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I made the decision to take the Great Ocean Road tour with a group called Goin' South, because they were a small company and they seemed to have some different options for activities along the way. This is a three day tour that stops off at the many sights along the way - beats taking the highway any day!
The tour started early, before 7:00. I was excited to get on the road. I learned the night before that there were only 2 of us on the tour, quite the personalized experience! I was excited to meet my other tour mate, Edward, a Belgian residential developer that lives and works in Spain. Quite the interesting guy! Our tour guide Dave was also the owner of the company so I felt that I was having a great experience from the start, it was also really nice to be able to have my own seat in the van!
Just to give you some brief history on the great ocean road, it was built by the veterans returning from the war who needed work. Most of it was built by hand, as the statue shows! It is a really beautiful drive and I was reminded of many places along the coast of Italy.
Our first stop of the day after we had reached the start of the Great Ocean Road was at a place where koalas live in the trees in the wild. This was my first koala encounter, so I was excited to see them. There were 3 of them up in the tree and they seemed rather mellow, in fact, they shook the tree just to wake them up and get them to look at us. They sure are cute! I also took a walk on the beach, it was deserted and really beautiful! After a quick lunch stop at a quaint beachside town we were on our way to the Cape Otway National Park, where we did a walk at Maits Rest, where we were walking through native beech forests. These trees are HUGE and the way they grow is interesting because they end up having huge openings at the base so you are looking through these trees, really cool experience. After another drive we reached the 12 Apostles, still called the 12 apostles even though one of them has since fallen into the ocean. The water looked really amazing and I was tempted to try and climb down to the very deserted beach, but we didn't have enough time for that, we still had a lot more stops before we reached our destination. Both Ed and I decided we didn't want to pay to take a short helicopter ride to see the coast from above. It would have been a great experience but I was happy seeing everything from the vantage points. Onward to the wreck of Loch Ard, which you can't see from the shore but the coastline is really interesting, this area had the remaining apostles as well as a formation they call the razorback, a narrow sliver of rock separated from the coastline. This is a geologists dream! Next we stopped at the costal formation called London Bridge, which actually has since collapsed and now is no longer connected to the mainland. We had a quick stop at an area called the bay of islands, but it was getting cloudy so we didn't stay long, heading off for Warnambool, where we would be sleeping for the night at a nice hostel called Warnambool Beach Backpackers.
The next day we had a new tour mate, Sasha, a fun German guy joined us for the remaining two days of the tour. We started out our day at the Tower Hill Volcanic Crater, just outside of the city. This was a fascinating area where there were lots of emus and kangaroos. As this was also the first time for me to see these things in the wild I was pretty excited. The crater is huge and it's really strange because there really aren't any other mountains around. We hit the road heading towards the Grampian Mountains. Unfortunately it was about this time that it started to get really cloudy and by the time we reached the mountain it was lightly raining. We stopped off at the Brambuck Aboriginal Center, a really well done place where you can learn about the history of this particular tribe. From here we headed further up into the mountains, ideally to see the views of the ranges from the lookout points but as you can see from my photos there weren't many views to be had due to the weather. At this point it was really raining and cloudy (I think we were in the clouds at this point) but we weren't going to miss out on McKenzie Falls, we trooped off in the rain, got soaked, but had fun! I had on my quick dry pants so all was well, gotta love the quick dry things! From here we made our way to the town of Naracoorte, a small place where we stayed at a hostel owned by Dave, the tour guide. We had a fun night complete with an authentic australian barbie, Dave's wife is an amazing cook! There were some fun people staying at the hostel and we had a good night of great food, company and wine. Too much wine in some people's case unfortunately for them....
The next day we woke early to get out to the Naracoorte caves, where we were going to be doing some adventure caving. I had heard Ed trying to find his room in the middle of the night due to drinking a bit too much and I was amazed at his ability to join us in the morning. The thing was, I think that he was a bit drunk still....I still don't know how he did what he did in the caves. I was impressed. These caves were different from my caving experience in New Zealand in that they were dry. We were led by an excellent tour guide through a series of challenges, I am still amazed at some of the areas that I squeezed through. I didn't complete all of the challenges though, some of the places were just a bit too dark and narrow for me to handle. Sasha was the only one of the three of us that did all of the challenges. We had a rather long drive to our next stop, in the Coorong Wilderness Reserve where we were taken out into the bush with a native guide, Geordie, who showed us how the Aboriginals use the local plants. Really interesting experience where I learned a lot! From here it was more driving to reach our destination, Annie's place in Adelaide. I was sorry for the tour to end, I had a great time! Fortunately both Ed and Sasha decided to stay at the same hostel so we weren't finished having fun!
previous travel blog entry
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