The final day of my Great Ocean Road Adventure...
DAY 4
For the final time (for now), it was the old hostel routine - up and out by 10pm, sheets in the laundry bin, key at the desk, and back on the road. Having seen most of the fantastic limestone formations yesterday, I only made a brief stop off to check out the Bay of Islands - once again a whole load of stacks that for now stand proud but will soon be lying face-first on the ocean floor (see below). The rocks on view were actually the same ones I'd seen the previous evening from a quiet walking trail - off the beaten track - that runs off the GOR and along the top of the protruding headland adjacent to the cove and beach of the Bay of Martyrs. With all the coastal geography features on display - arches, stacks, a giant lagoon - the scene was quite ridiculously picturesque, as the second photo below hopefully does some justice to:
Anyway, it isn't long before the GOR makes its final turn inland, and officially comes to a close about 12km outside of the city of Wornambool - Victoria's largest regional city (I guess Geelong is too close to Melbourne to be considered regional). The woman whom I believe to be proprietor of my hostel in Port Campbell had had anything but a good word to say about the place - a view shared by pretty much everyone I asked - so it served the same function on my route as Luxembourg, "The Highway of Europe", serves for continental drivers - you drive on the highway straight through the middle of it!
The main reason for the rush through Warnambool was that further down the coast were better things - in particular the beautiful little seaside town of Port Fairy, situated at the meeting point of the Moyne River and the Southern Ocean. Originally settled in 1843 by a Northern Irishman by the name of James Atkinson, it spent its first 40 or so years of existence under the name "Belfast" (in yet another example of naming ingenuity by homesick settlers), but was renamed in 1887. Asking around further up the GOR, the town had been met with unanimous approval by anyone and everyone, and it is easy to see why as you walk along the broad, quiet, shaded streets from the quaint little High Street to the Moyne River, where an array of boats - modern and old - lay docked in the sapphire blue river water awaiting their no-doubt wealthy landlords. It's like combining the gentle, timeless tranquility of the English Cotswalds with the Great Gatsby-esque cultured sophistication of Long Island's North Shore in the 1920s - all in a modern setting in warm summer sunshine.
Walking down the river front eventually takes you to the causeway linking the mainland to Griffiths Island, which sits at the mouth of the Moyne and is exclusively home to a massive colony of some 30,000 migrating muttonbirds while they mate over the summer months. Over the winter, they embark on a quite ridiculous journey north up to the Arctic Circle, kotching in Bering Strait/Alaska region for a few months before making another 12,000km journey back again. Physical exertion of that level is a lot for a little bird, and the countless muttonbird carcasses littering the Griffiths Island shores are testimony to consequences of pure exhaustion.
Fresh King Prawns and chips were the order of the day for lunch, before hitting Port Fairy's East Beach and catching some rays. Across the river, which runs southward till it meets the sea, lies the long peninsula whose eastern flank is yet another golden sandy expanse for the locals to enjoy, just in case they didn't have enough already. Having a dip in one last place was compulsory, so I suitably froze my nuts off in the chilly water for a few minutes before retreating back to shore. It was soon back to the car, as advanced planning was needed to get back to Melbourne by the evening, but arrival back at the Tiida provided a nasty shock... in the form about half a million flies.
From where the Great Ocean Road leaves the coast and heads inland right up to Port Fairy, the roads are essentially long, open, and straight - resulting in cars traveling at a higher pace. As a result of a) the roads being surrounded by fields, and b) generally being in Australia, there were suitably millions of bugs getting squished on the windscreen, bonnet, radiator ducts or wing mirrors as I zoomed by. What I hadn't factored was that flies, being the disgusting little verminous creatures that they are, are instinctively attracted by the blood and guts on display, in addition to the heat emanating from the cooling engine. Unlike our European, or "normal" flies who don't land on things that are moving, Aussie flies are the king of the bugs, landing on anything, everything and sundry, whether moving or stationery, dead or alive, male, female or "other". And it goes without saying they're a bloody nuisance.
The result? My car was closer to black than white as a veritable gazillion of the pests worked their way all over the paint - and invariably half a dozen or so would get inside every time you open the door, resulting in a driving soundtrack of buzzing and squealing and the occasionally drumbeat slap from my left hand as "another one bites the dust". As I said, nuisance.
Just outside Port Fairy on the road back to Wornambool lies my last tourist stop - Tower Hill National Park and Game Reserve was Victoria's first ever national park, and is the site of a huge volcanic caldera that has blown massive hills both around it, encircling its interior lake, and within it, resulting in mountainous outcrop within the range. Without a massive amount of time to explore the whole park, I went for the toughest of the 4 recommended 45-minute walks - the Peak Experience Trail - which works its way up to the top of the central volcanic basalt mountain, but came fairly close to shitting myself about 50 metres in when, after setting of at a canter to make good time, I rounded a corner around a gum tree and came face-to-face with this chap:
I froze like a pillar of salt and, upon seeing the infant emu next to the mother, stood like a pillar of salt to ensure I didn't give off any "I'm gonna steal you baby" vibes. The emus weren't keen on moving, however, so I ended up running away backward, taking a cheeky couple of photos from behind trees, and then taking a large diversion sweep around their path to keep going up the hill. Up is a massive understatement - the climb is a good 100m up, and you're sweating like a fatman by the time you reach the ultimate peak to look out at the re-vegetated forest surrounding you, the enclosed lake surround that, and the Southern Ocean breaking on the coast a few kilometres due east. And once you're done with all that, there's a small matter of the trip back down - gravity's on your side, but when it's this steep that's really not a good thing!
A final treat summed up a great 4 days down the Great Ocean Road - sitting in the gum trees right above my parked car sat not one, not two, but three koalas - all sound asleep, and all happy as can be in their natural habitat. Seeing koalas in the wild is notoriously rare - several of my Australian cousins have never seen them at all outside of reserves - but I was lucky enough to see... well, loads!
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