Wilsons Promontory National Park

A little more than 200km from Melbourne, Wilsons Promontory National Park makes a popular weekend trip for the city people. It is also the most southern point of the Australian mainland. The main camping ground at Tidal River has nearly 500 campsites and there is a lottery every year for the spots in the summer holidays between Christmas and end of January. Luckily for us, it's not peak season anymore and we arrived mid-week, so only a few of the camp spots were actually occupied.

The park offers wonderful beaches, great walking tracks and even some "summit hikes" which I always love (..Austrians always love). As we are spoilt with "squeaky sand" beaches in West Australia (well, at least there is the whitest beach in the world in WA) we are not that interested in beaches, we are looking forward to the walks to get us fitter and prepared for the Inka Trail, our ultimate goal for 2014 in Peru.

Although the weather was rather "Victorian" (for our European readers that means, the weather is more or less like in Europe in April, cloudy, rainy, but it could still have all seasons in one day) it didn't put us off from our hiking plans. After our tour through the Yarra Valley we arrived at the camp site in the park in the evening, had a nice meal and went straight to rest.

In the morning the forecast predicted "a view showers" which is still better than "rain" and it actually remained overcast (cloudy) all day with only few, scattered, light rainfall. Mount Oberon is a very popular hike and not too long either. The weather wasn't too bad yet and therefore we started off to climb this "monster" of a mountain. After not even an hour we reached the summit at 2,350ft (558m). The views though are spectacular with Tidal River Beach and Campsite on the left. The next beach you see is Squeaky Bay and then Whisky Bay which is just behind me (Stefan) in the picture. 

We were still motivated after this walk and headed over to Lilly Pilly Gully for a rainforest walk which was actually a lot longer than the Mount Oberon climb. On the Lilly Pilly circuit we took a side step and climbed Mount Bishop as well which gave us spectacular views from the other side of the bays.

All in all we came to 17km of walking that day which filled us with pride and joy. Even more so as it started raining heavily at night which continued throughout the next day. Just because of that we would have left Wilsons Promontory anyway if there hadn't been another incident..

Only in the morning we realised that the fixed window of our Ford Transit where we are actually sleeping with our heads was leaking and the mattress got soaked with water. Waking up to this realisation was rather horrible. On the one hand we tried to stop more water coming into the van, on the other hand we tried to clean up the existing mess by taking off linens, etc. It was not a nice morning. After a few deep breaths I straight away called a glass company and arranged an appointment in Sale, about 125km further to the East of Wilsons and off we went.