The Great Ocean Road and Melbourne

We drove towards Port Cambell, our first stop on the Great Ocean Road, with a few stops on route to take in a few sights. We stopped in the ‘Bay of Islands’ first which is a lookout point with a number of limestone sea stacks where weaker limestone has been eroded away to leave stronger limestone stacks in the sea a few hundred metres from the coast. There were around 10 different stacks of various sizes and were pretty nice to look at as the sea was very rough and crashing around them. Our next stop was the ‘Bay of Martyrs’ a few kilometres along the coast and here we walked down to the beach which had a nice view as the sun was beginning to set. The weather had been hit and miss and it was still quite windy so we didn’t spend to long hanging around. We stopped at a few other look out points with views to other sea stacks before driving onto Port Cambell Holiday Park where we had seen an advert for FREE WIRELESS INTERNET!!! We arrived and enquired about it and were given 3 hours, which was a bonus. That evening we decided to cook some fish and thought we would get some take away chips as a treat but unfortunately of the 2 chip shops neither would serve us as it was past 7pm... These small towns!

We had planned the next day to double back on ourselves as we had missed a couple of important sights but unfortunately it was hammering it down. We staying in Port Cambell that morning just parked up at the sea front drinking brews and eventually about 2 the rain stopped and some sun started to peek through. We drove back to ‘the Arch’ which was, yep you guessed it, another sea stack shaped as an arch. It was quite impressive but we were more ‘excited’ about the ‘London Bridge’ which was a set of 2 adjoined arches, one of which had collapsed in 1994. It was again impressive and as the weather was quite rough the waves smashing up against it were huge. You can see how they erode so quickly and go off to visit Davy Jones’ Locker.

We had had seen a display in the Port Cambell visitors centre about the ‘Loch Ard’, a boat which had sunk after crashing into Mutton Island just off the coast and we decided to head to ‘Loch Ard Gorge’ to see if we could see any remnants. This was a silly idea considering it had sunk about 200 years ago and there was bound to be no sign of it but we walked down into the gorge anyway to find a nice secluded beach set back from main cliff face. There were some eerie looking caves at the back of the gorge with stalagtites but no boat that we could see and sadly no treasure.

Next we moved onto what the sign described as the Blow Hole Thunder Cave and Richard got very excited by the name as it sounded menacing. We arrived to discover that these were in fact two separate sights, the Blow Hole and the Thunder Cave. The blow hole was as a part of the coastline which had been worn away about 100 metres further back than the rest of the coast but still had land covering most of the 100 metres. As the waves entered the hole on the coast side they surge through and create rising and falling waters in the hole of about 10 feet which we imagined would be a lot worse depending on the weather. Apparently several of the victims of the Loch Ard wreck wound up here which would not have been pleasant.

Next we went onto the ‘Thunder Cave’ which was a gorge with a cave at the rear and which the water surged into, much the same as the ‘Blow Hole’, that created funny sounds and the sea foam here was lifting up in whirlwinds and raining down around us. It was quite nice but bloody freezing in the wind!

After this we moved onto the main attraction along this stretch of the Great Ocean Road, the ‘12 Apostles’. As you can imagine these are 12 different sea stacks which are reasonably huge but alas 3 of them have collapsed and now only 9 apostles remain. The lookout area here was protruding right up to the cliff edge and the wind was bitterly cold so unfortunately we didn’t spend too long here. Essentially they are just sea stacks the same as the other 30 or so we had seen over the last couple of days.

After this we decided to move onto Princetown and find a cash machine and a campsite. The name Princetown would suggest a place larger than 4 houses, a post office and a general store and no cash machine but it wasn’t meant to be, we decided to return to Port Cambell and claim another 3 hours FREE WIRELESS INTERNET.

The next day, up bright and early (.. it was neither of those things) we started our journey onto Great Otway National Park to do the ‘Wreck Walk’ where we could hopefully see some wreckage but due to a mixture of poor maps and information leaflets and our incompetence we drove past it 30km and decided it was too far to return. We pushed onto the next turnoff which was again in the ‘Great Otway National Park’ and to visit the Cape Otway Lighthouse which is apparently ‘Australia’s most significant lighthouse’. Alas luck was not on our side today and they have blocked off the path to the lighthouse and are charging $11 to walk up to it. We settled for walking up to the lookout to see it from a distance then headed back through the National Park to where we spotted wild Koalas in the trees! They are amazing things, most of them were just curled up in balls balanced on branches but we eventually found some moving and one with a baby on its back. So in the end this was free and much better than a lighthouse.

From there onwards the Great Ocean Road got more windy and began its journey from Apollo Bay to Lorne as the section which had been cut out of the hillside for miles on end. The road was built/dug/hacked by soldiers returning from The First World War and the Great Depression as the engineering project provided employment. We arrived at Lorne and it was a very pleasant little town and we decided to stay near here for the night for free just parked up at a night fishing spot about 100m from the beach.

We got up early and headed straight to Melbourne to try and see some sights before meeting with Catherine, a native Melbournian and friend of Richard’s parents from France. We had trouble finding any decent parking in the city and when we did, we realised that the time on the parking ticket and the money we had put in the machine wasn’t quite adding up. It turns out that for who knows how long we had been working on it being an hour earlier than it actually was. Apparently there had been daylight savings at some point but we didn’t know! It wouldn’t have made much difference but meant that we only had an hour and a half to spend in Melbourne that day, so we spent it wandering around and just seeing what we could see. As it was a Saturday there were lots of buskers and street performers out which was cool. We just about had time to wander round the main shopping areas and back round to our camper by the time our parking ran out so we decided to call Catherine and see if she was ready for us to come over.

Catherine and her beautiful 16 month old daughter Bonnie live in Lilydale, about 45 minutes from Melbourne city centre and about 5 minutes from the Yarra Valley wine region, which you can see from their balcony. This was where we had our first bona fide Aussie barbecue which was delicious after the rabbit food and noodles we’d been eating all week. After the BBQ when we could move again Cat took us to St Kilda, the posh district of Melbourne right next to the beach. We had some beers and people-watched for a while before Catherine pointed out the good places to go at night and left us to it. We first went to ‘Pony’ where there was live music, at first it was some young emo guy in a trucker hat twiddling knobs on his MacBook and not looking up, which was OK but nothing special. The next guy to play also had his MacBook out but also a nice synthy sounding keyboard and some maracas and played a strange Hot Chip / Prince –esque set which was as good as it sounds! We had a good boogie to this as did everyone else in the crowd (who probably knew him – but still) before moving on to ‘ACDC Lane’ the home of ‘Cherry’ where Melbourne’s greebos go. We were lured in by the sound of Queen and thought it would be worth the £4 entry. Sadly after Bohemian Rhapsody it was pure screamy metal so we never really got to shake our tail feathers. We stayed for a couple of drinks though as we knew a lot of the songs from Guitar Hero and it was very entertaining watching drunk people play air guitar on the stage. We stumbled off to the bus stop and arrived back at Catherine’s at an ungodly hour after a nice sleep on the bus (for Joy) and an uncomfortable journey (for Richard).

The next day we weren’t up too bright and early as you can imagine and we never did get to make much of the day but as Catherine let us use her internet we decided to catch up on the blog. We put another BBQ on that night before heading off to the Gem Hotel in Fitzroy, the slightly edgier cooler area of Melbourne, to watch a Rockabilly band called The Rechords. Catherine and Bonnie were both dressed up to the nines in their 50s dresses and we’re gutted we didn’t take a photo of them as they looked great! Catherine had driven us there in her Hillman Minx (see pic below) and we felt like we were in the fifties or at least an 80s Matchbox B-Line Distaster video. The gig was excellent and again we were annoyed we didn’t have our cameras to take pics of the band as they looked very suave. Nonetheless, we had a great time and headed home at a more sensible hour so we could head into Melbourne again the next day to get a better look.

We set off for Melbourne after some breakfast, getting the tram in from Ringwood where parking was free. We managed to get in at a decent hour and wandered down the Yarra River and up through the shops again before heading to the Parliament Gardens and Parliament House where some important looking people were being escorted by about seven motorbikes and two police cars! It wasn’t Obama or anyone we knew so we soon lost interest. We then caught the tram to St Kilda to take a look at the beach in the daylight and as it was another extremely windy day there were about 100 kite surfers in the sea. We sat and watched them for a while before wandering down the pier and taking some photos of the Melbourne cityscape which is quite visible behind the beach. We decided to walk a little further down the beach and saw that a Jewish wedding was going on somewhere as they were having their photos taken with the beach as the backdrop. We went to we sat in a bar for a little while and got very jealous of the people who had ordered their ‘$5 pizzas before 7pm!’ which we had missed by 15 minutes! Eventually the bride and groom came into the bar to a separate room where the guests began parading them around on chairs! We thought we’d leave them to it so we moved on and when it got dark we walked back down the pier to get some night shots before heading back into the city on the tram. We had to leg it for the last train back to Ringwood but just made it in time.

The next morning we woke up at 7 to say bye to Catherine before she went to work and to receive a Skype call from Richard’s parents and grandparents. After some breakfast and a tidy up we said goodbye to Melbourne, driving through the Yarra Valley on our way out towards Philip Island which would be our next stop...