2nd Feb: Bellarine Peninsula and The Last View of Melbourne.

Bye, Cabin #5 and broom-cupboard office.

We packed up and left the Barwon River Caravan Park, embarking on an anti-clockwise tour of the Bellarine Peninsula.  We had fanciful notions of camping beside the sea on the peninsula, but were soon disabused of this by the extortionate cost of camping beside the sea.  "It's peak season!" said the caravan park lady on the phone, blithely ignoring that the school holidays had ended and every caravan park we passed was empty. "$85.00 for an unpowered tent site!" she sang. 

No thank you.  We resolved to find other options and in the mean time we had a peninsula to tour.

We went anti-clockwise around the Bellarine, stopping at anything that caught our fancy along the way.  First stop:  Breamlee for morning coffee which we had huddled behind a wind break in the local park. Breamlee was not the buzzing centre of peninsula activity.

Once we had got over the excitement of Breamlee it was on to Lake Connewarre Nature Reserve, which occupies a sizeable chunk of the middle of the peninsula, and is also part of the Barwon River Estuary as it continues on its reluctant journey to the sea. 

For an environmentally significant wetland site, it was very close to the heart of Geelong.  So close, in fact, that the lights for the football stadium were visible behind the lake.

 

Lake Connewarre provides a good annual food source for up to 300 000 migratory birds from the Northern hemisphere, and is listed as a significant Ramsar site for this reason. Unfortunately we didn't see a single bird due in part to the miserably cold wind and in other part to the time of year which meant that the migratory birds were off doing migratory stuff in other parts of the world.

Cold and windy = no birds around.

 

From Lake Connewarre we went to see the Barwon River finally meet the sea at Barwon Heads.

The Barwon River mouth - no more meandering, out to sea now!

 

While we were there we also found the remains of a WWII searchlight installation, originally installed as part of a series of military installations designed to defend Australia from whomever had the desire and the supply chain to invade from the south. 

Somebody took the searchlight.

 

On we went to Point Lonsdale where we looked out over the Rip to Fort Nepean. The 'Rip' refers to the narrow entry to Port Phillip Bay, which the Nepean Historical Society assured me is one of the most treacherous stretches of water in the world. We watched a container ship navigate faultlessly through the Rip and immediately hang a hard right in order to avoid running in to Mud Island on the way up to Port Melbourne.

Making it look easy.

Port Lonsdale light house.

 

Point Lonsdale was significant for something else as well: it was here that William Buckley re-entered British/Australian society after 32 years on the lam, most of which he spent with the local Wallarranga people. He was promptly pardoned and put to work as an interpreter, having learnt to speak native like a, well, native. His biggest contribution however was to bring the phrase "Buckley's and none" to the Australian vernacular.

Not William Buckley.

 

We popped into Queenscliff but nothing had changed since we were last there so on we went to St Leonard's. St Leonards had a long Jetty which was all there was to say about St Leonards.

Nothing left to say.

 

St Leonards was quickly followed by Indented Head where to our delight we discovered both a monument to John Batman (Melbourne's founder, not the dude in the black cape) and a long view of Melbourne over the choppy waters of the Bay.

I know we already had the last view of Melbourne, but here it is again - really truly the last view.

Last one, I promise.

By the time we'd done a lap of Portarlington we were getting tired of little seaside towns and it was starting to rain which made us very glad that we'd decided to snub the very expensive campsites. Instead we settled into a tiny container Airbnb in a backyard at Moolap, right on the rail trail and with a rural view incorporating a chicken pen, the odd cow or two, and some loud and woolly dogs.  Rain splattered on our container roof, the cold wind howled, and we were very happy not to be in the tent.

Chook pen view for the night.