We arrived back in Melbourne on Wednesday from the Great Barrier Reef and Anwar, picked up our ‘hire’ car (a brand new silver Toyota Corolla hatchback), and loaded our bikes, bags, and backpacks all into it with no problem at all, and headed for Wilson’s Promontory, a triangle-shaped, ruggedly mountainous peninsula at the very bottom of Australia, just across the Bass Straight from Tasmania.

Talk about another complete change of weather – it was rainy and quite cool there. It is wilderness mountain rainforest almost completely surrounded by beaches and coves, and is a haven for wallabiess, kangaroos, koalas, deer, and wombats among other things. We saw some more wallabies (small kangaroos) on the drive into the Prom, and took a movie of them jumping. The western coast is just wild with wind and crashing surf (see the photos).

We drove about ½ way up one of the peaks to Telegraph Saddle parking lot, loaded up our backpacks, and took off on a 10k (6 mile) trek to calm and lovely Sealer’s Cove on the eastern side. It was a beautiful 3-hour hike, through a badly burned area (but we think not this year), over a pass called Windy Saddle. The entire last 2k of the walk was on a wooden boardwalk through a swamp. We camped for the night in a beautiful spot with huge gum trees, gigantic boulders, and many different sized tent areas surrounded by bushes and paths, occupied two big high school groups and at least one other couple.

We finished dinner (after borrowing a can opener from one of the kids’ chaperones), crawled into our tent, and suddenly heard some *very* loud breathing (exhaling to be exact) in the bushes nearby on my side of the tent (I thought it was about 15 feet away). I asked the next day, and the consensus seemed to be that it was probably a wombat, who are nocturnal, though we did not see one, and didn’t hear it again… because then the rain started, and didn’t stop all night – the wind roared through the trees, and the rain crashed down. It continued to drizzle even through brekky, so we loaded up our wet stuff, and climbed back out of the cove. On the way, the same school group kept leapfrogging us – we felt like the tortoises and the hares, but had fun chatting with them all, and tasting their chocolate babies (yes, *babies* – Aussies are wierd!).

It was not such a long or difficult hike, but worked us hard enough – we hiked non-stop on our return, about 3:15 hours, and I had difficulty standing up straight and balancing after taking off my pack. It was weird! And this is a place I could have spent lots more time, and visited many more beautiful and wild beaches – one is called Squeaky Beach, because if you take off your shoes and walk on the sand, you can hear it squeak!