Braving The Red Alert In The Grampians

Today was a hot day in the Grampians. I mean, it was a really HOT day. It was 41 Celsius degrees, which is 104 degrees Fahrenheit!

A bit of heat is certainly not gonna stop us. We are here for 2 days so we might as well enjoy it. We filled 2 bottles of water and we left Tim’s Place to go to our first stop: the MacKenzie Falls.

Tina wasn’t really feeling it. It was so hot she thought it wasn’t a really smart thing to do to go hiking in the middle of a National Park. We did anyways.

After a 1 km walk, we got to the bottom of the MacKenzie Falls. It’s nice but nothing very exciting. After seeing the beautiful Bridal Veil Falls in New Zealand, this one was kind of a joke. Anyways.

We went back to the car and decided to go to Hollow Mountains. We had to drive in the bush for maybe 50 km until we got to the bottom of the mountain.

It was burning hot out! There was no one to be seen around us. We decided to hike all the way up; a 2.2 km hike/climb up the mountain.

I was really surprised they let people do this. It was very steep and you had many occasions to die out there. A few times, I was thinking to myself “if you slip, you die”.

At times, it seemed we were more rock climbing than we were hiking…

We stopped many times to rest and drink water.

When we finally reached the top, we never found what we came for. The brochure showed some kind of cave thing but we couldn’t find it. I was pissed but still glad we took this hike.

On the way back, we took this dirt road for 35 km to the village. We didn’t see one car. All we saw was a few ostriches and a couple dead kangaroos on the side of the road (ew, gross!).

When we got to town, it seemed it had been deserted. Finally we saw one car and another. After getting some well-deserved ice cream, we went back to Tim’s Place.

I talked to Claudia, the manager, who told me there had been warnings on tv and on the radio, alerting people to stay in because it was too hot and dangerous, and there was a risk of fires.

I told this to Tina and she gave me that look which says so much… In this case, it said “of course it was stupid and dangerous to be hiking out there by this heat”.

Meh! I’m glad we did it. It didn’t seem dangerous or stupid at the time. Maybe Aussies are just wooses 😉