Their have been a few posts about
free camping sites which haven't all been good news and this has co-incided with us checking about about 30 Victorian sites listed in a magazine someone got us for Xmas.
(After various recent 4wd incidents - I had promised the wife some quiet exploring alone time)
The overall picture I saw was quite encouraging given the usual hassles and I was surprized at the quality of some
places I have usually driven right past to get to the bigger hills.
In one example not far from
melbourne - exploring the
Goulburn from
Seymour to Eildon we came across an un-documented tracks and even river access.
We moved on to Gippsland where recent fires and roadworks still had the
bridge closed at Glen Maggie and road north of
Dargo was still closed (I thought unnecessarily so) so we checked out a backroad to
Dargo listed in the magazine.
A series of sites seriously worth checking out were in the freestone creek valley north of Stratford This is mostly the dirt back road to
Dargo area - a couple of valleys over from the Avon wilderness - and in state
forrest.
On the way we stopped at the 36 hour freesight on the main hwy out of
Melbourne at Rosedale.
This is a seriously good stopover and the town got some of our business as a result.
On the other side of town is a $62 a night motel and between them I thought there was a good balance of business and freecamping.
Blue Pool is a featured site in the camping magazine and its almost to good to be true.
Elsewhere in Australia this huge
circular pool with safe swimming and
rock diving would be the sort of thing you would drive 500km to see and then find vested interests wanting to control it or tell you how many breaths of the fresh air you could inhale per dollar.
BLUE POOL
The
camping area is a bit poor with just the minimum facilites of a drop loo but thats just how we like it.
We set up
camp about 3pm friday as these
places get filled up quickly over weekends and made a small fire from just the twigs lying around the
camp ground and it was just beautiful - only two other campers
were there and we went to bed early however about midnight lots of cars came thru, 4 or 5 stopped and had loud music playing for hours and we were thankful to be sleeping inside our car instead of a tent as shutting the doors drops noise down over 20 db.
The group were quiet considerate though and moved up the road 50m to the day
picnic area were they set up several tents and partyied till 4am.
Next day we explored the whole length of this valley which included several short tracks cutting across the stony creek and even a 1km drive up the creek bed during which I had to quickly grab the lockers in a deeper than average puddle else it may not have been a drama free weekend.
There is at least a dozen seperate camping areas off the 2wd dirt road and many tracks, even a
Gorge with small caves.
FreeStone Creek gorge & Caves
The magazine references were quite accurate and showed that one could go to a new place with confidence and even if one site was occupied another could reasonably be found.
We only checked out 30 sites but with hundreds listed, and many more not, I think the
free camping picture is pretty good around Victoria.