The Great Ocean Road
After arriving at the Avalon airport outside of Melbourne around lunchtime, we picked up our rental car, and set out to drive the Great Ocean Road. The 273km Great Ocean Road was built by 3000 returned servicemen as a war memorial for fellow servicemen who had been killed in the First World War. This is what we did and saw along the way…
Day 1:
- First stop was Torquay where we ate lunch looking out over the Southern Ocean.
- Jan Juc Beach and Bells Beach to check out the views and to watch the surfers. Torquay and it’s beaches are part of the Surf Coast and obviously are known for their surf culture. Unfortunately, it was a cool day and their wasn’t much going on at the beach.
- Anglesea Golf Club to see their resident kangaroo population. They figure they have about 1000 kangaroos living at the golf course. We watched a few golfers tee off near the kangaroos. We were curious if they would move when the ball was hit but they just kept lying around not even noticing the balls flying over their heads. We’ve been told that sometimes the ball lands right next to them and they don’t move for the golfer to get the ball. It would be a quite interesting place to play golf.
- We checked out Split Point Lighthouse
- Short walk to Erskine Falls. The falls weren’t overly impressive mostly since it hadn’t rained much lately so there wasn’t much water going over them.
- We drove up a back road in Kennett River to see some wild koalas. There were lots of them up in the trees. We were suprised at how many were awake eating considering they sleep about 20-22 hours a day and eat for the other 2-4 hours. We even watched one climbing down the tree, then run to the next tree and climb back up, it was cool to watch plus we were only standing a few feet away from it.
- We stopped in Apollo Bay to spend the night. We picked up some kangaroo meat and cooked that up for supper. It’s a really really lean meat and it tasted alright. Eero really liked it but I wasn’t completely sure what I thought. It didn’t taste bad but I think I just felt wring eating kangaroo for some reason.
Day 2:
- Maits Rest, a short walk through sub-temperate rainforest, in the Great Otway National Park. We also drove down a side road through the park and saw some more koalas on our way to check out the Otway Lighthouse, which we didn’t actually see, since it cost $14 to get onto the grounds to be able to see it and go in it. We weren’t really interested because we have seen and been in a few lighthouses already on our long trip.
- The Twelve Apostles. They are 8 giant rock stacks that come out of the Southern Ocean. There used to be 9 you could see but one fell in 2005. Apparently there are a few more that are out of view from the viewing areas.
- Loch Ard Gorge where we went for a walk and saw where the Loch Ard ship from England was wrecked in 1878. There are lots of shipwrecks along the coast of the Great Ocean Road.
- The Arch which is, as it’s name implies, a giant rock arch coming out of the ocean.
- On our way back to Melbourne we stopped in Colac at the Otway Estate Winery and Brewery to sample some wine and beer.
