Jeff Epler's blog

Great Ocean Road

The gorgeous Grotto, along the Great Ocean Road.

The Great Ocean Road travels along the coast of Victoria to the west of Melbourne. It's an area of amazing beauty and contrasts, well loved by tourists. We enjoyed the dramatic ocean views as well as the wildlife. Jeff got some amazing photos along the way.

Halls Gap Zoo

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Red panda on the way to food.

Jeff took some really neat pictures in Halls Gap Zoo, not far from Horsham.

Kingfisher Cruise

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Azure Kingfisher

We took a lovely cruise on the Murray River, between the border of Victoria and New South Wales, courtesy of Kingfisher Cruises. It was a fun trip exploring a shallow river area with a wide mix of birds.

Zoos in Victoria

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Australian Pelican.

We started out the next part of our trip in Werribee, where friends live, and they took us to the Werribee Open Range Zoo, run by the Melbourne Zoo. There you can ride in a bus around the safari area, seeing plenty of mainly African animals along the way. You can also walk around other areas and explore other animals. They also took us to other sites in Werribee. The next day we wandered around the entire Melbourne Zoo, which is quite an amazing place.

Healesville Sanctuary

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White-browed Wood Swallow

After Wilsons Promontory, we visited Healesville Sanctuary, one of the Zoos Victoria sites. At Healesville, all the animals are Australian. The day was overcast and lightly rainy, but not enough to interfere with our enjoyment of the animals.

They had displays of wombats and Tasmanian devils, but the animals were not visible when we went by. They also had a platypus on display, but the lighting was too dim to be able to get a photograph. Too bad, as we never got a platypus photo on the whole trip, though we did see them in zoos twice.

More Sites Around Victoria

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Beautiful view from Mt. William in the Grampians.

Here are some fun photos showing a wide variety of places we visited over the course of a week in Melbourne and cities around Victoria. These include the Halls Gap Zoo (a small rural zoo with quite a few animals), Horsham (small town where Ingrid's friend teaches), Grampians (beautiful national park), Geelong (city south of Melbourne with the National Wool Musem), CERES Environmental Park (with community gardens, small farms, delicious cafe, plant nursery, tons of educational displays, and much more) and some community gardens on public housing estates.

Victoria Sites

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A billabong!

After returning from Queensland, we explored a variety of sites to the east of Melbourne. Wilsons Prom was a beautiful park on the southern coast, and we went on a couple of nice cruises on the Murray River.