From snorkelling off Rye beach on the Mornington Peninsula to fishing off the pier in Port Albert, with camping on French Island, Inverloch and Venus Bay in between, made for a really great eBike tour. But then, marooned by a snap corona virus lockdown, I had to sit out 5 days of unrelenting wind and nasty biting midges in the dead-end sleepy little fishing village of Port Albert. As soon as the lockdown ended I hightailed out of there and caught public transport train back home to Melbourne from Sale.
Sunday 7 February 2021. Abbotsford • Rye |72 km cycling + 25 km train|
I left home in Abbotsford at 10.30 am with the weather looking decidedly dicey (overcast with patchy rain and a lot of wind), so I bailed out after 2½ km and caught the Frankston train from Richmond station. However, that service terminated at Mordialloc due to track work further on down the line and so I had to get back on the bike from there. That’s OK; the new bike path alongside the railway line is almost 100% complete now for the 22 km from Mordialloc to Frankston and I was able to try it out for the first time.
I was on the receiving end of some lashing rain and a lot of headwind on the hard slog along the Nepean Highway for the 20 km to Mount Martha but then conditions eased off a bit on the sheltered foreshore Bay Trail for the remaining 25 km, arriving at my daughter Justine’s Rye home at 3.30 pm.
We all went for a snorkelling swim at the Rye pier when husband Boaz got home from work. That was nice, and afterwards we enjoyed the usual sumptuous home-cooked repast (Balinese style nasi goreng this time) with Spritzers and beer. It was my youngest grandson Artie’s 8th birthday, so that was a kind-of excuse for the kind-of party.
Testing out my underwater Olympus Tough camera
Monday 8 February 2021. Rye • French Island |52 km|
[13 – 18°C, cloudy and calm]
I trundled off from Rye at 9.30 am to catch the 11.35 am ferry from Hastings (Crib Point) to French Island. But I forgot a not-so-small detail of crucial importance – I had left both my loaded panniers behind!! Strange how I didn’t miss them for 35 km, not until I pulled over for a sip of drink at the entrance to the Dromana Drive-in Picture Theatre. Luckily for me, Justine had a day off work and agreed to deliver them out to me on the side of the road .
Well, I missed that first ferry by just a few minutes and had to wait until 2.35 pm for the next one. I got talking to a local Islander, Bruce, who helped me get my bike, panniers and trailer down the three flights of ramp steps and onto the ferry boat. The ferry trip to the island only takes 12-minutes, and costs $17 one-way. There were 7 passengers on board for that trip. I declined the bar service though.
On the island, I took the right fork just after the ferry landing and cycled 5km up the west coast to a free-camping area called Fairhaven. The unpaved road is wide but corrugated and sandy in patches, not so pleasant for riding on. There were 6 tent sites already taken (and 2 left) when I got there, mostly couples and 2 singletons, and they all seemed to be younger international backpacker-types. The ones I talked to were Korean, French and Serbian.
The place looks great at high tide, but at low tide the mangrove mud flats start appearing. So too do the mosquitoes, though not so much into view as annoyingly into biting range.
Remnants of old pier at Fairhaven beach
So after a quick meal of reconstituted freeze-dried meat and veg ‘cooked’ on my tiny gas stove, it was quickly into the sanctity of the tent for a spot of Kindle reading before lights out. The Fairhaven camp is free by the way, but you’re supposed to book ahead to reserve a spot (though I didn’t).
Tuesday 9 February 2021. French Island |36 km|
In the morning Bruce, the helpful guy from the ferry, came by. He’d mentioned on the ferry that we could go on a ride together today up to the north end of the island. He actually owns 10 Chinese hub-drive eBikes that he uses for guided island eBike tours. I wasn’t all that keen to damage my bike on the rough tracks (and they are worse, apparently, within the National Park at the northern end of the island), so we left it that I might wander over to ‘his’ end of the island (on the western side, near to the car barge landing ramp) later on in the day and I could do the ride on one of his bikes. He said I’d be welcome to set up camp on his property for the night if I wanted to.
After the chat with Bruce I did try out cycling north along the western coastal track without any luggage on board, but I got bored of the bone-shaking, bike-rattling corrugations and turned around to go and check out the only store on the island, situated a few km inland from the passenger ferry landing. But first I made the short detour back to the ferry landing to take a couple of photos of the shoreline from the pier.
There’s a raised railway line running up the jetty and I came off the bike heavily when my front wheel skidded on it. Apart from the skinned knees and skinned left wrist I felt OK at first, but I guess I landed on the pointy end of the saddle with my lower right side, because, not straightaway but over the ensuing 4 days, I developed an excruciating pain in the area of my right kidney. Over the next few weeks it felt like when I broke a couple of ribs during my 2019 trip down the Danube, so maybe I did a similar bit of damage this time around. Even now as I write this, 6 weeks later, it is still not fully healed.
Anyway, my purpose in checking out the store was to make a booking on the car barge that plies between the eastern side of the Island and Corinella on the east coast of Westernport Bay. The ferry only has capacity for two cars, and doesn’t run every day. It is also at the vagaries of the wind and tides. I called the number on the store notice board and the ferry guy was quite nonchalant – “sure, no problem, see you at 9.40 am tomorrow.”
My escape route off the island thus settled, I sat down for a leisurely meal at the store – a not-so-trivial $25 for a steak sanga and chips, but gourmet standard. I could have done without the chips. I also spent another $30 on 6 cans of JD and coke as a gift for Bruce (well, to share anyway), since I’d decided to take up his offer of a camp for the night. I dawdled back to Fairhaven and packed up all my gear and hauled it over the rough tracks to the western side of the island to Bruce’s place.
I wondered what I’d gotten myself in for when I arrived at Bruce’s place in mid-afternoon. Living arrangements are informal and rather rudimentary. Abandoned cars and machinery lay about. A small open-sided shed seems to be the main kitchen/ washroom, with a few stools and benches around a hearth outside as an eating area. Other open-sided sheds housed the ebikes and all their spares and charging apparatus. There were two teepees. Bruce lived in one and I think the other one had meat hanging up in it. It must be awful in winter when it’s cold, wet and muddy!
A large and profesionally-installed solar array supplies power for the fridge and the bike-charging power outlets. It is all owned by a lawyer from Melbourne, including a proper house in the paddock next door that I got a brief glimpse of through the trees (and hence the fancy solar array). Bruce is the live-in manager of it all, and his duties include looking after the few head of cattle as well as a “Camping with Koalas” business, and his ebike tours of course, that are just getting off the ground.
When I arrived there was a bloke leaning into the back of a station wagon expertly hacking away at a large and bloody carcass with an evil-looking boning knife. He didn’t notice me though because he was isolated from his environment by the huge pair of headphones he was wearing, and was manically shouting away, presumably in time with the …hmm, well….punk-rap I suppose you’d call it…and I wasn’t about to interrupt him
Bruce appeared out of the ‘kitchen’ and shouted introductions were made. Bruce and his mate Vaughn/ Vaughan (sounds like) were busy turning a deer into mince meat, glad-wrapping the product into large (2-3 kg) blocks and popping them into a top door freezer. A different kind of meat (sheep, apparently) was added to the deer mince mix, one fistful per five of deer, whether to extend the deer or to improve it’s flavor I didn’t find out. The provenance of the actual animals was not entirely clear either but I was lead to conclude that one was poached from the National Park and the other was ‘found’ on the side of the road. Anyway, according to Vaughn later his aboriginality (very distant aboriginality, judging by appearance) entitles him to hunt locally.
I did find out later that Vaughn is descended from the initial European settlers to the island in 1857. Five related family groups took up the government’s offer of settling on the island, growing chicory, but only Vaughn’s immediate family stuck it out. Bruce was born on the island too but left in his teens, becoming an itinerant station-hand before meeting his future wife, a Canadian tourist, on Philip Island and moving with her to Canada, where he lived and worked in the mining industry for many years before his divorce and return to French Island a couple of years ago.
It took several hours to finish off processing the deer. Bruce cleaned up (himself, not the fly-infested bits of meat adorning the place), I was allocated the caravan to sleep in and moved my gear in, and then the two of us (Vaughn had gone home) went for a ride on his best two ebikes. The ‘track’ was all overgrown and we had to bush-bash our way up, over and down a heavily wooded hill before descending onto a rocky beach at the south-western-most corner of the island, a ride of only maybe 2 or so kilometres, but pretty tough going all the way. We’d taken fabric shopping bags and a crowbar with us and within 10 minutes we’d collected two bags full of oysters. Bruce also collected various varieties of wild vegetables along the way, such as warrigal greens, samphire, sea rocket, salt bush and purple wild mint. We also stopped at an abandoned homestead and picked apples and madrones as well as copious amounts of blackberries. Bruce turns these last three into “fruit leather” in his small circular drier.
Vaughn came back and a couple, Chrissie and Stephen, also appeared for “band practice”. Bruce is the leader of the band, that he calls Bellamarin after the name the local aborigines gave the island, and plays the guitar and sings ballads of his own composition. The others strum along. They’ve done a couple of gigs apparently, including for the patrons on the “Camping with Koalas” experience. We had an al fresco dinner of venison burger patties with pickled oysters and wild vegetables followed by compote of fruit – a free meal essentially. Neither Bruce nor Vaughn are drinkers – they’re on the weed instead – but the other two made up for it and polished off all the rum and coke. A funny old night indeed.
I didn’t get too much sleep because the caravan is under a tree with low-hanging branches that screeched back and forth across the van roof all night long when the wind picked up.
Wednesday 10 February 2021. French Island • Inverloch |80 km|
[Warm and clear but breezy then downright windy from the west; I was mainly heading west]
I was in plenty of time to catch the 9.40 am barge. There was just myself and one guy in an SUV as paying passengers, and it cost me $20 for the one-way trip, that took about 15 minutes, A lot of water and sea-spray entered the car well area even though conditions were relatively mild – I’d hate to be on it if the wind and sea-chop really picked up!
Corinella didn’t have much to offer, breakfast-wise. Just a vanilla slice and a choco milk.
I took the C436 to the Bass Highway at the village of Bass and rode down the side of the highway for 2 km, then took a left turnoff towards Woolamai, aiming for the well sign-posted Woolamai racecourse, and at the racecourse joined the Rail Trail that goes to Kilcunda and on to Wonthaggi. It was a great ride all along here especially as far as Kilcunda but I found it a little bit boring thereafter. Note that the track in the map above is not strictly accurate, as my route actually took in Kilcunda.
After Wonthaggi, the ride along the coast from Cape Paterson to Inverloch on C435 is well worth the extra 7 km travel distance compared to the direct route from Wonthaggi on B460 (20km vs 13 km).
The Big4 Caravan Park at Inverloch is an up-market resort-style park so I guess the $58 it cost me for a powered site is about right. I’d planned to stay at the council-run park right next door but their office was unmanned and there were dire warning signs everywhere about camping without having first paid the fee. Basically, Big4 are running both parks and preferentially put travelers into their own. I also went and splurged $160 on a pair of Crocs wading shoes and Billabong swimming shorts – I’d left my sandals and old shorts at Justine’s house too, I realised then and there, just as I was about to go for a swim in the Big4 indoor pool.
But the best thing about my Inverloch stay was the antics of the rowdy pair of koalas in the tree right next to me. The big guy chased the usurper up the tree onto a little branch that he (the big one) couldn’t get onto, and every time the other one came down, the big one chased him back up again. They’re obviously not real bright, koalas. The little guy just wanted to escape but the big one was adamant no one was going to encroach onto his part of the tree. So every half an hour or so there’d be this confrontation accompanied by snarling and loud grunting that ended in the young one being chased back up the branch again. They carried on in this fashion from 11 pm until at least 10 am next morning when I left Inverloch. The alpha male would have been better off, you’d think, turning a blind eye while the little one scampered down the small branch past him onto the main trunk and thus got down out of the tree, but nah, he had to prove a point.
Thursday 11 February 2021. Inverloch • Venus Bay |50 km|
[Heavily overcast and slight breeze. Temperatures in the high 20s]
It was only supposed to be a short ride today – a mere 20 km hop around Anderson’s Inlet to Venus Bay on the other side, but I made a wrong turn riding out of Inverloch and went the long way round via Kunwarra and Balarra.
I didn’t think much of Venus Bay. It has a crappy caravan park located right in the village, which is landlocked and sheltered from the ocean beach by a series of wooded sandhills. It rained off-and-on all night, and the 4 noisy women in the cabin opposite partying till 12 pm didn’t help either.
Friday 12 to Wednesday 17 February 2021. Venus Bay • Port Albert |100 km|
[19°C and heavily overcast; a strong tail wind when I set off from Venus Bay, and a stronger head wind for the last 15 km coming into Port Albert. In Port Albert. it was calm and sunny for the first and second days, but then a very strong and consistent SW to SE wind sprang up and continued for the next 4 days, only stopping and then reversing in direction on the day I left]
The rain in Venus Bay of last night had petered out by morning, but I still had to pack away a wet tent and then scoot off between showers.
First, it was 30 km of okay riding on C443 and then the Tarwin-Buffalo Road before the C444 to Fish Creek.
The village of Fish Creek is a delightful artists’ colony – yuppified, but in a nice way. I bought a rather nice Pot au Feu pie there from “Long John Pickles” – yummo – as well as a citron tart and a litre bottle of just about the best milk I’ve ever drunk, that originates from Bass River Dairies. I’ve been looking for that milk in Melbourne ever since – unhomogenized, and with 14% fat and protein, about double that of most other milks.
Fish Creek marked my start on The Great Southern Rail Trail that I followed for 40 km through Foster and on to Toora. Then it was an easy run down into Port Albert.
I arrived in Port Albert around 2.30pm and was looking forward to pitching my tent in the RV park right on the wharf in the centre of town (as per expectations raised by the WikiCamps app), but the signs about the place made it plain that ‘self-contained’ was the order of the day, meaning ‘no camping allowed’, and there is no other camp ground in town. So I thought, “well, okay then, one night in a B&B won’t hurt me” and I booked a night in the ‘Angler’s Rest’ right opposite the quay where I was standing, for $120.
But I had no sooner booked (and paid for) my accommodation, when an SMS came in from my Sydney-based daughter congratulating me on having escaped yet another snap Melbourne COVID lockdown that just come into force. I knew nothing about this! Then my friend Flavia texted in saying it’s actually a Victoria-wide lockdown, meaning I couldn’t move more than 5km from my present location for at least 5 days.
This turned out to be the more correct information, and as there are no caravan parks in Port Albert, nor within 5 km, I had no real choice other than to stay put in the B&B for the whole 5 days. At least the owner, Valerie, who was similarly marooned in Melbourne, gave me a small discount on the room rate and the room I had was fine; but honestly, 5 days in Port Albert is not a vacation I’d recommend to anybody.
There’s one service station/ general store in town and a fish-and-chip shop – that’s it! No pub, no bottle shop, no café, no pharmacy nor anything else for that matter. It was okay wandering around town on that first, calm, day even though I got eaten alive by sandflies (tiny midges) and March flies (the big buggers) and still, 6 weeks later, I have a couple of suppurating sores left to heal – and they’re itchy as all f@#*. But then the wind came – a steady 35 km/h blow in off the sea that kept away all the insects but rattled the windows, and my brain, for the next 4 days straight. It drove me crazy!
I spent most of the time in my B&B room reading. There’s a library book-exchange cupboard up the street that I made good use of and I went through 4 books – “The Caine Mutiny” and a cold-war spy thriller called “The Red Square” among them, as well as a couple of non-fiction books on my e-reader.
I ate fish and chips as the main meal of the day (a late lunch) for 4 days (it was closed on the Monday). This was okay and nutritious, but nowhere near the paragon of fish and chippery it was touted to be by the locals and the tourist brochures. Valerie had a few tomatoes growing in the front garden that made a tasty tomato-sandwich snack with the defrosted frozen bread I got from the store – much much better than supermarket-bought ones.
I even tried my hand at fishing off the boat jetty using a rod and reel from the B&B – bought the ‘right’ bait and tackle and all – only to be reprimanded and threatened with a hefty fine by the Fisheries Inspector – because fishing during COVID lockdown is not allowed – and I’d only been at it for 10 minutes before he nabbed me.
Thursday 18 February 2021. Port Albert • Sale |103 km|
[Sunny, 23°C rising to 27. Wind at 25 km/h from the NE. I was heading NE!]
Lockdown finished and guess what? Yep, after 5 days straight of incessant SW wind, it turned around 180° on the day I departed and blew almost as strong from the opposite direction, straight into my face from my direction of travel. But I needed no second invitation to get the hell out of dodge. Thoroughly disillusioned by now by the impracticalities of trying to tour around Victoria during a virus epidemic, I decided to make for the closest railway town, Traralgon, and just catch a train straight back home to Melbourne.
However, in the first real town I came to after Port Albert, Yarram, I got into a conversation with a helpful taxi-driver who was having his morning cup of coffee at a road-side van/kiosk. He told me there are an awful lot of hills on the way to Traralgon and the road, C483, is busy, narrow, hilly and dangerous, and I should just go to the town of Sale on the flat A440 road with a wide shoulder instead. Sale is a lot further from Melbourne, but it’s still on the railway line so it doesn’t matter. Sounded like good advice to me, so I took it.
I nearly made it to Sale on the batteries too, but not quite, and so for only the second time this trip, and with only 15 km still to go to Sale, I stopped to use the generator to give a quick top-up recharge (rather than unexpectedly run out of power altogether in a more unforgiving road situation).
Hoards of midges, mozzies and March flies – the dreaded 3M – emerged from the long grass and made my life misery for the next 30 minutes that I was there on the side of that damn road charging up. I was almost mad with grief by the time I chucked everything back together to get out of there quickly and continue on to Sale. I even sat down in the middle of the road at one stage to escape the worst of the biting, preferring the risk of getting run over to getting slowly eaten alive.
I missed the train by 4 minutes. And unlike Traralgon that has a Melbourne train every 40 minutes, Sale only has 3 per day and the next one wasn’t until 7 pm – still fully 6 hours away. The manager of the very swank and over-designed Sale library was super-friendly and let me sit in my shabby outfit in his grand foyer reading all the day’s newspapers, and let me fully charge up the eBike using the mobility-scooter charging point in the basement garage. Nice of him, but not too sure I liked being lumped in with that cohort.
I went back to the station at around 2pm – rather wait there, I figured, in case some more train information came up. I’d already been to the station and bought a ticket when I first arrived in Sale. The station is a good ways out of town, a couple of kilometers at least. I bought some sushi to eat on the train but started tucking into it as soon as I got back to the station.
I think the station-master took pity on me, because he’d been talking to his friend the bus-driver who had a last-minute call to go to Traralgon, and managed to convince him to take me with him, eBike and all (and it was no mean feat squeezing that eBike into the under-bus storage area I can tell you) That way, I’d be able to catch a 5.07 pm train to Melbourne.
Well, the 5.07 departure was cancelled and became a 6.07, but I still made it back to Richmond station by 8.20 pm. and to my home 15 minutes later.
– ends –
xxx