Day 26: Hiking in the Grampians and onward to Adelaide

 
There were wallabies all around the cabin. Most are active at night but this guy was still up.

Another early morning and a quick breakfast, then back on the minibus.We were driven further up into the mountains and given a choice of a long slightly downhill hike, a fairly short hike or no hike at all. I chose the first, partly in preparation for trekking in Malaysia.

 

It was already pretty hot so I was glad there was not much climbing up. People had told me that Australian cities and suburbs looked very much like southern California, but in the Grampians I felt as if I could be in almost any Californian National Park; it brought to mind especially the Pinnacles. Judge for yourself in the following photos, although this one looks like it could be an alpine lake almost anywhere in the world.

At some points the water looked almost like a murder scene, but this was a natural occurrence!

 I was taking so many photos (a lot more than I am posting here) and one by one the other members of our party passed me by. As I tried to catch up one person, it turned out, was behind me, another photographer, Julie from New Orleans. For a while we truly thought we must have taken a wrong turn as the trail seemed so much longer than what we had expected, and there were no signs.

But we finally reached the end of the trail and were greeted by this pair:

No more photos for today, although it was not even noon. We knew we would be traveling on to Adelaide and would arrive there this evening, but what we had not been told was that we would be dumped at a bus station, and our comfortable minivan would be going back to Melbourne without us! It was an hours' wait for the first bus and at one point we had to transfer; eight hours in all! None of us were expecting this. Most of the drive was inland not very scenic; we didn't even see a kangaroo!

It was a Wednesday, so Tuesday in the States, and election day. As I did not have a smart phone I had no idea what was going on until I began receiving disturbing texts from California and London. A Canadian couple in our group who were sitting behind me did their best to console me, and after checking into the youth hostel in Adelaide, Julie and I needed to find a bar. We did find a nice gastropub with no televisions. I hoped that Kangaroo Island tomorrow would cheer me up!