The Great Ocean Road, Part 4

FERNTREE GULLY, MELBOURNE, VICTORIA - 23rd December 2009

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!

The Great Ocean Road, Part 3

PORT CAMPBELL, THE GREAT OCEAN ROAD, VICTORIA - 22nd December 2009

Continued from Days 1 and 2...

DAY 3

With a fair whack of distance to travel today, I was up and out of my hostel in Lorne by about 9.15 and off south-eastward down the GOR. The first port of call wasn't far, however, as I'd decided I was not going to have peace until I saw a koala in the wild. Kennett River, between Lorne and Apollo Bay, has a "Koala Forest Trail" walk that seemed to offer as good an opportunity as any, so I stopped off there and began the hour-long ascent up from the seaside into the shaded abyss of the forest of gum trees. Trying to spot little furry animals in massive trees is not the easiest of tasks, and I had little success on my own. Thankfully, a few other groups of people were driving the path (lazy gits) and had an incredibly sharp eye for the creatures, so I just went to wherever I saw them stopping. Sure enough, between about 3 cars of people we came across about 7 or 8 koalas sitting, dozing in the gums, but the last one we saw was wide awake on a branch above the trail path, munching away on the eucalyptus leaves and generally posing for the cameras.


As a bit of an educational aside, koala bears are not actually bears in any shape or form - like kangaroos and lots of other indigenous Australian creatures, they are marsupials - their closest relatives are wombats. As a general rule, marsupials are incredibly energy-efficient creatures, needing just 20% of the food intake of an equivalent-sized placental mammal to survive (spanning everything in size from rats to whales). The need for this energy efficiency is obvious in Australia's dry, largely barren and desolate landscape. The koala, however, has taken this efficiency to an extreme, with the latest biological insight concluding that the reason it, unlike any other living creature, has a brain smaller than its skull ("a walnut of a brain rattling around in a fluid-filled cranium"), is that that its brain has been sacrificed in the name of energy efficiency. Brains need a lot of power - our human brain uses 20% of our energy, despite being only 2% of our mass - and koalas don't have energy to spare thanks to a diet solely consisting of gum tree (eucalyptus) leaves - a leaf so toxic that 20% of their energy is spent just detoxifying it (leave alone digesting it). As the LPG correctly notes, "there is no doubt that the koala is not the Einstein of the animal world". However, living up in the treetops with no predators of note, they can happily doze their time away, spending 75% of their day asleep.

Happy as Larry with a camera full of awesome wild koala snaps, I was soon back on the GOR, passing through Apollo Bay again before the road heads inland around the coastal peninsula of the Otway National Park. Without any CDs or an iTrip for the iPod, I was forced to use that ancient medium of radio to entertain my ears - and was pleasantly surprised by what was on offer. Having enjoyed the rock'n'roll of Vega 91.5 through Melbourne and the cheesy classics of Bay FM round the Bellarine Peninsula, this particular stretch of journey had 95.9 Mixx FM as its soundtrack - principally because the towering Mountain Ash trees lining the road prevented any reception from anywhere further afield than Apollo Bay!

About 30km further inland from the GOR is the Otway Fly - a massive system of raised walkways running through one of the few remaining preserves of Victoria's natural rainforest. The fly system is one of only 3 in the world - all of which are in Australia - and rises 25 metres (85 feet) off the forest floor allowing you to walk through the different layers of canopy for its 600 metre length. In the middle, rising up alongside the towering Mountain Ash eucalypts, is the 45 metre (150 feet) high viewing tower which takes you up to the top of the canopy by a spiral staircase (see right), and gently sways in the breeze as a result of its central pillar support structure. The trees are magnificent - it is hard to comprehend just how big they are when you look at them because it is equally hard to comprehend just how high you are off the ground, and for the same reason photographs, like the one below, simply cannot do justice to what you're actually experiencing. For all the uniqueness of the Fly, however, I wasn't massively impressed by the $22 entry fee - it was cool, but not that cool...


Out the other side of Otway National Park, the GOR once again meets up with the coastline, although now west of Cape Otway we were running along the factually accurate, if a shade melodramatic, "Shipwreck Coast" (in contrast to the touristy clichéd "Surf Coast" to the north-east of the Cape). The stretch of the coast contains the most photographed section of the GOR - either side of Port Campbell lie a series of spectacular rock formations including "the Twelve Apostles", "The Arch" and "London Bridge" - all formed as a result of the gradual erosion of the limestone sedimentary rock of the cliff face. The area is like coastal geography in action - I'm fairly sure it'd be like Christmas-coming-early for Miss Kateley or Larkin or the rest of the "geoggers" crowd - there are stacks and gorges and islets and all the other buzzwords, and over 10 years you can see the photographic change. The catalyst is the relentless force of the sea water coming up against limestone cliffs, which are eroded away over time leaving a protruding cliff with harder rock as the headland. The weaker rock around the edges will continue to be eroded behind the headland, forming caves on either side that are eventually eroded through to form an arch. Eventually, as the width of the arch is forced to increase, it will collapse, leaving behind an isolated "stack", which itself will gradually disappear or collapse. The Twelve Apostles, below, are such stacks, and now number just 6 (or 7, depending how you count them), after a 50m stack collapsed in 2005. It is unlikely that 12 were ever visible from any one point, put the name was catchier than the "Sow and Piglets" name that it succeeded...


Still within the broader Port Campbell National Park, but the other side of the Port Campbell township, "The Arch" is a natural archway carved out of the rock in the manner described above and, although resplendent now, will eventually collapse in on itself and leave behind an isolated stack like the Apostles further up the coast.


This, in fact, is exactly what happened in 1990 over at the equally impressive London Bridge - the photo below shows the gaping hole between the main headland and what is now an isolated arch, after the adjoining part of the "Bridge" collapsed. Apparently a couple of tourists ended up trapped on the newly isolated stack when the middle caved in, and needed to be rescued by helicopter... according to Wikipedia.


As you continue to head westward away from Port Campbell, you eventually reach the tiny village of Peterborough (population: 178), which has the dubious claim of being the centrepoint for shipwrecks on the Shipwreck Coast. With rocky outcrops all over the place and infamously choppy seas on the Bass Strait, not to mention a total lack of lighthouses back in the mid-nineteenth century, a good half a dozen vessels came to ground within a mile or so of Peterborough, including the Falls of Halladale, which sat aground off the Peterborough coast for months as a tourist attraction before eventually succombing to the might of the waves, and the SS Schomberg, which was designed with the sole purpose of eclipsing the record for the fastest journey from Liverpool to Melbourne, but came to a sticky end just a day's sail from its destination. A look across the water from the village tells a story - in among the expanse of water are a collection of random outcrops of rock - barely a few feet higher than the water level and almost certainly invisible in bad light.

En route through Port Campbell I'd stopped off for a bite, a swim in the sea, and to book some accommodation for the night, and so it was back to Port Campbell in the evening after seeing everything there was to see further up the road. My hostel sits on the best piece of real estate in the town - the front verandah sits right on the beach which is enclosed by large headlands on either side of it. While swimming at lunchtime, I'd noticed a path running up the side of the eastern headland from the edge of the beach, so I decided to build up an appetite for dinner by taking a stroll on what turned out to be called the "Port Campbell Experience Trail". Up on the trail, I got talking the a young family who were out for a post-dinner stroll - a couple with 4-year-old and 2-year-old boys. Turned out the Dad was the local police officer for the town, and the couple had moved to Port Campbell from Melbourne a couple of years back and loved it. As happens, we ended up having a long, winding chat about everything from my travel plans to the state of the world economy and the weakness of Pound Sterling, but they also pointed out some spectacular views looking eastward back up the GOR - from the end of the Port Campbell headland you can see right back up to the 12 Apostles - the stacks visible on the right hand side of the photo below. All the while, the sun was gradually working its way down to sea level, and the evening afterglow produced a stunning orange hue in the limestone cliffs, beautifully contrasting with the aquamarine blue of the ocean and the wild green of the shrubbery around us. It was one of those moments where you just wanted to keep looking, keep absorbing the image, capture the moment in time and never leave it. Instead, I have to make do with the photo!



The clouds in the sky were absolutely perfect, producing the most idyllic backdrop as we got back to Port Campbell's inlet beach, with the sun setting over another amazing day down the Great Ocean Road:

The Great Ocean Road, Part 2

LORNE, THE GREAT OCEAN ROAD, VICTORIA - 21st December 2009

Continuing from where I left off...

DAY 2

Free Sunday parking in Geelong expires at 9am on Monday morning, so I had to be up and out of the Nash bright and early which, all in all, worked out quite well as I headed south-east to the Surf Coast (as the stretch from the Bellarine Peninsula down to Cape Otway is known). The Great Ocean Road begins shortly after the seaside town of Torquay, which is home to some hefty waves and hundreds of surfers, but otherwise not a great deal for someone working on a budget - general consensus is that it's a bit of a pretty boys' town. However, the town's war memorial garden a top of a protruding section of rock, aptly named "Point Danger", provides a nice view looking both ways up and down the coast (the former seen in the photo below).


Heading out from Torquay puts you onto the Great Ocean Road (or "GOR"), although you don't see much of what the hype is about for a long way yet - it's about 40km from Torquay to the next town, Anglesea, and most of it is somewhat inland cutting through sections of the Great Otway National Park. Anglesea itself is a quiet little town, again with a beach full of boogie-boarders, but its most famous tourist attraction is almost certainly its golf course at the top of the town - in amongst the fareways live an army of kangaroos that hop around without a care in the world as golfers smack balls around them. Several tourist information centres had described it as being a place where you're guaranteed to see 'roos in the wild, and the LPG confidently declares that "there's always a posse of them along the Golf Links Road". It was typical, therefore, that even after driving around the course for about half an hour, I didn't see a single one. Disappointing.

As you continue further down the coast, you pass Bells Beach, renouned as having the best surf almost anywhere in Australia, and soon arrive at Airey's Inlet - a tiny little village with a population of 1000 that is home to one of the many big lighthouses that mark the major indented heads along the GOR's coastal route - which was historically the shipwreck capital of the British Empire. With ships going down like high catches to Adam Dowson, with the frequency of a Jamie Nimmo forward defensive, every major indented head along the whole southern coast was armed with a lighthouse that could project light 7km out to sea by the end of the 19th century. But back in the present, I was in need of a sharp bit of coffee, I stopped off at a cosy little family run cafe next to the lighthouse and ended up stuck in a conversation with an old Aussie chap who, while perfectly friendly, was pretty damn deaf and responding to most things by shouting "WHART?" at the top of his voice. And, being a man of a different generation, he had some fairly amusing views on the world, British culture (big fan), Australian culture (not a fan), and various other issues spanning the fallacy of global warming and state of Australian cricket.


Anyway, with nowhere booked for tonight either, I was quite keen on getting down to Lorne, which most people had told me was the place to crash, and getting somewhere sorted. As well as including the famous "Great Ocean Road" sign suitable posed above, the section from Airey's Inlet to Lorne is where the GOR begins to unveil its full flamboyant glory, running along the water's edge, rising and falling as it scales the geological barriers in its path, diving in and out of crumbling limestone cliff faces; all the while with the turquoise blue Southern Ocean over to you left, lapping the sands of the countless beaches along the way. Amazing driving conditions, and on top of that it turned out things really aren't as rammed - at least at my end of the market - as some people made out - first hostel I went to had plenty(ish) of space so it was happy days for me. Lorne is a beautiful little town, with a pier out to the sea overlooking the town's long stretch of beach. I had a pre-lunch swim in the sea, but then post-lunch decided to make the most of having a car at my disposal on an amazing stretch of road and cruised down to Apollo Bay - the next major town, a further 45km down the GOR.

I reached Apollo Bay at about 3.45pm - it would have been a lot sooner had I not been stuck for 39 of the 45 kilometres behind a nut who refused to make use of any of the 50 or so lay-bys provided with the explicit signposted orders: "Slow vehicles pull over in turnouts. Please consider vehicles behind you". This plonker had no consideration, and dawdled along a road with an 80km/h speed limit (50mph) at a mindnumbing 40km/h all the way into Apollo Bay where he finally pulled over to park. I'd be downright lying if I tried to claim that a fair few expletives hadn't been uttered in my Tiida, but all was forgotten as I lay out on the white sand in the evening sun, looking out to the beach stretching away for miles to the north west, while to the south-east the boats docked in Apollo Bay Marina idled elegantly, sails rattling in the brisk coastal breeze. After some time I decided to take on the water, which proved to be absolutely freezing, but I ended up out there for a good half an hour after overhearing a familiar Kentish accent - sure enough a couple of sisters from Canterbury were out visiting family for a few weeks and were equally freaked out by the weirdness of floating in the sea on the beach in the late afternoon sunshine 3 days before Christmas. All Brits in Australia seem to have at least this much in common!

Wanting to check out a couple of walking trails around Lorne before the sun set, I made sure I was up and out before 5 o'clock, giving me time to take a brief detour up to Mariners' Lookout, just outside Apollo Bay. Getting to the lookout involves a drive up a quite ridiculously steep section of road - parts must have been approaching 45 degree gradient - to a little below the top of the tallest of several large hills that enclose the Bay into its small coastal enclave. From there it's a 10 minute trek up to the summit, whom which you have a view that can only be described as breathtaking. To the north-west, you have the Great Ocean Road winding its way up, down and around the golden-orange limestone cliffs, stretching out for miles in front of you; to the south-east you have to township of Apollo Bay, its expanse of beach and the Apollo bay peninsula jutting out into the water - though from the height of the viewpoint you can see right over the top of the peninsula out to the ocean on the other side. And just top top off an idyllic scene, a sole horse was up at the top of the hill grazing - him and I alone, looking out into infinity. Naturally, I nabbed a snappy snap:


After spending about 10km on the way back stuck behind a Winnebago (camping van), I got a good half hour of enjoying the open road once Mr. Slow had finally turned left at Kennet River, though I detoured on arrival in Lorne to head up to the steep hills to the top of town, park the car, and trek for 20 minutes or so through Queens Park and its forests of gum trees up to Teddy's Lookout. The lookout offers yet another incredible viewpoint of the GOR winding its way out of Lorne, but here combining the rocky, rugged cliffs with the mouth St. George River, itself rolling down to the coast from the lush green forest inland, and merging with the sea 100 feet below us. I personally think the photo below is pretty good, but it still does scant justice to what was on display in reality.


The sightseeing wasn't over just yet - after descending back down to me car I headed inland further to Erskine Falls - located 8km inland from Lorne within the Great Otway National Park. Completely enclosed by dense forest, you'd never say you're in the same state as the dry, desolate landscapes I'd seen just a week ago up in the bush - the roar of water crashing down 100 feet or was barely visible as you approached it through the forest, so dense was the vegetation. That is not to say it was a puny waterfall - the viewing platform from the top gives you a tidy view right down to the bottom (though fit lads like yours truly who are prepared to climb all the way back up can also work their way right down to the bottom to look back up - and get corny photos like the one below) and gives you a pretty solid appreciation of the potentially behind the simple combination of water and gravity...


What was similar to the bush was the nutter 'roos, one of whom sat on the side of the road watching my car as it approached, and picked that exact moment to jump across the road. Luckily I was slowing down as soon as I saw him (I wanted a photo), so all harm was averted. But you do wonder about the intelligence of some creatures...

Anyway, in terms of all-round enjoyment, this was without doubt one of the best days of my life, and good days tend to begin and end with good food. A nice bit of seafood marinara pasta, loaded with fresh prawns, mussels, scallops and fish saw me nicely settled for dinner, and a rowdy mix of Swiss Germans, Quebecois Canadanians, Queenslanders and various miscellaneous others provided entertainment of sorts over a few beers back at the hostel well into the early hours.


P.S. I've also uploaded a couple of photos to "Part 1"...

The Great Ocean Road, Part 1

GEELONG, VICTORIA - 20th December 2009

My general style of travelling involves a level of advanced planning that is, essentially speaking, non-existent. True to that form, I arrived back down in Melbourne from Mooroopna on Wednesday with the vague plan of filling in the 4 free days I had before Christmas with a trip over the Bass Strait to Tasmania. Come Saturday, when I decided it was high time to book said sojourn, I discovered that the combination of leaving it to 24 hours before departure to make a booking and timing it with the big end-of-school holiday rush meant that Tasmania was both very expensive, and wholly unworkable time-wise in order to be back in Melbourne for Christmas.

The Tasmania plan itself had been a plan B - my original thoughts had been to head inland to Ayer's Rock - but that got shelved a couple of weeks back when it became apparent that getting there by any non-airborne means would take days each way, and airborne means would set me back close to A$500. Pre-Christmas plans, therefore, weren't in great shape... until along came Plan C (at the suggestion of my cousin David) - and more or less 24 hours after sitting down to book flights to Tasmania I was heading west on the M1 Freeway in a brand spanking new set of wheels that I'd picked up that morning (Sunday) from the local Hertz Car Rental. Compared to the Little Beast back in England - my 998cc VW Polo - the 1.8L Nissan Tiida I've got hold of is a veritable beast (and is basically identical to the white one pictured on the linked website). The only downside is that it's an automatic transmission - like the Americans, Australians don't seem to like driving cars properly - but it certainly packs a useful punch, albeit with dark magic taking place in the gearbox.

So my new plan was to take a 4 day trip down the Great Ocean Road - a winding 250km road carved along the coast to the south-west of Melbourne, taking in a succession of beautiful seaside towns and some of the most spectacular scenery anywhere on the planet, causing it to be variously described as "one of the top 10 trips of a lifetime" and "one of the top 10 drives in the world" by various travel magazines (that may or may not have conducted fully exhaustive studies on the matter). However, with the upcoming weather looking great and the real busy season only starting on Boxing Day, it was a good time to be heading for the coast - naturally with no bookings for accommodation, or indeed any sort of plan of action or information of any kind aside from my trusty Lonely Planet Guide. Incidentally, I only got hold of this particular Australia LPG by luck, thanks to the generosity of a fellow backpacker who was staying in the Prince of Wales hostel in Singapore - she'd just come from Australia and was heading westward back to the UK so wanted to offload a couple of kilos (it's a hefty volume)!

As the whole Ocean Road trip involves a lot of stuff (plus, when I get round to it, a lot of spectacular photos), and because my lack of a diary means that if I don't detail it here I won't detail it at all, there's gonna have to be a separate blog for each day... starting here!

DAY 1:

About 120km west of Melbourne along the Port Phillip Bay coast, I arrived at the city of Geelong (pronounced Jer-long), which is basically the gateway to the Great Ocean Road, which begins about 40km down the road. It was a pretty uneventful drive - the highlight was taking the "Citylink" Toll Road and paying $12.50 for the privilege of going on a half-mile long tunnel under Melbourne. The fact that I had unlimited use for 24 hours was a fat lot of good for me...

Geelong is, apparently, the second largest city in Victoria with a population approaching a quarter of a million, but its city centre really doesn't give an impression of its size. Approaching the town from the north allows you to take a scenic route off the highway and sweep into the town from the top of a hill to the north-west, offering a beautiful view of the town centre, pier and renovated sea front that symbolises the focal point for the community (see above). All streets lead up from the sea front, including Moorabool Street, home of the National Hotel Backpackers (or "The Nash" to those down with the lingo), where I checked in for the night. After wandering around a few sights of the town, including a pretty cool art gallery that featured an excellent exhibition of works by Adrian Feint, I befriended a couple of Scottish girls from the Nash who were getting their own rented car the next morning. As they had nothing to do in the evening, they joined me for a drive around the Bellarine Peninsula, which stretches out eastward from Geelong right across the Port Phillip Bay, almost-but-not-quite enclosing it (as will make sense if you look at a map).

The peninsula's coastal road takes you through the towns of Portarlington, with its eerie views of Melbourne's skyscrapers in the distances, seemingly floating on the water like hazy shadows; St Leonards, which is an infinitely nicer place than the East Sussex town for which it is presumably named; and Queenscliffe. The latter is on a tiny little peninsula of its own, and its little High Street boasts a grand old hotel with a rooftop bar offering panoramic views from the highest point anywhere on the Bellarine - a view that was begging for an arty sepia-toned photo like the one below! It was up there, surrounded by water in every direction and enjoying the warm evening sunshine, that our conversation turned to just how crazy it was to have Christmas in the summer... but there'll be more on that in later blogs!


A couple more stops on our evening drive took us to Point Lonsdale - the Bellarine's closest point to its sister Mornington Peninsula on the other side of the bay - and, as the sun set, to the wonderful 10km stretch of golden beach at Ocean Grove. Then it was back to the Nash, sampling some of their LPG-recommended noodles for dinner (they aren't lying when describing portions as "very generous"), and time to get some good shut-eye before the assault on the Great Ocean Road proper early the next morning.


P.S. A lack of editorial process may have resulted in my last blog featuring something along the lines of "BLAH, BLAH geometry BLAH". I was supposed to go back and fill in the blahs but apparently forgot to do so... but rest assured it has now been corrected.