Wednesday, March 24, 2010

I live in Australia...

So I know it has been a while.  I am sorry but I have been a little busy lately with school and exploring the city.  Two weekends ago, March 13th and 14th, we took another little road trip to The Grampians National Park which is North West of Melbourne.  It was about a 3 hour car ride.  I am pretty sure it was the best camping trip  of my life.  The most serious night of camping I have ever done.  The first night was fake camping because we stayed on camping grounds.  For the next night we decided that we wanted to be real campers and sleep in the bush, yes the bush, it's not called woods here.  Come to think of it neither of those names make sense you can find wood in the woods and bushes in the bush but there are lots of other things too.  I vote for renaming them.  I will come up with something later- I am not feeling all to creative right now.  Anyways Saturday morning we woke up from our first night of fake camping and set out for our first day of hiking.  This really turned out to be out first day of rock climbing- who needs a trail?!  We started off on a trail to see the Venus Baths which was a natural creek that had red water (it looked rusty).  Then from there we were going to take a trail to the Pinnacle look-out; however, we ended up on a little detour.  We started climbing up these rocks a bit and it didn't look like it was too far to the top- about an hour maybe hour and a half later maybe two hours- who knows I wasn't paying attention (we were rushing up because of the excitement and adrenaline) we ended up at the top.  It was absolutely gorgeous.  The view went on for miles. There was everything within site.  The small town -Halls Gap- where we had camped the previous night, a lake, mountains upon mountains, and of course some dessert looking spots.  We ended up hanging out on top of the world for a while.  Luckily we found the trail to the pinnacle was right by us, not that far down.  we had basically just climbed over the mountain rather than taking the trail around the mountain.  It was great.

The hike from where we got on the trail to the top was not as exciting as climbing up the rocks but again, the view was phenomenal.  We sat for a while at the top to take a break but some of us were anxious to get back down and have something to drink and rest a little.  It was a long hike down- we must have hiked over 13 miles total.  But once we got to the bottom it felt great to sit in the shade.  We could not sit too long because we needed to go find a place to camp before it got dark.  We gathered all of our stuff from the car and set out back up the mountain to find a campsite.  After about 20 minutes of walking my friend Kevin and I split from the group to look in one spot for a site.  The spot Kevin had been thinking of was not flat enough so we just started sprinting up the mountain and off the trail until we found the PERFECT spot.  Once we got the whole group there we set up camp.  This ended up being one of the most epic nights.  We just sat around a flashlight (no camp fires allowed!) and talked for a while.  Then we turned the flashlight off...I do not think I have ever, no actually I know I have never seen that many stars.  It was so beautiful.  Some of our crew had gone off to bed so it was just me, my roommate, her boy Hugh, and the Frenchman David. laying under that stars listening to Supertramp, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd while drinking some wine.  It was such an incredible experience.  I was the Southern Cross!  I loved it.

The following morning we walked back down to the cars and headed back to Melbourne.  It was the end to yet another amazing weekend.

This past weekend we stayed in Melbourne.  I have been exploring the city much more and I really love it.  Did you know more people live in the suburbs of NYC than in all of Australia? 24 million people in the suburbs and 22 million people live in all of Australia.  So to say the least this is not a crowded city.  I love walking around especially down by the Yarra River.  I will post another entry soon (I promise) about my adventures in the city.  I need to get some school work done now- time is flying only 8 days until Easter Break and mid-terms are right after and some before!

Cheers

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