antonalyptic: Great ocean road

20170526

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

Oz report 3 GOR day 1

So much excitement has sort of eclipsed my last Oz report. We flew to Melbourne on staff travel and "did" the Great Ocean Road. Because our intended flight was full we had to reschedule at the outset and take a zeroth night in the Ibis very-budget at Melbourne airport. You can of course click on the photos to enlarge them.

Three men in a boat at Ibis

Thereafter K had organised Airbnb for each of three nights and I have to say this is the way to go as I think you will agree...

Simple map of GOR

The GOR starts at Torquay, 113 km south of the airport, where of course we had to sample the beach. Indeed the whole coastline of the GOR appears to me made of this soft orange rock which looked to me like sandstone. Note the virga trailing from the clouds. An inscription on the boardwalk helpfully informed us that Antartica lurked 6000km across the horizon which we figured might explain the sea temperature.

Torquay

From Torquay to Appolo Bay the GOR generally hugs the coast apart from convoluted and tortuous bends and gradients to negotiate water courses. One such exception is at Cinema Point where we are told that returned First World War servicemen built the Great Ocean Road as a tribute to their fallen comrades.

The next port of call was Lorne which boasts a pier (which we did not frequent as it looked rather tacky) and (fleetingly) a topical inscription on the sand.

The pier, Lorne

We dutifully added our own rock stacks at this location. Mine was of course the best, but then it fell over... Strange but that name was also left here.

So many beaches that I lost count. Wide seas, large skies, gorgeous weather.

And so to Apollo Bay the destination of our first Airbnb. First we checked out the local Fish'n'Chip place where we sampled Flake, apparently the Oz equivalent of the British Rock Salmon and a euphemism for Shark. Had we known... We wandered down to the quay, passing an interesting sign and still more interesting graffiti thereon, and found a fishing vessel garlanded with powerful lights which we learned attracted squid. Now why, I ask, would anyone want to attract squid?

And so to our first Airbnb a ways up the awesome Wild Dog Valley, complete with parrots, deer and goats on the property and the Karmic goat farm nearby. The good thing about Airbnb is that you have the place to yourself. I have never liked regular B&B which remind me of my first digs in Banstead on getting a job with the BBC: the landlady was a lonely older person who kept calling me to see if I wanted a sandwich or a drink when all I wanted was solitude.