The Great Ocean Road

As one of the people that I recently met in Australia put it “Australians aren’t the most creative at naming things.  We have an ocean road, and it’s a really great ocean road, hence we call it The Great Ocean Road”.  And let me tell you – it’s a really great road.

The Great Ocean Road starts about 400 km east of Adelaide, and winds its way along the southern coast of Australia towards Melbourne.  It’s touted as one of the most beautiful drives in the world, and they’re not lying.  We started early in the morning and made our way along the coast, pulling over at each and every look-out point we came to.  It’s hard to describe the roar of the surf, and the constant mist that hangs in the air.  At the end of the day, you’re covered in salt.  The cliffs are primarily limestone, and the constant pounding of the surf, and the wind, leads to some amazing rock formations.  Sadly, the majority of places where we were able to access the surf, it was too dangerous to swim – not that you’d want to anyway, the water is really cold.

The one rock formation that everyone talks about along the Great Ocean Road is the Twelve Apostles – twelve limestone pillars that stand in the surf.  Except now there are only eight Apostles.  The constant action of the surf has toppled four.  It’s interesting to stop at – every other named rock formation has a small parking area, and some gravel paths for you to access the viewing area.  The Twelve Apostles has its own visitor centre, and the paths are paved.  The viewing platform is grandiose.  And I personally found them to be some of the most over rated formations.  They’re pretty, but I found that some of the lesser visited sites to be more pristine and picturesque.

We continued on up the long and windy road – think right angle turns and switchbacks that make you white knuckled as you manoeuvre your very unresponsive campervan through them.  We decided to camp about halfway through our journey in the Otway National Park at a wonderful caravan park called Bimbi’s.  It is here that we finally saw the fabled Koala.  This resulted in my tramping through the fields and bushes, quite forgetting that everything in Australia is apparently able to kill you.  But I got some pretty good pictures.  And I can’t even begin to describe the growling noise that they make (apparently it’s mating season).

After a chilly night, we continued on down the road to the Otway Lighthouse, which has preserved all of the old buildings and homes used when the Lighthouse was the primary means of guiding the ships around the rocky shore towards Melbourne.  You are able to climb the lighthouse to see the view, which we did.  It was a little disconcerting to climb out and look down and see nothing but the rocky shore below. 

We made a couple of hikes out to some waterfalls, seeing another fabled Australian animal, the Echidna.  They’re primarily nocturnal, and very shy, so it was quite a surprise to see one.

Afterwards, it was a white knuckled ride along the rest of the Great Ocean Road.  The cliffs were on the left side, the long drop down to the open ocean was on the other side.  All I can say is thank god for slow driver turn out lanes, or else there would have been a riot by all of the faster cars behind me.   Next up – wine, wine and more wine.