On Monday 3rd February, we left Sydney for a journey across the Outback. Not far outside of Sydney things became pretty rural and pretty dry. Traffic thinned out and roads became endless stretches of tarmac ahead. We covered many hundreds of kilometres and overnighted in Hay. Dinner in the Jolly Jimbaroo, a neon lit, canteen style, diner attached to a hokey pub was probably the best value meal we had in all of Australia, at 15 dollars for roast lamb, veggies and gravy! By now we had become accustomed to Australia's exorbitant prices for almost everything, but especially food and wine. The problem is, places are generally so ordinary and often similar to what you get in South Africa for a quarter of the price! Imagine sitting outside a take-away bakery on rickety old garden furniture in the main street of a Karoo town like Beaufort West with flies everywhere and paying R50 for a coffee and R75 for a croissant! That we did in Coonawarra! Eventually it's just not fun anymore. I do have to give the Aussies one thing here though, the coffee is usually very good. But still. We drove to the Barossa Valley, then Adelaide and McClaren Vale, before heading back to the coast for the journey from Adelaide to Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road, which was beautiful but just packed full of busloads of tourists. On Saturday 8th February we found ourselves in Apollo Bay and enjoyed a night of live music and crazy people watching at the Apollo Hotel.
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