Great Ocean Road

18/02/13 to 22/02/13 –  We arrived in Melbourne and we could see bushfires just northwest of the city. They looked closer to the town than we had expected and more impressive than we’d seen on TV the day before.  We met our friend Kavi and stayed with her for the night. We just had time to catch up with her and get our bearings before hiring a car for a few days to explore the Great Ocean Road.  We stopped at some familiarly named places, including Torquay, Anglesey, London Bridge and Peterborough, of all places.

Our first stop was Torquay, where we had a quick walk on top of Fisherman’s Beach and saw an interesting sundial.  On the other side of Torquay was another beach, where surfers were catching some breaks and, as the wind was getting up, some kitesurfers were out on the water too.

We continued along the road to Aireys Inlet, where we walked to the headland to see a familiar lighthouse, which was famous from the TV series, “Round the Twist” which Dave used to watch as a kid.  The wind was getting stronger and it had started to cloud over by the time we reached Lorne a few miles along the coast.

We stopped at a few lookouts along the road, which gave some great views of the sea and coastline, but eventually it had begun to rain and the views were then obscured. We turned our focus to exploring some woodland walks along the way where there was some shelter from the wind and rain.  Some of the trees even started to creak in the now gale-force winds, so we decided to take shelter in a pub in Kennet River before calling it a night.

The next day the bad weather continued, but we were still able to stop and see some Koalas (mostly sleeping) in the trees.  They seemed pretty ‘relaxed’ (probably something to do with the eucalyptus diet), despite looking precariously balanced in the violently swaying branches.  We continued further to a second lighthouse (Australia’s oldest, so not that old) that was charging an extortionate fee to enter, so we skipped it and instead we went for another rainforest walk in Great Otway National Park before moving further along the coast towards the Twelve Apostles.  We were lucky as when we arrived the weather started to clear and we could get a good view from the various lookouts (several Helicopters were also flying overhead doing quick flyby tours).  We took a walk on the beach near two of the apostles, and then went back up the hill to view the rest from the clifftops.

Dave was keen to make it to the namesake of his birthplace (Peterborough) before we called it a night.  The light was now fading and we managed to avoid hitting a kangaroo on the road towards Port Campbell and eventually took a walk out to ‘London Bridge’, so called due to its former resemblance to Old London Bridge.  However, one of the arches collapsed a few years ago, comically leaving an adulterous couple stranded on the outer arch.  Just before sunset, we made it to Peterborough.  Unlike the UK version, Peterborough had a lovely sandy beach and links golf course, although the ‘high street’ was tiny with just a few shops (so no M&S like the one in the UK).

At this point we turned around and headed back along the Great Ocean Road and tried to get a few kilometres out of the way before stopping at Apollo Bay for the night.  On our final day we stopped off at a few places we’d skipped on the way through (mostly lookouts over the ocean, as the weather was now better).  We tried to spot a platypus at a small rainforest walk, but we didn’t see any.  However, we had more luck when we stopped at Lorne where we saw more koalas and parrots, before walking the pier and watching people fishing.  Then we finally stopped at Torquay for a quick swim before heading back to Kavi’s place in Melbourne.