Great Ocean Road (plus photos at long last!)

Sick of job hunting and having itchy feet in general, Tracey, Michelle and I hired a car and headed west to the Great Ocean Road, an absolutely stunning coastal road that meanders around red cliffs and along white and golden beaches for some 4 or so hours. We set off on a nice sunny morning but in true Melbourne style, it was raining by the time we arrived at GOR's first town, Torquay where world famous beaches, Surf Beach and Bells Beach are... OK, they're famous if you're into surfing... As it was a Tuesday, it was raining and the waves weren't at their best, we didn't see any surfers. But the beaches themselves are really beautiful, very isolated too.
Torquay itself is full of surf shops and not much else - good if you're into surfing... If not, better to keep going. After reading that it was frequented by kangaroos we decided to visit the Anglesea Golf Course off the GOR. It was raining as we arrived so our furry friends weren't out at large but we did find them sheltering under trees. Our first kangaroos and the first indigenous aussie animals we saw since arriving.

The World's Most Persistant Fly
Actually, no, the kangaroos weren't the first indigenous creatures we encountered. The Victoria Fly was... unfortunately.
After a couple of stops at lighthouses and such-like, we arrived at sunny Lorne where none of the $10+ meals appealed so we bought delicious peppercorn pate in a deli (after filling ourselves up with pate, olive tapenade, honey etc etc samples) and bought the makings of a picnic in the supermarket... However, one major problem with picnics in this area is.... the FLIES... In case I haven't mentioned the flies yet, Melbourne and Victoria is host to The World's Most Persistant Fly. What happens when one of these flies takes a fancy to you is it pursues you, more specifically, your face and all its orifices in stalker-like manner despite all your efforts to turn it off (screwing up face), deter it (giving it a mighty whack) or escape it (run/cycle/drive away). As these flies currently outpopulate humans by 100 to 1, you can be guaranteed of several admirers everywhere you go in Victoria. Hence, our picnic had to be relocated to the interior of our car.

Walking shoes, food and water supplies etc. for 240 steps
After Lorne and lunch, we drove inland a bit, drove up and down steep roads (and, thus, discovering what '2' on the automatic gear is for) and found the Erskine Waterfall, a really pretty waterfall. Kindly aussie local councils and governments tend to veer on the overprotective side and everywhere you go, you find long detailed signs full of interesting information on how to keep oneself safe. At Erskine Waterfalls carpark, we read that we ought to kit ourselves out in walking shoes and protective gear and ensure that we had plenty of water and food before setting off. We'd brought none of the above apart from a half full bottle of water but decided to take the risk and set off... 240 steps down , we found ourselves at the waterfall. 240 steps up later, we were back at the car... These signs, I really don't know....! Anyway the waterfall was beautiful and its environs more like S.E. Asia's tropical jungles than Australia's dry landscapes.

Spent the rest of the day driving, stopping, taking photos and short walks, driving some more. GOR is a great road to drive, lots of bends in the road around which yet another beautiful view is revealed. When the sun came out, the sky was just so big and blue... the water clear and turquoise... big isolated beaches... Every now and then, the road'd go through eucalptus tree forests and we'd crane our necks trying to find koala bears. We didn't that day but we did have to screech to a stop to allow an echnidna to pass.


That evening we arrived at the Twelve Apostles, probably GOR's most famous landmark. It was cloudy and pretty cold so we reckoned we weren't gonna get a good sunset and left but just as we were pulling out of the carpark, the sky turned a furious pink colour... A quick reverse and job later, we were back at the viewing point in time to capture a sunset full of pinks and burned oranges. We also saw two families of penguins come out of the water after dusk.
We then went to Port Campbell for food and sleep and found that one restaurant was open - the town's most expensive one... So we ordered one portion of fish and chips and had it between the three of us... That's travelling on a budget for you!


Next day, it was more sandstone cliffs, golden beaches and big waves for a few hours at the Loch Ord Gorge, Bay of Martyrs and a few other stops along what's known as Shipwreck Coast, so called due to the 100+ ships that have been shipwrecked. When you see the waves and feel the rip as you wade in 3 inch high water, you are not surprised...

Visited the Big Cheese Factory where all the cheese samples we tried sufficed as lunch and then it was onto Warnambool - a not very exciting town where Tracey and I had to borrow a torch to go to the loo during a powercut! - and from there, Port Fairy via Tower Hill Park... Tower Hill is on a volanic plateau and is full of different indigenous animals... including kangaroos, emus and koalas, including 'Cathy the Koala' (a koala who responded after Tracey called me leading her to believe that it was called Cathy). Port Fairy was our last port of call. We'd been led to believe it was a bustling port town full of restaurants so were looking forward to some fish and chips surrounded by lots of atmosphere watching the sunset over the port. Er, that's not quite how it panned out. Port Fairy is this very and I mean very quiet town reminiscent of 1950s America. It has a 'port' but an inland one with a few privately owned boats, nothing like Howth or Dun Laoire. What it does have is plenty of restaurants. We figured that since there's nothing else to do, people just go and eat in restaurants and that's how they are kept in business. Port Fairy appears to have a folk festival every March and it was already being advertised. There's even a 'folk festival office', one of the biggest buildings in town dedicated to it and outside the office, a post box for 'folkie mail'. How 1950s American can you get?! After getting ourselves some fish and chips we went to the 'Dublin House' for beers, and tea for the designated driver, but found that for all its pub-like exterior (and its name for god's sake!!) it isn't a pub but a restaurant (yes, another one), a restaurant that, despite a number of vacant tables, was 'full' after its maitre 'd registered our scruffy appearances. So we had to scuttle away and comfort ourselves with tea and cake elsewhere. The sunset was not great that evening but we were on a beach with the softest white sand ever, flanked by dark volanic rock so we didn't mind... You get an idea of how meandering the GOR road is when it only takes you two hours to drive back to Melbourne on the freeway, having taken you 2 days to get to Port Fairy! GOR - highly recommended!