The greener roads less travelled: The best eco-friendly road trips around Victoria in the Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross Plug-in Hybrid

There is no sunrise here. Well, there must be one somewhere, I suppose. But from where we're standing? We’d have to take an educated guess.

The appropriately named Mount Abrupt has made sure of that, towering as it does above the Grampians National Park in Victoria, the presumably rising sun hidden entirely behind its vast, flat-topped peak.

Still, we hope it’s rising - even if we can’t see it - because so much of what we’re doing here is being powered by that 4.5-billion-year-old star, including the battery in our Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross Plug-in Hybrid, and most of the destinations on this eco-friendly road trip across Victoria.

Of course, this Mitsubishi has a pretty handy back-up plan should the sun stop shining (hopefully not permanently). Equipped with two battery-powered electric motors, the eco-friendly SUV can operate as a pure electric vehicle with a 55km zero-emission driving range.

But because it is also fitted with a potent, 2.4-litre, four-cylinder petrol engine, the Eclipse Cross can operate as a petrol-powered SUV, a conventional hybrid, or a combination of the two, delivering a combined range of up to 700km - perfect for exploring this country’s wide open spaces.

Harry and Iwona Wakeling have a Plan B, too. The couple, who haven’t seen a traditional electricity bill for years, have pivoted to an entirely off-the-grid existence, making their power free, and so they don’t mind one bit that we’ve got our Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross plugged into a conventional power socket at their Aquila Eco Lodges, where they’ve lived for 20 years.

Their property covers 100 acres, largely surrounded by the glorious Grampians National Park, which is overflowing with the sounds of our native wildlife.

We’ve spent the night in one of the four eco-lodges on the site, designed to be completely self-sufficient when they were built in the early 2000s. Interestingly, though, they were not built by Harry and Iwona.

Have you ever stayed somewhere you loved so much you fantasised about simply staying there forever? They did, too. And so they made it happen.

“[The former owners] were very environmentally minded and put down all their philosophies to the environmental architects who designed the lodges, all with that principle of giving people that maximum exposure to the outside,” Harry explains.

Harry and Iwona stayed as guests shortly after the lodges were built. “We wrote in the guest book that we’d happily stay forever,” laughs Harry, with the couple buying the site when it was offered a few years later.

“We’re completely off-grid. Everything comes through the atmosphere,” says Harry. “Our power is all our own: we generate from solar panels on the roof, charging batteries with a back-up generator that hasn’t run for quite a while.”

In ‘The Treehouse’ where we stayed, you feel part of the surrounding habitat, with a great expanse of glass bringing the richness of the stunning forest outside right into the lodge.

“We’ve got underground worm farms, two big reactors that live down beyond the last lodge, so the worms process everything – grey water, black water, organic waste,” Harry explains, with some pride.

The Aquila Eco Lodges is our final stop on an eco-adventure that started with a Victorian rite of passage: coffee. We shared a cup with Eliza Whitburn-Weber at The Workshop Café in Ballarat, only 70 minutes from the Melbourne CBD. Eliza is the co-founder of GroundUp Coffee Recyclers, which services Ballarat’s thriving café scene by taking coffee-ground waste to nearby farms.

“We owned a café in Northcote and worked with a business in Melbourne that did something similar,” Eliza says.

“Because we are so close to the city, but we are still quite rural, we have a lot of farmers, growers and small producers around locally – the company that we were working with in Melbourne, they took the coffee grounds to community gardens, home growers and so on, whereas here we can take it straight out to the farmers to create that circular economy.”

GroundUp Coffee Recyclers was established in the middle of COVID-19 lockdown, but plenty of takeaway coffee was still being consumed.

“The problem with it going to landfill is that it doesn’t break down,” Eliza explained. “We did the numbers and there were about 240,000 tonnes of coffee grounds going to landfill each year – that’s just in Ballarat. It’s a lot of coffee – something like 1.9 million coffees a year.”

The Workshop Café where we’re sitting is within the Flecknoe Building, dating back to the 1870s, and it’s a structure that has since evolved from its industrial origins to become a perfect example of adapting with the times.

The thin window frames give away its workshop origins, but inside there’s a fantastic wooden curved wall that wraps the kitchen where owner Meg Zerafa serves up not only great coffee, but locally sourced food. In fact, the social consciousness theme sees part of the curved wall dedicated to a ‘Pay it Forward’ system, reflecting the idea of the café being embedded in the community.

“We’re not perfect at it, but we do our best to source locally and sustainably,” says Meg, who points to the local items on show, including Ballarat chocolates and marshmallows.

“Nothing's perfect, everyone’s adapting. We use reusable cups – Green Caffeine, a program out of NSW, does that,” she adds. Meg’s logic is simple: “We want a planet to be on. We want to keep as many resources as we can.”

Setting off from The Workshop Cafe, we put the Eclipse Cross Plug-in Hybrid in its ECO drive function. We’ve maximised fuel economy since leaving Melbourne by using the full EV-mode around town, while replenishing the battery when needed on the highway runs, with the engine at its most fuel efficient.

Around town, the EV Mode brings both comfort and practicality to the driving experience. The peacefulness of near silent motoring, with a soothing hum from the electric motors, is teamed with supportive, comfortable seats and a great driving position.

We set the adaptive cruise control for the next stop – a place that also uses GroundUp Recycling – Café Sidra in nearby Learmonth. Owner Belinda greets us at the fantastic indoor/outdoor venue, used for weddings, parties and as a great place for locals to dine on their local produce.

“We do all our own herbs and veggies, but we use our own produce and have chickens out the back. Our thing is that we use as much local ingredients as we can first; all the eggs, asparagus, meats, the milk is from two kilometres down the road. Whatever is in season, we cook with,” Belinda says.

Why go to the trouble, though? “Well, it tastes better, number one, and to support local supports everyone. We try and go as organic as we can, and while not everything is, if we can get our hands on organic produce, we do,” she says.

“The flavours are so good it’s not interfered with – even the potatoes, they’re just amazing, and it all comes from the soil.”

Cider is a key component – and that’s produced literally across the road, from apples grown at Philip Cormie’s Spring Vale Farm orchard, which follows organic practices with an emphasis on flavour and quality, not quantity.

“Because of the nature of the soil up here, they produce a different character, much like wine – it’s what you grow it in that influences it,” Belinda adds. “There are about 200 to 300 trees here, and around 20 apple varieties in the orchards overall. They’re grown on organic principles: there’s no sprays used on them.”

Those apples become 321 Cider for the not-for-profit Learmonth Foundation, which works on a broad scope of sustainability and community projects that reach as far as Africa.

“Some of the rules about sustainability: you don’t turn over the soil, you certainly don’t burn things off, and you multi-species plant,” she says. “The healthier the soil, the better the outcome. It’s what happens here [points to ground] that influences here [points to an apple tree].”

Sustainability practices not only deliver environmental betterment, but the superior products can bring economic benefits, too.

"For farmers, there are also better financial outcomes. The trials we are doing over at Mount Beckworth are resulting in huge savings on fertilisers, for instance,” Belinda says.

We leave the stunning orchard in the shadows of wind turbines on the nearby mountaintops, switching the Eclipse Cross to its charge mode, thus maximising economy by using a combination of EV and regular propulsion as we arrive closer to the Aquila Eco Lodges near Dunkeld.

That sees us switch to silent EV mode along the one-kilometre driveway and park the Eclipse Cross for the night among the wandering grey kangaroos and wallabies.

One thing all of the people we’ve met along the way have in common is that they don’t claim to have all the answers.

“We have to take responsibility for our actions, ultimately, and we can be taking responsibility either through the choices, the products or the places that we choose to spend our money,” said Eliza at our first stop in Ballarat.

Before we headed for home, she sent a final text, a quote from the Zero-Waste Chef, Anne-Marie Bonneau: “We don’t need a handful of people doing zero-waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.”