Off to the Great Ocean Road
Trip Start
Dec 31, 2008
1
19
40
Trip End
Mar 27, 2009
Apollo Bay,
Victoria,
Australia
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Our basic itinerary was to drive down to Port Campbell on the southern end of Victoria, about a 3 hour drive away, and then start making our way back to Melbourne along the slower Great Ocean Road, which is basically Australia's equivalent to the Pacific Coast Highway. The GOR was built by Australian vets returning from WWI in an effort to get the troops back in the work force, and is now considered a monument to them and one of the world's great drives.
After driving for about an hour and a half, we stopped in a town called Colac, which is a town of about 10,000 in the middle of nowhere southwest of Melbourne. Colac is located on Lake Colac, which is supposed to be a semi-major attraction. However, we stopped in the tourism office of Colac and found out that the Lake was dried up due to the hot weather and did not exist at this time. We asked her what to see in the area and she suggested some wineries and some volcanic rock thing, but they were both kind of out of the way. Some of the stuff we maye did want to see in the area, we were told we could not, because the wildfires that had broken out in Australia were too close. In fact, the road we intended to take to Port Campbell, we discovered, was actually closed due to the fires, and we were informed that on our alternate route, there was a good chance we'd see smoke in the distance. That was good to know. We asked the woman at the tourist agency for a good place to eat in Colac, and her first response was that KFC was really good. Trying not to laugh (although I do love KFC), we asked if there was anything local and we ended up at some Italian place where I had a meat lovers pizza that had so much meat on it, that I could not see the cheese. This pleased me.
After leaving Colac, we took off to head towards Port Campbell. Along the way, we drove through some interesting countryside that progressively got hillier and more scenic. We arrived in Port Campbell around 3 or so and went to the coast to check out the view. Port Campbell was set on a beautiful inlet and we got out and took some pictures and stopped at the tourist info center to find out just what we wanted to see along the Great Ocean Road. It was notable that the temperature had swung about 50-60 degrees cooler than yesterday in Melboure, which made the current temperature right around 60 degrees if I had to guess, which is probably the coolest weather I've experienced thus far in Australia. We hopped back in the car since there wasn't much to see in Port Campbell, and headed for Loch Ard and the Twelve Apostles.
Loch Ard was this really cool national park along the coast that had unbelievable rock formations from the pounding of the waves and wind over the years. There were huge cliffs and the waves on the ocean were absolutely massive- definitely the biggest I've ever seen. We stayed at Loch Ard for probably an hour and walked around the many sites. There was a shipwreck at the site about 140 years ago at this site and we saw the beach where the only two survivors (out of 54 people on board) swam ashore and slept in a cave, which was pretty interesting.
We then headed to the Twelve Apostles, which is probably the most famous site along the Great Ocean Road. Each "apostle" is a pillar of rock sticking out of the ocean, which is really cool to see along the beautiful coastline. The Twelve Apostles is a bit of a misnomer, since there are only eight of them. There used to be nine, but about 10 years ago, one of them collapsed into the sea.
After leaving the Twelve Apostles, we drove through some mountains and a really beautiful forest and then we went to see a lighthouse that was labelled the "most significant lighthouse in Australia", but when we arrived, we walked about half a mile through the wilderness only to find out that the lighthouse was closed. However, the trip was not wasted, because when we were driving back to the main road, we ran into a car pulled over to the side of the road with people looking up in the trees. There were two koalas up there, which were the first cool animals I have seen in the wild in Australia. It was pretty cool- they were just chilling out, eating some eucalyptus. From there on, we would frequently see koalas in the trees, once you konw what to look for. Additonally, just a little further up the road, we saw a huge open field full of about 40 kangaroos in the wild, which were the first kangaroos I've seen on this trip. This was very cool, although I didn't get to see them up close.
Finally, we headed to our final destination for the evening, Apollo Bay. We read in my guidebook about a restaurant that was supposedly the best in the region called Chris's Beacon Hill restaurant, and since we had been skimping on dinner all trip, we decided to treat ourselves to a nice dinner. Chris's was in a fantastic location a tthe top of a hill and had a beautful view of the bay. I had a filet and a local wine and a side and it only cost about $40 in US dollars, which I thought was a steal. We returned to our hotel in Apollo Bay, the Best Western (shockingly nice, by the way) and then walked to the only bar in town still open, called the Apollo Hotel. Unfortunately, it being Sunday and we being in a town of about 2,000 people, the Apollo Hotel was not very happening and closed at 11, but not before I slaughtered Lenny at Big Buck Hunter at the bar. So, with a big day ahead of us tomorrow, we retired for the evening.
