We're off to Little Desert......

After Christmas Day with the family we said goodbye to everyone and drove home stopping on the way to pick up the camper for an early start the next morning.  We were going to stay at the Little Desert Nature Lodge and while there explore the Little Desert National Park.

Where is this you might ask, just as I did too, never having ever heard of such a place.  The National Park can be found 375km NW of Melbourne.  It started out as a 217 hectare reserve set aside for the preservation of the Malleefowl.  Over the years this has increased to its present size of 132,000 hectares and it remains one of the last strongholds of the endangered Malleefowl (Lowan).  

The Nature Lodge, 16 kms from Nhill, is owned and operated by Conservation Volunteers, a leading not for profit organization. It borders the National Park and conserves over 117 hectares of Mallee habitat and wildlife.  With cabins, bunkhouses and camping it is a great place to base yourself and explore both the reserve and the National Park.

We got a reasonably early start the next morning and after stopping for coffee at Beaufort we found that Santa had not quite left Australia.  Perhaps his six white boomers didn't want to fly.  

After two more stops for lunch at Ararat and fuel in Nhill we arrived at our destination around 4 pm.  We were met by Peter, the Ranger on duty, and told we could set up camp anywhere we liked as there were no other campers there.  We picked a great spot beside the shelter shed and were soon having a cold drink in the shade.

Once we were settled in we set off with the mud map to find Big M's Waterhole and spent a couple of hours being entertained by masses of cute New Holland Honeyeaters.  

Crossing the lawns we were surrounded by many of the resident Eastern Grey Kangaroos.  These were grazing peacefully in the sunshine and were to be our constant companions over the next 6 days.

Another resident of the lodge was George, the emu, who spent his days wandering the property watching all the comings and going of the visitors.

After our big day on the road we were glad to have dinner under the stars and slept like babies not even waking with the first birds the next morning.

until then......