Similar to most of reviewers, I only visited Naracoorte component of this World Heritage Site as part of my Great Ocean Road trip from Melbourne to Adelaide. I chose Penola, a lovely small town with fine food and nice red wine of the well-known vineyards of Coonawara as my base to visit this fossil caves national park. Before the visit it is highly recommended to check the website of the national park for tour schedule and buy the limited ticket, I saw many tourists came without this preparation and found no tour available. I arrived the tourist center 1 hour before my booked tour to register. The biggest attraction on the ground level is the big, cute statue of Diprotodon, an ancestor of wombat and Koala bear.

From the tourist center, I had to drive to the entrance of Victoria Cave and wait for the ranger with the less of almost 30 tourists. The tour could easily divide into 2 parts, the normal cave tour with lovely stalactites and stalagmites, and the fossil bed tour. I was quite surprised to see that actually the cave was quite beautiful, better than my original idea. Maybe originally the caves have pretty low ceiling so the formation of dripstones here are easier. It was quite fascinating to see how much earth they had to dig out in order to make passageway for tourists without crawling the low ceiling. Too bad that the quality of dripstone could not compare with other famous World Heritage Site caves, but it was lovely, and the fossil was the real reason to come here. The fossil part was even more surprising, after small caves, I entered a reasonably big cavern with many chairs similar to small classroom. Here the ranger showed us the fossil bed and many fossils sample. The stories of how ancient animals trapped underground and struggled to survive were quite sad. The ranger also gave us a chance to touch those fossils which was an amazing experience, and jokingly that the fossils here were enormous and they already had too many specimens that cannot find space to keep so that if anyone asked for a souvenir, he may ask his boss for approval!

I spent about 3.5 hours in this national park, the visit experience was nice and very educational, it was well plan for all ages, which was quite contrast to US that seem to focus on children, and in my opinion better than other fossil sites I have been. The site is not a must visit for Australia, but it is a great stop between Melbourne and Adelaide along the Great Ocean Road for everyone.