Clockwise Around Aus: Great Ocean Road

We drove from Ballarat to Apollo Bay (for a 2 night stop) and then Warrnambool. The sights are amazing.

You drive along the coast, seeing one great view after another, while on the other side there were either steep hills or rolling green pasture. There had been very strong winds, gusting up to 90kmh, the day before and the seas were still up. The waves were massive! I was surprised by how many surfers there were at almost every headland, I mean, don't people have jobs to go to (oh wait, we don't so I guess others don't necessarily either). I found it interesting, although perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, but a lot of this stretch didn't really have beaches, it was more rock platforms adjacent to the land. I'd never thought about it before and I guess I just assumed that all of the “beaches” would have sand on them all around the coast of Australia. (It would seem that somewhere along the way while studying 3 unit Geography for the HSC and and environmental degree at Uni, I still managed to miss this bit of information).

We stopped at the Recreation Centre at Apollo Bay for 2 nights and just passed our campsite, at a place called Marengo, there lives a seal colony on the rocks off the headland. You can actually see the rocks from the campground entry. So despite not being able to see the seals clearly at Phillip Island, we got to see them here. They are close enough to see with the naked eye (but better with binoculars or a good zoom lens). I was pretty happy about that... actually, very, very happy about that. I have seen seals quite a lot at Taronga Zoo and the Sydney Aquarium but it's not the same as seeing the just going about their lives in the wild. This was an amazing privilege.

We drove up into the hinterland towards Forrest. We stopped at Stephensons Falls, which was nice to see, but perhaps the best part was the drive there, which is very pretty, and the awesomely typically fairy like mushrooms (or are they toadstools?) we found. We played in the creek and explored the nearby pine forest. Rory amazed me with his physical capability climbing around the rocks, although he didn't surprise me when he stuck his foot in a deep hole full of water. I should know by now that if he can get dirty or wet, he will at the very first opportunity and usually fairly spectacularly too!

Stephensons Falls

We also drove to Lake Elizabeth. On the brochures it looked lovely and apparently if you canoe on it you can see platypus sometimes. Despite telling the lady at the Information Centre that that is what we wanted to do, she didn't bother to tell us it is a 1km, very rough, very steep climb to the lake and that dragging our canoe to it wasn't a possibility. So we only discovered that after we drove there. Apparently you need to go a very long way around to another place to put your canoe in. Still, it is a lovely drive around the area and we did enjoy our trip to the mountains. They are so vastly different in climate and vegetation to the coastal strip just 20+ km away. And we did get to see this little guy on our way home