Day 4 - Great Ocean Road

I wrapped up Sunday with a visit to the mutton bird colony on Griffiths Island where I couldn't help being impressed with the birds as they swooped in from the ocean to find their burrows by the thousands.

Woke up to a breakfast of homemade pancakes courtesy of the driver, Shane, and then we headed off to check out Tower Hill wildlife reserve. Rule number one of running a tour like this - any unexpected wildlife WILL make the tour fall behind time. :P We saw quite a few koalas at Tower Hill, including a young one climbing down a tree, looking at our camera-laden busload of tourists with that kind of facial expression meaning "What the hell are you looking at?" It was quite amusing :)

Next stop, Allansdale cheese factory, where you can buy authentic Australian cheese. Then we turned onto the Great Ocean Road, which doesn't actually hit the ocean for its first 50km, but when it does so, it does so with style. As it was maxing at about 17°C temperature-wise, I was actually starting to come down with a bit of a cold, so I took it fairly easy around the attractions.

From here on, we did the standard Great Ocean Road thing - basically look at a very impressive bunch of big limestone rocks sticking out of the ocean in improbable ways and marvel and take lots of photos. In order, we visited Bay of Islands, Bay of Martyrs (or Massacre Bay), London Bridge (no longer a bridge), the town of Port Campbell, Loch Ard Gorge, the 12 Apostles and Gibson's Steps. We got surprisingly fine (although cold) weather for the entire afternoon so hopefully my photos will have turned out OK. I had the opportunity once again to meet heaps of interesting people at each of the attractions (and usually take their photo with their camera for them).

After a rainforest walk at Mait's Rest (as per last year), we stopped for the night at Apollo Bay. This was the point where I left the Wayward tour, having made a few new friends, and stayed at the Apollo Bay Backpackers - which was an excellent, very informal establishment with TV, internet and so much local information it wasn't funny. The room was clean and had a great view of rolling hills and the surrounding country-style houses. I had a nice shower in their well-maintained bathrooms.

My main complaint about Apollo Bay (which is a great town which I do intend to spend more time in later) is that once you leave the touristy bit on the front street (Great Ocean Road), the roads have no kerbs, no footpaths, no lights, and these crudely dug tunnels at the side of the road for drainage purposes which are easy to fall into at night. But it would be easy to live there for a while - surf culture rules the place.