2006/08 Australia trip - Great Ocean Road |
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Wednesday August 16th
We’d heard gale warnings on the radio and, sure enough, Wednesday was sunny but extremely windy. In theory we were only about three hours’ direct drive from Melbourne, but we wanted to travel along the coast and that would be a longer trip and a bit slower. I had forgotten how twisty the coast road is and it turned out to be a lot slower. With the gale anyone driving a motorhome or caravan was going very cautiously, and there aren’t many spots to pass.
There are dozens of great places to stop on that coast, at cliffs and islands, blowholes and waterfalls, but as we’d explored the coast a couple of times before, we rationed ourselves to the Bay of Islands, London Bridge, and the Twelve Apostles. There 
were some good-sized waves coming in and the wind was coming off the land, blowing great spumes of spray off the wave tops. Part of London Bridge fell down in the 1990s but there’s still one arch standing and the waves were pounding through it. The Twelve Apostles are sea stacks. There never were twelve of them but they’re down to maybe eight now, with the remnants of one that fell down in 2005 still visible in the lower left of my picture. All this is a reminder that the erosion process is still very active here.
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Great Ocean Road (1.32) |
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The road climbs up over headlands and hugs the bottom of cliffs, so it is slow and twisty and hilly, great on a motorcycle, but slow going with a camper, especially when all the high-sided traffic is struggling with the gale. From one of the high points we could see dust clouds coming off the dry country to the north and we were sandblasted at times.
We’d hoped to get to Melbourne in time for Sandie to have that long-delayed haircut and for me to buy some replacement bits for the camper. However, after traveling for ten weeks and over 11000 miles we managed to enter Melbourne’s tunnel under the Yarra River at precisely 5pm and ended our trip by crawling through the city’s rush hour to John and Edna’s in Mulgrave.