I arrived on Thursday afternoon, the 18th, and we walked around a nearby cute little town, Williamstown, lunched at a pizza joint—I ordered the American pizza, with pepperoni, and the waitress started laughing and said every American orders the American pizza. On the beaches, we saw the old historic lighthouse and looked across the bay, and did a bit of gossiping. It was good to see fellow Fulbrighters again.
We got dressed back at Karl’s place. I was in my uniform, and Karl’s housemate has two big Huskies, beautiful animals, but not the most intelligent. When I first arrived, I had petted one, and he reared up and jumped on me and left huge muddy pawprints all over my shirt. When I put on my uniform, then, I stayed in my room until Karl put them out in the yard, but when I emerged I had dog hairs all over my legs anyway.
The Fulbright dinner was in honor of the new Australian Fulbrighters, who will be heading off to the US this year, and boy did they look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. We ate at the National Gallery of Victoria, behind the gorgeous waterfall wall, a big glass wall with water cascading down it, that once in a while sprays at you. I sat next to the American ambassador, but he was getting a cold and didn’t provide much conversation. Later, one of the Aussie ladies asked me if I was his bodyguard. Dessert, a too-fancy pavlova, was a let-down. One of the Aussie scholars gave us some beautiful piano music. Some of the scholars, especially the new Aussie ones, wanted to go out, but we decided against it.
Friday morning we had an early breakfast at the Mantra hotel, first meeting the new Aussie scholars, and then all the American scholars got together with our coordinator and discussed our trials and tribulations. The whole crop was heading out soon, and it was a little nostalgic, remembering how confused we were at our first meeting last September, and now all of us much more experienced, but with mixed feelings about going home.
A bunch of us headed back to the NGV to see the Ron Mueck statue exhibition. We lunched at Lord of the Fries, a vegetarian stall on the street which served (rather gross) veggie burgers along with huge baskets of Mexican fries (chilli and sour cream ), Thai fries (peanut sauce), or Italian fries (mozzarella and tomato sauce).
After lunch, the party broke up. I continued to walk around the shopping district, saw a bit of the Melbourne Food Festival, browsed the used bookstores, looked at exorbitantly priced lingerie, bought soufflé dishes, had a minty choc cupcake and was back on the train in time for a seven p.m. dinner with 9 other Fulbrighters at a place called the Waiters Club. The Club served decent, not fantastic, Italian and is famous for its history as the only restaurant open late, where all the waiters would go after their own restaurants closed. Across the street, we finished off the evening at a bar called Loop; I paid $16 for a raspberry/rhubarb/lemon sour cocktail.
We were up early on Saturday. Four of us were headed for the Great Ocean Road, a three-hour or more driving tour along the south coast. Our first stop was at the famous surf beach, Bells Beach, and we were in luck—a surf competition was going on! We gathered with the other tourists, gazing down over the cliffs from the edge of the parking lot at perfect waves, and dozens of surfers enjoying long, long rides. Headed back to the main road, we stopped at Torquay, a little town famous for its surf outlet shops: Billabong, Ripcurl, Elwood, O’Neill. I went a little nuts with excitement and the other three very kindly waited while I hurried from store to store and finally bought a lovely white Ripcurl long-sleeved t- shirt that says Australia in pink...yessss.
We stopped again an hour or so later, for lunch of fish and chips, sandwiches, and fried banana ion a tiny town, then we stopped a few minutes later to hike about 4 minutes along a path to a little waterfall. Then we stopped at Koala Cove, where we crossed a few campgrounds and walked up the road just a tiny way, koala-spotting. In twenty minutes, we had seen five or six, sitting sleepily in their trees, just waiting to be photographed.
Continuing on, the road had become windy and steep. A convoy of motorcyclists roared past us. As we came around a curve, Karl put on the brakes and the emergency flashers and pulled over in the space of four seconds. One of the bikers had spun out and was lying under her motorcycle, whimpering in pain, only just now reaching up to push it off. Three other bikers were just jumping off their bikes and hurrying to help. We all leaped out of our car, too, and offered help, but no one had cell reception and in a very Aussie way, the three guys sort of grunted at us and said repeatedly that she was all right. She was, actually, just bruised and scared and already standing up.
Finally we reached all the attractions, within twenty minutes of one another: first the Twelve Apostles, then the Arch and the Blowhole. This is the Arch:
Two of the Twelve Apostles:
My favorite was a beautiful gorge, which used to be a cave but collapsed, long ago, so that now the ocean crashes in between two narrow tongues of rock and the beach is all sand and rocks and open to the sky. In the early 1900s a ship sank just outside, with 58 persons onboard, and only 2 survived: the 18 yr old daughter of a family of Irish immigrants, and the ship’s young steward. He washed up on shore in the gorge and then heard her, crying for help, floating on some spares, and swam out to rescue her. They slept that night in one of the limestone caves, lined with stalactites, dripping with water, and the next day he found help. The little placard I read, with all this history, didn’t explain just how the boy went for help—back then, I thought, the walls would have been sheer. Perhaps since it has become a tourist spot, they removed a lot of the rocks, because we had to climb down into the gorge on a very steep set of freestanding metal stairs.
Karl and Susan at the Apostles:
We continued on to London Bridge, which actually collapsed fifty years ago while tourists were crawling over it, leaving tourists were stranded on the other side. We weren’t surprised by this story, because all of the other rocks we had seen, including the 12 Apostles, were covered in dozens of dumb tourists who had hopped the fence and were running out onto narrow spits of rock, crumbling away on either side, to have their photos taken. We finished at the Grotto, a beautiful cave, which you can climb down into to look out through a series of arches into the ocean. It would be a lovely place to have a picnic if you felt like sitting on piles of foot-long, perfectly round rocks.
Here's London Bridge. The rocks used to connect all the way to land:
We took a faster, inland route home, and in three hours we were back in civilization. I said goodbye to all the Fulbrighters—this was probably the last time we would see each other in this country. The next morning, I flew back to Sydney.
