Road Pt. 1

Preparing for Caving Adventures
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We were picked up early in the morning by the Goin' South tour company, along with six other travelers. All were backpackers save for an older Australian lady named Rose who was traveling to see her family in a small town along the coast. It seemed like a good group, important as we would be in each other's presence day and night for the next three days. The tour guide was a funny and relaxed Australian named Dave who also seemed to be the owner of the company.

We stopped in a cute little town outside of Adelaide for coffee, rolled through the winelands and stopped at a winery for a tasting at the stroke of noon. Unfortunately it turned out to be the home of at least one of the bitter vintages we'd tasted the day before. They did have a nice port though, which we took with us to give to our friends Gary and Bojana who we'd be staying with in Melbourne.

A giant robotic flat-faced kangaroo surprised us by lurching to life

Stuck in a Hole
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Soon we reached the town of Naracoorte where Dave and his wife run a backpackers that also serves as a stop over for their tour. The building used to be a morgue but was certainly very lively. We unloaded our bags into small dorm rooms and then headed out of town to the world heritage Naracoorte caves. Dave had disappeared and was replaced with great fussiness by the driver who would have picked us up in Adelaide if she hadn't had been sick. She was called Foggy, and a small voice in my head muttered something about people with nicknames. Remember 'Chill' the dive master? It asked.

There Are Better Ways to Have Fun
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The Naracoorte caves are interesting as they were the repository of thousands of fossilized Australian animals that had fallen through small hidden skylights into the caves below for thousands of years. Dummies. The name of the activity they'd signed us up for was called "adventure caving" and we suspected that was a fancy name for walking around in caves. We slipped on knee-pads, jumpsuits and hardhats with lamps and descended into the earth. Soon we learned that adventure caving was all about squeezing through clausterphobicly small windows of rock or squirming into paper thin slots between cold stone walls. Cheered on by a spunky spelunking cave guide, we contorted through keyhole sized openings that at first glance seemed impossible to put a key in. I failed our final task of crawling through a crushingly tight squeeze that constricted my breath and made me want to break through the millenia of rock that had me trapped. Frustrated and clausterphobic, I suddenly realized that caving wasn't my game and while Magda wiggled, got stuck, got free, and generally fought her way back to the surface opening, I returned the way we came. I felt only vaguely ashamed I hadn't made it through, mostly I was just happy to be breathing freely.

Once back at the visitor center we walked through a comically cheesy recreation of what prehistoric Australia might have looked like. Animatronic mega-marsupials growled and wobbled on paper-machet tree limbs. Lightning flashed, of course. A giant robotic flat-faced kangaroo surprised us by lurching to life and staring at us indignantly after Magda told it it was ugly.

We returned to the hostel and went swimming in the town pool, a lovely, refreshing experience in the 100` heat. Dave and his wife Sonya cooked a huge delicious banquet and by the time we'd finished the meal and a bottle of wine we practically passed out in the overheated dorm room.