Day 5: Great Ocean Road

Friday, Feb 10th

Today's plan called for a long day's tour. We left Melbourne at 8 AM and returned at 8 PM. After departing Melbourne we headed west along the coast through Geelong, Torquay, Anglesea, Apollo Bay and into Port Campbell and then back to Melbourne.

We passed by Bell’s Beach, apparently a Valhalla of the global surfing set; the water looked cold and uninviting.

Along the way we stopped by a golf course. We may have problems with goose droppings, here they have problems with “Kangaroo Doo” mucking up the tee boxes, fairways and greens. The “roos” make for large targets for the misguided golf shot. After stopping for coffee we continued to the Kennett River area populated by tourists, parrots and Koalas. Life as a Koala is not too bad, seems they wake up, eat a few leaves and then go back to sleep.

Had a nice lunch in Apollo Bay; a beach town not so different than some of our small beach towns except that they had no Wings stores and apparently don’t permit fast food outlets to exist.

Along the Great Ocean Road, the scenery was very similar to the Pacific Coast Highway along the California-Oregon coast in terms of vistas, variety of terrain, vegetation and mini-climates. The road was carved out with picks and shovels by post “Great War” vets in the early part of the 20^th century.

We turned inland briefly for a hike through a small temperate rain forest; interesting variety of flora with some huge trees, second tallest in the world, following the redwoods.

Then it was back to the coast where we stopped along with hundreds of similarly minded tourists to see the Twelve Apostles. The “Apostles” in this case are sandstone rock formations standing in the sea. This area of the coast was notorious for shipwrecks; we heard the story and visited the site of the Loch Ard shipwreck of 1878.

Then it was back to Melbourne and the end of a very long day.