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: