Legend has it that Loo-errn was cooking eels by the side of the Yarra River in Melbourne, saw a swan's feather floating on the wind and followed it to the Prom. He now lives in the mountains of Yiruk (as the Prom is traditionally named) and watches over the welfare of his people.
Campers obviously feed the birds because we has rosellas, magpies, seagulls and kookaburras all fighting for our attention - and Pringles. At one point, Rob had three green rosellas on him, Sophie attracted two reds, I had a magpie yelling at me and Isabelle was hiding in the hut, still traumatized by our visit to the Parrot Sanctuary at Coombs a few years back.
It is one of the earliest designated national parks in the world.
Eighteen thousand years ago, when the oceans were 130m lower, Aborigines walked from the Prom to Tasmania.
The Gunai are the traditional owners of the land but there is shockingly little information available on site about the history of the area before the arrival of Europeans. I found this quite different from our experiences at BC parks like Montague Harbour, where the parks people can take you on a tour of culturally modified trees, midden sites and are well versed on the significance of the area to the First Nations.
The Prom is quite an impressive place. You have to drive 30k into the park before you get to the campground and in that 30k drive, I almost hit a deer, a wombat and a kangaroo. Luckily, I had three back-seat drivers to tell me how to drive and managed to avoid each one. FYI, the deer looked just like the ones at home. I think I even saw one of Gran's tulip bulbs dangling from his lips.
The campground has a range of accommodations from a no-frills patch of land to pitch your tent all the way to a two bedroom, two bathroom wilderness retreat. We were in a yurt-like hut with two bunk beds, a stove, bar fridge, cold running water and a heater.
We were only a hop, skip and a jump to Norman Bay - a huge sandy beach with great surf and no sharks. The sand is so fine, it feels like cornstarch under your feet and behaves the same way too - you can make a sandball hard enough to bruise when thrown with accuracy and yet, if you hold the ball in your hand for more than 10 seconds, it will flow through your fingers like pudding..
The weather was chilly but that didn't stop us from bodyboarding and frolicking in the surf - we're hardy Canadians (and we had wetsuits).
As soon as the sun starts to go down, everyone prowls around looking for wildlife. Rob came across his first wombat on the way to barbeque dinner on our first night. They are about the size of medium sized dog, round and fuzzy and very low to the ground. This guy was placidly chomping on the grass so Rob crouched down and did his best wombat whisperer impersonation. The bundle of fluff snuffled straight over to him and as he was taking this picture, the wombat slowly reached out his paw and sliced a foot long hole through the BBQ bag Rob had placed between his legs. Rob moved away with haste.
Campers obviously feed the birds because we has rosellas, magpies, seagulls and kookaburras all fighting for our attention - and Pringles. At one point, Rob had three green rosellas on him, Sophie attracted two reds, I had a magpie yelling at me and Isabelle was hiding in the hut, still traumatized by our visit to the Parrot Sanctuary at Coombs a few years back.
The Prom animal count: deer, wombats, foxes, bats, emus, ring-tailed and brush-tailed possums, kangaroos, wallabys and more birds than you can shake a tube of Pringles at.
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| FYI: Wombats smell like guinea pigs |
On first reading I didn't read the word 'frolicking' as such. For this, I do apologize. And I'm with Isobelle all the way. Birds are creepy. Does sniffing wombats give one a certain high? It is so wonderful that you are seeing so much of Australia and enjoying yourselves so immensely. PS~ glad to see the bottle of wine in the kitchen of the yurt. If you come across 19 Crimes wine, please start collecting the corks for me.
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