The Travel Sage
Grampians Day Tour
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While staying in Melbourne, we took a Grampians National Park day tour. The Grampians is a mountain range about 3 hours from the city. Our guide, Sherif, was was from Egypt but had lived in Melbourne for 8 years. He started our tour by demonstrating an aboriginal musical instrument called a didgeridoo which is considered one of the oldest musical instruments in the world. Traditionally the instrument was made from Eucalyptus trees. The didgeridoo requires that the player use a circular breathing technique which entails breathing in through their nose while simultaneously blowing air out of their mouth using air stored in their cheeks. Our guide said it took him 2 years to learn how to do it.
After a stop along the road for some pound cakes and hot beverages, we drove into the Grampians. These mountains are made of sandstone and are believed to be formed by continental shift compressing the shoreline sand (that’s my layperson’s abbreviated interpretation).
Our first stop in the Grampians National Park was to do a hike to Splitters Falls. It was a short hike but not the easiest one. The “path” was mostly rocks and while the waterfall was at the same elevation as the trail head, the entire hike was fairly steep, either walking up or down. It just so happens that after all of the elevation changes you end up at the same level you started on. After walking on slippery rocks for a while, we came upon a beautiful area with unique rocks and a water pool. From there you could see that a ladder went up to the rocks above.
I was already pretty tired at this point so I decided to just hang out in this pretty spot and not feel miserable for the rest of the day. I felt like such a weakling when everyone else continued on, but I was happy to have to place all to my self!
Mark continued on to the Falls and fortunately for me, I didn’t miss much – they weren’t too impressive. I felt a little less like a wimp when Mark told me that the hike exhausted him.
Our next stop on the tour was for lunch at the town of Halls Gap at the base of the park. Here we saw some parrot-like birds for the first time. And our reaction was, “oh, those must be someone’s pet”. After the fourth bird showed up, the lightbulb came on for me and I realized that these birds are wild – they are native to Australia. The type of parrot-like bird that seemed to be the most plentiful in all of our travels around southern Australia was the Sulpher-crested Cockatoo, but the Crimson Rosella was a close runner up. We saw both of these birds in Halls Gap.
After lunch we were taken to Boroka Lookout which provided some spectacular views. Apparently, the rock that sticks out here is a popular place for people to pose in their attempt for a cool photo. Some people have been crazy enough to do yoga poses and even back flips. It doesn’t always end well.
Our next stop was kind of disappointing. We went to MacKenzie Falls, which I see from photos on the web is quite impressive. Our guide told us there was an overlook at the top of the falls, another overlook half-way down, and you could hike all the way to the bottom if you were up to it. Mark and I decided that the view from the top would be just fine, but when we got there we found that the top overlook was closed. While most of the others on our tour did the hike to the bottom of MacKenzie Falls, we instead walked a short way to the not-so-impressive Broken Falls. The view was mostly blocked by trees. But we still managed to enjoy this stop by doing some birding. The Emus were hard to miss.
Our last stop in the Grampians was at Reed Lookout.
On our way out of the mountains we saw our first echidna. The first photo is the one we took from the bus and the second is one I downloaded from the web, so you can see it’s face. The echidna has spines somewhat like a porcupine, and eats like an ant-eater, but these other critters are not related. The only other animal that the echidna is directly related to is the platypus. Those are the only two mammals that lay eggs.
At the beginning of our tour, our guide promised that we’d see kangaroos (a lot of them) on our way home. He managed to find a field full of them (a group is called a “mob”), but they were pretty far away. You’ll have to just trust me that those lumpy things in the photo are actually kangaroos. I’ll provide some up close photos in our trip report from Kangaroo Island.
Overall we enjoyed our tour, but it was a painfully long day. (It’s a 3 hour drive from Melbourne.) We got picked up at 7am and dropped off at 10pm! We barely had energy to walk around Melbourne the next day. But we recovered enough to take another all-day tour (but only 11 hours) a couple of days later. That tour took us to the scenic Great Ocean Road. Be sure to check out that trip report here.
1 thought on “Grampians Day Tour”
Cool to see an echida! Great vistas – like Boroka Lookout, and others. Nice to know what a didgeridoo sounds like. But does not top Kangaroo Island.