Australia with the Windahl family: Day 12 To the lighthouse, and to Kingston SE

Griffith Island lighthouse, Port Fairy

This morning we went to Griffith Island in Port Fairy for a walk. The island has a lighthouse and is home to a colony of mutton birds, or short-tailed shearwaters. They nest here and spend the winter (that is the summer in the northern hemisphere) close to Alaska. There are also black wallabies on the island, but Alice was the only one who saw a wallaby. The lighthouse was beautiful and the rest of the walk also wonderful, even if we did not see any wallabies. We walked by the sea, and on beaches and saw stone "walls" that formed like a lagoon, shells on the beaches, kelp and the ever fascinating waves that rolled in from the ocean. The weather was perfect for walking, sunny, windy and around 20 degrees C. It took about an hour to walk the nearly 3 kilometers around, and after the beautiful walk we left Port Fairy.

Sun hits the lighthouse

Stony beach

Annika and Christina by the lighthouse

We stopped in Portland for lunch. It was a bit of a detour, but for me it was kind of irresistible to have a photo of me and my daughter from Portland, since I have one of me and my son from Portland, Oregon, USA. Portland, Victoria, Australia turned out to be a fairly big port with many tankers coming in and out, and we saw a lot of trucks delivering timber to the port. We had lunch in an old watch house that was now a café. The rest of the road was rather boring, but at least I got to drive the longest straights I've ever driven. The road seemed to disappear on the horizon more than once. We also passed into South Australia which also means new time zone. Oddly enough they are 30 minutes behind Australien Eastern Standard Time. Arrived in Kingston SE I took a bath in the sea with Lennart and Christina. It was windy and not very warm, but the water was warm enough. It is surprising how warm considered next bit of land from this beach is Antarctica. The beach, or the way to the beach, was not at all prepared for visitors so it was very much of a natural beach. The sand blew onto everything that we put on the ground so it was not a place for a long swim. We then had dinner at the hotel restaurant, it turned out to be a rather good place and I had seafood plate. This one had only fried fish and seafood, but it all tasted really good. Particularly with some wine from "around the corner"; Cape Jaffa.