The Great Ocean Road

Soo I forgot to mention in the last blog that I was terrified of driving in Melbourne, it's a massive place and they have trams and it's foreign despite being on the 'right' side and everything...So I should thank Seb most gratefully for directing me from the Airport and also out of Melbourne as well the next day etc etc entirely managing to avoid me having to do any Hook turns...I know you should do things that scare you but, well, this one I just chose to avoid!

So we left around 9am on the Tuesday morning heading out of Melbourne, avoiding all Hook turns! It takes a long time to drive round Melbourne and out of it all the way down to the coast/Geelong etc, about an hour/hour and a half...then we eventually got to Torquay, the first stop...beach didn't look so impressive, I remember being quite impressed the first time I saw it..but maybe Winter and whatever..we didn't stay for long, then we drove on and on and on...the actual Ocean part of the Great Ocean road takes a while to come about, but eventually it does.

The Great Ocean Road was built after the first world war to keep all the war veterans busy and distracted from all the horror they'd seen etc.

It's strange driving in Australia, I don't know quite why, maybe it's the scenery, but driving for nine hours with the occassional stops etc is not that tiring. I've driven in Australia before and found that to the be case too, very odd. Reckon I'd be broken driving for nine hours in the UK...and I'd have done pretty much the whole length of the country rather than a tiny tiny fraction of it!

We also, of course, saw Koalas, Megan was super enthusiastically keeping an eye out for the Koalas and anything living in the trees as we drove by so spotted I think maybe all of them pretty much! Probably due to the winter they were all quite active, maybe in the Summer it's too warm (someone was suggesting this to me last night) so they just go to sleep and keep still to keep cool.

We did a few little detours and stops along the way for photos and quick stretches of legs. Had fish and chips I think in Lorne too...then drove on quite quck the last part to catch sunset at the Twelve Apostles, some massive rocks in the middle of the sea, parts of the coast that's worn away over years and every now and then one of the rocks fall down, so there's not quite 12. When I last saw them in 2005 there was definitely at least one more too... 

After the sun goes down on Twelve apostles ...you can wait about half an hour and you'll see 'Little Penguins' to fall out of the sea, they sort of fall in with the waves and then fall over and wait for each other and then wobble up the beach to their little beds for the nights, cute, sort of, or well, it probably is, it's just it's really dark and all you can see is this tiny blob, because you're so far away from them.

We stayed in Warnambool as we'd hoped to see Whales, think it's the Southern Right Whales? We stayed at the Warnambool beach backpackers, 17 Stanley street. It was fine, but extremely empty and we were in the sort of outhouse type part of the building, meaning it was freezing in the corridor. We searched around a bit for food, nothing seemed to be quite right, we ended up eating at a Thai restaurant which was fine.

The next morn we got up early and left to find breakfast, we wanted somewhere interesting but ended up settling for a Subway because the other options just weren't that good. Then so, we had hoped to see Whales in Warnambool but apparently so far none had been sighted, but they had been sighted an hour and a half down the road in portland...so, I'd already driven this far, why not give it a go...so we did, and also called in on Tower Hill reserve on the way which was very cool, big valley and you drive over cattle grids to get in and out of it. It was quite a gloomy day so we totally chose the right day for driving along the Great Ocean Road the day before. I'd hoped to see sugar gliders, but they are nocturnal and yep, apparently rarely sighted, boo. We did see Emus though and Meg saw her first Roo in Oz too! Then we drove on to Portland and did see the occassional flip of a tail in the harbour, although at quite a distance and we were using binoculars. Was pretty cool. So satisfied with our findings we turned on back and drove ALLLLLLLLLLLL the way back to Melbourne, only with one little jolly stop off at the park to give me a rest.