When booking our Great Ocean Road tour in Peter Pans we also received a day tour to Wilsons Promontory for free. It's always nice to get something for nothing. It was even nicer when we saw how beautiful 'The Prom' (as it's known by the locals) actually is. It could definitely rival The Great Ocean Road in my opinion and you don't need to fight the hoards of tourists at the scenic lookouts to get a good picture, you can actually take a few minutes to relax and check out the views.
The Prom is located at the southernmost point of mainland Australia but is actually attached to the same piece of granite that is Tasmania. This means it has a very different landscape to other areas around it which was nice to see.
Our tour guide for the day turned out to be the same one as we had for the three day tour, Matt, the Crazy Cat-man. He earned this name by telling us about his Siamese cat, Lemar, for about half and hour. He confirmed our suspicions that he was in fact crazy for his cat when he showed Matt and I a 3 minute long video of Lemar walking along a fence which wasn't that impressive. He thought it was amazing.
Anyway, our first stop took us on a short walk through some trees into an open space full of Kangaroos and Emus. We managed to get pretty close to the kangaroos but I wasn't so keen on the emus being there. They are too similar to Ostriches and for those of you who don't know, I am terrified of ostriches, ever since I had a dream that one chased and ate me as a child.
After getting back in the bus without being attacked by the emus, we headed further down the road to Mt. Bishop, which took about 40 minutes to climb to the top. The rocky summit offered an excellent place to sit and eat my sandwich (Matt forgot to bring his) and look out across the ocean and the offshore islands.
Our next walk took us along the shoreline and through forested areas from Norman Beach to Squeaky Beach. Unfortunately we didn't actually get to set foot on Norman beach so I had to write in the sand of Squeaky beach for the photo telling dad that the other beach was his beach. Squeaky Beach received it's name because of the rounded quartz sand that apparently squeaks when you walk on it. I didn't really notice it squeaking but the sand was beautiful and white. Also, one end of the beach had lots of rocks which were perfect for doing a spot of bouldering.
As well as having amazing views and doing some really nice walks, me and Matt learnt a very important lesson which is: slow and steady does in fact win the race. We were clearly the fastest walkers out of the group but the person to reach the end of the days hiking first was the eldest of the bunch. He was a man from Auckland perhaps about 70 years old, he walked pretty much non stop the whole way round at a pretty slow pace, yet every time we turned around he was there, coming up the track behind us. On the last leg he passed by us. I don't think Matt, The Crazy Cat-man was expecting him to come around the corner first.
