Travelling to Sydney by road just cost us 200 AUSD, thanks to a one-way special from DriveNow, an online car hire service. This special offer usually comes very cheap because you actually help the companies to relocate their cars.
At the end of the trip, we planned to go back to Melbourne from Sydney using Jetstar which had an offer for 45 AUSD one way.
The entire trip covers six days in early June. We stayed overnight in 6 different places: Wilson Prom, Lakes Entrance, Cooma, Oberon, and Sydney. We initially planned to drive along the Victoria and New South Wales beaches, but we ended up doing different route.
Day 1 - To Wilson Prom
Early morning from Melbourne we travelled down Princes Highway, switched to South Gippsland Highway at Dandenong, went down to Leongatha before proceeded further south to our first destination, Wilson Promontory National Park. Frank had not been there before, while it was my second trip to Wilson. Few months earlier there had been a fire there and the park had been closed for serveral weeks. Fortunately, some part of the park had been opened when we arrived there. Moreover, the fire gave a new shroud of ambience to the place, dark eerie scenes that served us refreshing tingle, especially when we saw them moving closer slowly as we drove towards Tidal River, the base for the national park.
It's good to go there at the wrong time of the year, because not many people went there and we sort of had the park for ourselves. We planned to stay their camping site. The site and the entrance to the park just cost us 15 AUSD. We roamed around Tidal River till dusk. Only when the light started dissapear we could only see lots of kangooroo coming out of their hiding. We nearly reached to Squeaky Beach, when Frank dropped his Swiss-made water bottle in the cliff close-by. We decided it was time to come back, cook, have our dinner, bath and sleep.
Day 2 - To Lakes Entrance
Early morning we left Wilson Prom, but we stopped by at Derby River, a nice accessible little spot. The beach was serene, the wave was much more merrier, and an albino wombat unwittingly grazed around
the scarce patches of grass in the border of sand and vegetation. We then went back up north to South Gippsland Highway and side tracked to Seaspray for Ninety Mile Beach. We traced the beach till Golden Beach before returned to South Gippsland Highway. When we reached Sale we changed to Princess Highway again. We went straight to Lakes Entrance and arrived in the dark for another camping site. We decided it would be best to cook, eat, bath before roaming around the small city of Lakes Entrance in the dark.
Day 3 - To Cooma
In the Morning, we had a short walk along the beach behind our camp site. This beach is still part of the Ninety Mile beach we saw in Seaspray and it still looked the same. I guess the ninety mile stretch provides just the same kind of scenery. You just need to pop up to one point in the beach. That's enough. We left Lakes Entrance and traced Princess Highway along southern part of Victoria, before make a left turn at Cann River to the north.
Intially, we intended to go to Jindabyne for Snowy River National Park, unfortunately most of the the road lead there was unsealed (most rentals and insurances won't let you drive in this kind of road). The only way is probably to hire a 4WD, not a camper van. We decided, instead, travelled north via Cann Valley Highway and Monaro Highway. The scenery along this track is superb. It starts with quaint view of farm houses interspersed among green pastures and colourful summer tress. And along Monaro Highway it continues with a landscape of a vast reddish gold of dryness and articulated shapes of clouds in perfect blue sky. Finally, we stopped and stayed overnight at Cooma, where we could see the glimpse of Snowy Mountain.
At the caravan park at Cooma, we met a friendly bloke, Shawn, who offered us a can of beer and oveflowing supply of stories. He seemed belong to this alternative anti establishment species.
He was just interesting and kept talking, bout John Howard, Singapore, Australia and desert race. At the end, I found out that he was born in Carlton at the hospital one block away from where I'm currently staying.
Day 4 - To Oberon and almost Jenolan Caves
Leaving Cooma, we remained moving north and we thought why not visiting Canberra. Canberra is pretty much boring city. Fortunately the trees are beautiful. I was pretty much fell in love with Canberra's trees (generally I'm a tree-fetish). Parliament House in Canberra was our next stop, though I had been there a week earlier. It's lucky for me because the sky was much better than the one in my first visit.
Out of Canberra, we took Federal Highway to the north and crossing Hume Highway at Goulbourn, old mining town, where we stopped for lunch and visited local church and flea market. Hereafter, we're not very sure with which the road we should take. We ended up following a smaller road which leads to Taralga and Oberon. The initial part of the road was pretty much promising till we met with a strecth of gravel road where we had to drive 20 kmh. The day got darker and we caught in the intervals of smooth and rough road, and some steep ups and downs in the middle. We ended up quite late when we reached Oberon, the biggest of some pretty small cities around city closer to Jenolan Caves.
Day 5 - Jenolan Caves, Blue Mountain and To Sydney
In the morning we quickly went to Jenolan Caves to catch one of the cave tours. We couldn't go as fast as we expected because the road from Oberon was not as good as the road from Sydney. It was pretty hilly and definitely not for caravan trailer. The Jenolan Cave was pretty much a village full of caves. Frank really loved those caves (generally he's a cave-fetish) despite his height gave him some difficulties in moving around inside the caves. As soon as the tour finished, we hurrily had lunch before running for Blue Mountain.
Luckily Blue Mountain is not that far from Jenolan Caves. Blue Mountain itself is pretty big, so we decided to visit the most famous part, the Three Sisters at Katoomba. In the car park at Katoomba just after we parked our car we realized that we left the key inside the car. We're frantic and panic. We called the car rental to see how can they help us and how much it cost. Fortunately while waiting for the response Frank managed to open a small window, and thanks to my slim body I was able to slip through the window and get the key.
We sit with full of relieve in front of those georgeos Three Sisters and bluish Blue Mountain forest. The night was coming so quickly that we had to rush to last spot of the day, Wentworth Falls. By the time we reach the waterfall, it was dark. Frank was full of grief. He wished the we all could stay few weeks longer.
Finally, we drove slowly along Great Western Highway to Sydney for a caravan park close to Sydney Airport where we had to return the camper van. This caravan park is the worst we visited so far. It's a bit cramp and dirty. Anyway it was our last night for the trip.
Day 6 - Sydney and Melbourne again
Early morning we returned the car. And we then took the train to go to the city, go to the typical spots for typical tourist, Harbour Bridge and Opera House. I lived in Sydney before, so I knew a little bit more about how to move around. We had cheap lunch at Chinatown and roaming around the city.
Finally we left Sydney for Melbourne in the afternoon in the new plane with cheap airfare. We landed in Avalon Airport. It was not really an airport, it's just a runway and one small building. We took shuttle bus to the city. I and Frank parted at night in the Spencer St Terminal Bus. I catched tram to the wrong direction. And when I took the tram to opposite direction, the tram stuck in an intersection. The technical support was called. He, the driver and two other passengers (including me) had to push the tram for centimeter to get it started. It was strange last day of the trip.
