Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

The Otways with Grandma, 2-3 October, 2010 part 1

Playground at Colac

We drove as far as Colac before stopping for a break at the playground on the main street. A bit of time to run around, have a drink, climb on things. Sparrow loved the rotunda where we ate lunch, loved the kids at the playground, had quite a few goes at trying to get up the blue ladder thingy. Climbing ladders is still well beyond her, but this was built in a way she could make a good go at trying.

The Otway Fly and the Dinosaur Walk

The Otway Fly is a rainforest canopy walk, out into the mountain ash and myrtle beech and other trees of this super-high-rainfall area. (Weeproinah, just down the road, is the town with Victoria's highest annual rainfall.) You walk down and down through overarching forest, possibly via a detour into the Dinosaur Walk that shows creatures that used to live on the planet when this type of forest covered the whole country and not just a few remaining protected valleys. (According to my dinonerd friends, the first creature she's looking at isn't in fact a dinosaur, it's a synapsid, which was on a different evolutionary track to the dinosaurs and is more closely related to the mammal ancestors. So I stand corrected. It's good for a girl to have such erudite friends.) Then you rise up into the sky on a mesh boardwalk that takes you gradually through different layers of canopy - sassafras, then myrtle beech, then eventually over the top of that to a height still below the giant mountain ash trees. They are the world's tallest flowering plant, and there's a suspicion that had the tallest ones not been selectively logged out before official measurements were taken that they'd be the tallest plant full stop.

Grandma, Sparrow and I all enjoyed the walk greatly, even the cantilever bit which I know is perfectly good physics but still gives me the willies. (Excellent example of science communication in how they explain it - they described its load-bearing capacity in terms of 14 elephants, which while nonsensical makes it very clear that unless you weigh as much as an elephant your weight is trivial to the structure. That didn't stop James from redefining the load capacity as being able to carry pregnant me plus thirteen more elephants. Maybe it was a good thing he stayed in the car and listened to the football instead of walking.) We could have climbed up the extra tower to reach canopy height for the mountain ash, but chose not to. Sparrow had great fun with the steps (which she went down herself!) and their wire surface, the mud and the rocks at ground level. She didn't enjoy having to stay in the stroller for the above-ground stretch, but it wasn't a good surface for her to walk on and was very narrow. She got to burn off her energy on the ground stage and at the playground after. Mum and I were already a little bit out of energy, and opted for the free ride back up the hill from the base!

Triplet Falls

Sunday morning we went back to the area where the Otway Fly was, and kept going down the road to Triplet Falls. The catchment for the falls is out of Weeiproinah, so the falls are really quite massive. And we were there in October, one of the highest rainfall months. It was quite beautiful, and a lovely forest walk to get there. Turns out the falls are very close to the carpark so if you didn't want to walk very far you could just walk the wrong way down the loop and you'd be right there. But we enjoyed the forest walk anyway. Sparrow slept through most of it on James' back. This was James' and my third anniversary, so the last photo in this group is our anniversary photo. We had last year's anniversary in the Otway rainforest too. We'll have to think about where we want to spend next years' :-)