Great Ocean Road

Our Great Ocean Road tour began at 6:30 in the morning, when we left our apartment and walked to the hotel up the street for our scheduled pick up.  We were the first group on the bus, and so we got a bit of an early morning tour of the suburbs of Melbourne.  In the dark. 

The scheduled driver was ill, so we had to wait a little longer than usual for the replacement driver, Peter, to arrive.  Peter was friendly and talkative.  He had a monologue for nearly every mile of the road.  We learned about economics, politics, history, ecology, biology, geology, you name it, from Peter.  There were a total of 20 tourists packed into the bus, including the five of us: Kris, Emily, Tim, Jonathan, and me.  So it was a pseudo-small bus.  At least, it could have been worse. 

After a couple of hours on the road west of Melbourne, we made our first stop.  Bathroom break at a rest stop, next to an estuary near the ocean.  There were cockatoos poking in the grass when we arrived, but we scared them away.  Twenty people heading to the public toilets will do that. 

Soon thereafter we paused at our first beach of the day.

Then we took our pictures next to the official welcoming sign.

The Great Ocean Road was built between World War I and World War II by unemployed soldiers.  It stretches 243 km.  And the full day with stops took us about 16 hours in total, from Melbourne back to Melbourne. 

Each stop was strictly regulated.  Ten minutes total to look at the sign, take a picture, wander down to the beach, then back up.  For the most part, the timing seemed about right, though.  We didn't spend much time waiting, bored, for the bus, or much time rushing quickly to see everything.  So positive points for the tour group for streamlined activities.

Our second stop was a pier at the town of ?  Actually, I don't remember.  Looking at the map, it could have been Anglesea, Airey's Inlet, Lorne.  The road is dotted with small towns, and each one has beaches, boat harbor, holiday houses.  The driver told us that sometimes sting rays swim around the base of the pier, but today the only animal life we could spot from the top was a seal with one flipper out of the water. 

 

Why would a seal swim around with one flipper totally out of the water?  The tip of the flipper looked dry.  Maybe he was trying to keep a band aid from soaking off?

A few years ago, our tour guide told us, the area around the road was severely burned by fire.  It seems that it has recovered.  The land is green again, and homes have been rebuilt.  Fire is a natural part of life in Australia, though, just as it is in the western USA.  And people are still trying to figure out how to live around it.

We turned inland after that, and drove to a rainforest: a leftover forest from prehistoric times in the Otway National Park.  The carnivorous black snail lives in the forest.  We enjoyed enough time to walk an entire circuit of the loop trail at a leisurely pace, listening to the wind in the trees and looking at the greenery. 

Lunch was a barbecue at the Cape Otway lighthouse.  The water you see in the distance is the Bass Strait. 

In the days of sailing ships, boats sailing from Europe would try to come through the Bass Strait.  By the time they reached the area, they had been sailing for about three months.  If the weather was good, they had been able to roughly locate their position by the stars.  But if there had been several cloudy days in a row, common this far south, it would have been hard for them to know how close they were to the southern tip of Australia.  To make the journey safely, they needed to sail through a relatively small gap between the mainland and an island out to sea.  If they couldn't determine their position correctly, or if they couldn't adjust to correct their position, they would crash against the cliffs that make up the spectacular views from the Great Ocean Road.  Hence much of it is called the Shipwreck Coast.  The lighthouse was set up to warn ships away from the edge of the coast.

Now, with GPS, the lighthouse is less important.  We were able to climb this one and take pictures.

 

The way out took us through koala country.  Peter pulled the bus off to the side of the road, and we looked up into the trees to see koalas.  Apparently koalas are one of the few mammals whose brain has actually shrunk to take up less space than available inside its skull.  If you only live on eucalyptus leaves, perhaps you are not very bright.  In any case, the koalas in the wild were rather boring.   They sat in the trees, asleep.  There was a little guy, lower down, who just looked at and let us take his picture.  Super cute.  But not very bright.

That lump right in the center is a sleeping koala.

According to our driver, there are so many koalas along the Great Ocean Road that they are eating themselves out of house and home.  They have already destroyed many eucalyptus trees by over grazing.  They eat all the leaves, go away to eat another tree, come back to the first if it starts reproducing young, tender leaves (those are the yummiest).  And the tree dies.  Apparently there has been some push to cull some of the koala population on the Great Ocean Road, for sustainability.  However, shooting a cute little koala is never a great move politically.  So the current koala management plan is to leave them alone and let them eat themselves to extinction.

Next stop:  Loch Ard Gorge, and spectacular seascapes.  A passenger ship on its way from England was wrecked here in the late 1800s, and only two people survived.  They made their way between cliffs into the cove in the photo below and spent the night on a beach.  In the morning, they climbed out to get help. 

 

Inside gorge, there were a couple of really cool looking caves.  Roped off.  Likely to fall in.  Erosion at work.

 
Peter and a couple of others took a quick swim here.  None of us did.  We hadn't come dressed for a swim, honestly.  And you can see from our attire that the day wasn't exactly warm.  In fact, look at me in this photo, holding down my hat because of the wind:

We are wimps.

Anyway, after the walking and the swim (for some), we drove to the Twelve Apostles: striking cliffs standing out over the ocean.  This, my friends, is what the postcards are all about. 

 

It was later in the evening when we finally left the Twelve Apostles.  From there, we drove directly north, cutting inland.  We stopped at a nondescript town to buy dinner at a selection of nondescript restaurants (Tim and Jonathan picked MacDonalds, Kris went to KFC, Emily got pizza, and I tried the noodle bar).  And then 2.5 hours later, we were back in Melbourne.  In the dark. 

Overall impression?  I'm glad we took the bus.  It was nice to have a driver who knew so many stories, and who knew so many great places to stop and see interesting things.  It was also nice to be able to watch out the window rather than navigate.  Of course, from darkness in the morning to darkness at night, it was a very long day.