Today we woke up bright and early for an all day bus tour of the Great Ocean Road. If you ever find yourselves in Melbourne, make sure you schedule in a day for this, it is absolutely phenomenal and is easily the best thing I have ever done on any vacation to date. We went with Go West tours who came highly recommended and were environmentally minded (carbon offsets and all that) but it seemed that there were many other tour groups that stopped at all the same places. We can say that Go West did provide a solid tour though and we highly recommend them. Our group was limited to twenty passengers and the driver, Stu, was very engaging and humorous and had a very thoughtfully picked out soundtrack that he played over his ipod. Also thoughtful, was the fact that they handed out foreign language translations on ipods to the non-english speakers on our tour.
A little background, the Great Ocean Road is similar to the Pacific Coast Highway in California in that it runs along the very dramatic coast of the Tasman Sea and the Southern Ocean in the Australian state of Victoria. It was built by returning veterans of World War I and then continued as a sort of WPA type job during the Great Depression years of Australia’s history. If I remember right, it was finished in 1939 and essentially links Melbourne and Adelaide. Since then, more efficient roads have been developed and this one is relegated to the tourists now.
Leaving Melbourne you actually have to drive a ways down to Torquay and through the city of Geelong which is home to the Australian Ford factory. It was surprising to see that they are still manufacturing cars in an Albert Kahn era factory rather than a modern plant. But anyway, the first stop was Bell’s Beach which is famous for its surfing and annual surfing championships. Even though it’s winter down here and the sea was a nipply 10 degrees Celsius, there were still quite a few surfers. The scenery was spectacular both on the beach and in the parking lot as several surfers changed into and out of their wetsuits right in the parking lot. Modesty is not so much in the lingo I suppose but the tourists were all agog!
From here the road hugged the coast which got progressively more and more impressive. The hills started out rolling but soon became mountains draped with greenery and the road cut its way along the side at times high up on a cliff and other times down at beach level. At one point we began chasing an intensely bright and sharp rainbow for at least 20 miles that, depending where we were facing on the road, seemed to hover a couple miles ahead to just a few hundred feet in front of us. In these close encounters, everyone was straining to see if the end of the rainbow perhaps really did exist.
In the hour and half before lunch it’s hard to remember what order things came at us, but in this short span of time we witnessed a whale playing out in the surf doing somersaults and backflops and spouting away in the waves. We drove through a eucalyptus forest where we saw several koalas hanging out in the trees. We stopped at a roadside dinner where colorful tropical parrots had congregated and alighted on our arms, heads, and hands expecting to be fed birdseed.
Giddy with our experiences we stopped for lunch in Apollo Bay – a charming village stretched out along the road alongside a crescent beach framed by two forested headlands. We ate at a little sandwich shop called Nautigals. It’s a pun, get it? Nauticals? Naughty Gals? Funny right? Forget it, I’m telling a story here. We had very tasty foccacia bread sandwiches and then walked down to a little bakery and bought a large cupcake that would cause most cupcake crazed New Yorkers to keel over in a heap, i.e. it was really really good.
After Apollo Bay, the road turned inland into the Great Otways Forest which started out as a eucalyptus forest but soon became a cold temperature rainforest. We got out and took a half hour hike down into the thick of it and marveled over how the landscape kept changing so fast as we drove along. Little did we know. . . .
After the hike we had about an hour’s drive through the rest of the Great Otways Forest and then past rural Victoria which is almost completely used as grazing land for sheep and cattle. When the road reacquainted itself with the coast the topography had changed dramatically. Instead of rolling mountains, we were now driving through desert scrubland which terminated in an unbroken line of sheer limestone cliffs that dropped 500 feet or more down to the ocean below which crashed and churned with more fury than we have ever seen. At times the waves would break against the cliffs with such force that the spray would reach halfway up the cliff face. The name Shipwreck Coast seemed to be well deserved.
We stopped at three locations along this stretch of coast that were named, in a national park sort of way, for their sculptural appearances. The Twelve Apostles were a group of rock sentinels standing out in the ocean that had been separated from the rest of the land by being stronger than the surrounding limestone and eroding at slower rate. There were many more than twelve and they extended for miles in each direction down the coast. We were able to walk along a boardwalk at the top of the cliff and look out at the Apostles and watch the waves and feel the wind. At this point the island of Tasmania was no longer forming a protective barrier and these winds were coming across thousands of miles of unbroken ocean from Antarctica – and they felt like it too!
The Loch Ard Gorge was named for a ship that sank near it called the Loch Ard and featured a fjord-like gorge that was shaped like a funnel with the narrow end being the entrance to the sea. The water blasting through that opening was unbelievably violent. We took stairs down to the beach in the mouth of the funnel from the top of the cliff and sat and watched.
Finally, we stopped at a location called London Bridge which looked very uncannily like the London Bridge with its series of natural arches but today only one of these arches remain as the others collapsed in the early 1990s. It was a very spectacular sight as well and was the perfect way to end the tour. From there we turned into the interior of Victoria and drove for about an hour past the cattle and sheep ranges to the town of Colac where we stopped for a quick fast food dinner. Asian again, Kirsten liked hers better than I liked mine. We returned to Melbourne at about nine that evening and were dropped off at our hotel.
Tomorrow is a travel day and we have to catch a 7:30 flight to Cairns. It’s going to be a very early morning.
(Again, I think we are behind on the photos, check back later on for those).
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