Oz report 3 GOR day 2

Great Ocean Walk

Day 2 of our fantastic Great Ocean Road break starts from Wild Dog Valley in Apollo Bay, Victoria. From here the GOR meanders inland, making a brief comeback at Castle Cove and then inland again until Princetown.

Rolling hills just west of Apollo Bay

At Castle Cove I discovered the Great Ocean Walk which does the coast bit whilst the GOR is inland, and I ventured a few hundred metres along its total length of 104 km before acknowledging the constraints of the remainder of my party.

Castle Cove

A very small part of the Great Ocean Walk

From there my camera deemed nothing worthy of note until we reached the 12 apostles. These are actually neither apostles (but lumps of rock) nor are there 12 of them, the missing ones having long since eroded and collapsed into the sea. The whole outfit is a huge tourist trap although I think we got away with not spending a cent. For $570 per person we could have been flown by helicopter way above the apostles and related landmarks.

$570 per person

Some still standing, some fallen apostles

Having "done" the apostles K and I agreed to walk the cited 30 minutes to the Gibson Steps originally carved in the limestone (apparently not sandstone) but now concrete. On the way we almost tripped over a fox. Honest. Foxes around here, like everything else, are apparently used to tourists. The two limestone stacks between the 12 and these steps are not apostles, being called Gog and Magog, names that seem somewhat arbitrary.

The fox we almost saw (private joke)

Proof of how close we were

Gibson steps

The beach at the bottom with Gog and Magog

A little further along the GOR we come to the Tom and Eva Gorge - follow the link to find out who these two were, now immortalised in these two stacks, and where you will also see that we somehow missed the beach below my next photo. Sad - the water there might have been warmer!

Tom and Eva

A cave nearby

Looking East from the Razorback

A yet a little further along the great road we come to London Bridge, another "must see" but frankly more of the same. Not that it wasn't worth looking at. The signage tells us that London bridge has fallen down as indeed the left hand arch did 25 years ago. It seems that the whole of this coast is at serious risk so that Australia is slowly shrinking, dissolving into the sea.

London bridge

And finally to our second Airbnb, an upstairs apartment overlooking the beach at Port Fairy. The view from our bedroom was just amazing. Thank you K! Pictures from the beach will have to wait until my Day 3 blog post.

View from our bedroom