Adventure Central - Karoonda Park, Gelantipy

Hey All!

We've had a very good - but very cold - couple of days since leaving Melbourne. On Wednesday we left our hostel early to get a taxi to Hotel Bakpak, cos Adventure Tours only do three pick ups in Melbourne. Even though we'd only been there 4 days I was actually quite relieved to be leaving the city cos it was starting to feel really claustrophobic. I liked Melbourne but in all honesty I think I prefer Sydney, because of the openness of the harbour and whatever. Anyway, we made our first stop at a little village off the highway called Yarragon, where I had a healthy breakfast of meat pie, ice bun and a hot chocolate! There was a Japanese girl on our bus who was asking the guide "When do we get back to Melbourne?" Turned out she was supposed to be on a day trip to the Great Ocean Road with a totally different tour group and she'd got on the wrong bus! Poor girl. We were about two hours out of the city too.

Next stop was at Bairnsdale for dinner, only about an hour and a half later so we weren't hungry, so that was a bit silly. Got some boardies from Jay Jays - they're really nice but I've got them dirty already. We stopped again at Lakes Entrance to drop some people off and take a picture of the estuary. Eventually, after much driving along winding roads through the Snowy Mountains (which, funnily enough, have snow on them in winter) we arrived in Gelantipy, which seemed to consist only of the farm we were staying at - Karoonda Park. The farm is also an adventure centre for local schools, so they had loads of things you could do. We opted for the 'Flying Fox', a pair of 30m high zipwires through the forest and over a lake, the 7m climbing wall and the Night Time Nature Tour. They also had two little pooches called Angus and Morgan - they were hilarious. When we went down to the zipwire in the minibus Angus was sat on the dashboard!

After we got settled into our rooms and had a brew we went down to the Flying Fox, and once we'd climbed the hill and saw how high it was I was cacking it. Especially after seeing how we were going to be strapped to the wire. It looked so unsafe! It was really good though, but despite trying my best I just couldn't land properly - I kept landing on my ass! After two trys of each wire we went back up to the centre to have a go on the climbing wall. I'd never realised climbing could be such hard work! It was fun, but at one point I was ready to come down and my spotter was laughing at someone else. I was whimpering: "Can I come down now please! Please let me down! Help!" First time I climbed to the top I looked round cos Claire wanted to take a photo and I screamed: "Man, this is high!" not realising how far up I'd climbed! That was scary. But it was all good fun.

After a pathetically dribbly shower we had a delicious three course dinner - potato and leek soup (I missed out on a bread roll cos I was late), roast dinner with beef AND turkey, creamy potatoes, caulifower cheese, pumpkin and gravy, and hot apple pie and ice cream for afters. It was lush and we both went back for seconds (even if we waited for someone else to go first!).

At about 8:30pm we donned our warmest gear and set out in the minibus to spot some nocturnal wildlife. Most of the tour was spent chatting with people on the bus, but we did see some kangaroos, koalas and a possum (which I've never seen in the wild before so that was cool). We didn't see any wombats so I was gutted about that, but it was lots of fun.

Afterwards we headed inside and set up a game of Australian Trivial Pursuit, which started out with four teams but dissolved into two after the non-dedicated and sleepy people dropped out! Me and a guy called Dave vowed to play til the death! Me and Claire ended up on a team with a guy called Andy, and once both teams merged their cheeses we both had four cheeses each. So we played next cheese wins. Of course, we won. The question was "Who swapped the Sudetenland for 'peace in our time'"? and it took us about ten minutes as a group effort to figure out it was Neville Chamberlain. We hadn't even had a drink! Mind you, with 2 history A Levels and 1 BA history between us, it would've been pretty shameful if we hadn't got it.