The Great Ocean Road

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The Great Ocean Road Considered one of the ‘top journeys of a lifetime’, a road trip along Australia’s Victoria coast, is definitely worth taking.

Text & Photos: Gavin Nazareth

An aerial view of the Great Ocean Road and the Twelve Apostles: magnificent rock stacks that rise up from the Southern Ocean on Victoria’s dramatic coastline.

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DISCOVER © dreamstime.com

Clockwise from left: Making a rest stop along the road; the quirky bollards at Corio Bay, Geelong, painted by local artist Jan Mitchell; a fishing community along the road.

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ike a shiny black ribbon the Great Ocean Road loops 280 kms along the South Eastern seaboard of Australia, on a roller coaster ride through one of the most scenic coastlines in the world. Kilometre after magnificent kilometre, the sea and the land paint an unending vista of Nature’s fury and glory, a living panorama that transforms constantly with the light, weather and the screaming winds that travel upwards from the Antarctica.

Along the way pristine beaches to surf, swim or just walk along; lighthouses, waterfalls, whales, grand forests, picture postcard towns, shipwrecks, and of course, the Twelve Apostles tempt the intrepid traveller to stay awhile.

Hand-built with pick and shovel, work on the Great Ocean Road began in August 1918 by veterans of World War I to commemorate comrades who lost their lives in the conflict. After toiling along precipitous cliffs and through sodden rain forests, the road was finally completed in 1932. Today, the long and winding road is as iconic as the kangaroo, and is one of the most visited attractions in all of Australia.

A chance reunion with a long-lost friend in Melbourne led the two of us in an attempt to catch up where we had left off to make what travel magazine Conde Nast Traveler has hailed as one of the “top journeys of a lifetime”. Driving the Great Ocean Road can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. A straight five-hour stint at the wheel will get you to the end of the road, but the stop-and-startas-you-please trail is a great way to do a great road.

With time on our hands and a brandnew SUV at our disposal, it was decided to do an over-nighter as it would give us time to explore the environs along the route.

u Day 1, 7am Geelong is our point of departure. An hour’s drive from Melbourne, Geelong is the state of Victoria’s second-largest city. A multi-million dollar face-lift for the millennium has restored the glamour to the city’s waterfront on Corio Bay. Exciting new attractions, a steam carousel, fabulous restaurants, artworks, landscaped gardens and regular events has transformed it into one of Australia’s

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leading coastal destinations. Not to be missed is a photo op with the colourful wooden bollard characters made from recycled timbers of the old pier and painted by local artist Jan Mitchell.

From Geelong, Torquay is a 20minute drive, the official start of the Great Ocean Road and the starting point of the fabulous Surf Coast. The sun is a goldenorange ball of fire as we drive into the town of Torquay. Surf’s up, and a number of surf enthusiasts are already making their way down to the beach to ride the waves. Bells Beach is where the action is; it is the scene of the Rip Curl Pro Surf event every Easter, where wave riders the

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Above: Lighthouse at Flagstaff Hill.

world over come to compete. Surf City Plaza is our first stop of the day. This all-surf shopping centre is a great place to pick up the latest surf gear and for the Surfworld Museum located right next to it. The museum with its impressive display of vintage boards, photographs and interactive movies is homage to how Torquay became the cultural home of surfing in Australia. But what gets our adrenaline really going is a flight in an open cockpit of a vintage aircraft, the Tiger Moth aircraft at Tiger Moth World.

It’s a thrill not to be missed especially when the pilot at our request does a loop.

With our hearts still beating a mile a minute we hit the road making our way past the laidback town of Anglesea, briefly stopping at Airey’s Inlet to visit the Split Point Lighthouse, built in 1891.

A tour of the lighthouse, which some say is haunted, allows us to walk the original cast iron stairs, view the new million-dollar crystal lens and step out on the balcony at the top of the 35-metre tower. The view, a 360-degree vista, is magnificent.

u Day 1, 12 noon

Our next destination before lunch is Lorne for two reasons, The Memorial Arch and the Shipwreck Walk. The arch was erected in honour of the soldiers

who built the Great Ocean Road literally with their bare hands. For us it becomes a snapshot of a been-there-done-that memory. Shipwreck Walk is an hourlong walk marked by plaques that tell the stories of ill-fated vessels which went down here: the Osprey (1854), the Rebel (1854), the Otway (1862), the Anne (1863), and the Henry (1878).

Walking whets our appetite and we decide that Apollo Bay, an hour’s drive up the coast is as good a place as any to halt for lunch. Along the way, we leave behind picturesque little hamlets, and pass our first kangaroo. At one lookout point, the waves throw tantrums at the rocks below, in an endless battle between implacable sea and eternal earth.

sundown. Just out of Apollo Bay, the Great Ocean Road leaves its coastal brief and veers inland as it heads through Lavers Hill, the highest point in the Great Otway Park, which totals around 142,000 hectares. The scenery switches to a leafy tunnel of mountain ash, gum, beech and mighty fern gullies that cuts of most of the daylight. We half expect to see a T-Rex thundering through the vegetation around the next bend. For a chance of a lifetime we decide to take a small detour and do a walk through the canopies of the some of the tallest trees in Australia via the Otway Fly Treetop Walk. This 600metre-long walk allows us to see the magnificent rainforest from a different perspective, 25 metres above the ground.

u Day 1, 5.30pm

Since making Port Campbell before sundown is nigh impossible, we decide to climb to the top of mainland Australia’s oldest lighthouse. Built

in 1848, the Cape Otway Lightstation towers over 80 metres above the surging waters of the Bass Strait and Southern Ocean. Cape Otway was the first landfall for vessels sailing the “great circle course” from South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope to the eastern Australian colonies. Riding the gales, ships were swept through savage seas before coming abruptly to this rocky cape. With only the 90-kilometre wide Bass Strait separating Cape Otway from King Island, making it through this gap was known as “threading the needle”. To fail was to end up as scraps of wood and canvas against the mighty cliffs. Little wonder then that the next 130kms of the road has earned the name Shipwreck Coast with over 80 major shipping disasters.

The view, like much of the Great Ocean Road we have covered, is amazing. The sun sets like a nosebleed, painting the vast expanse of the ocean and sky, hues of red and gold; it is one of those moments that leave you speechless.

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u Day 1, 2pm Originally called Paradise by the first European settlers, Apollo Bay, a former whaling port nestles in the picturesque foothills of the Great Otway National Park. Lunch is fresh seafood, warm bread and some delicious pasta at a café decorated with portraits of women of Ruebenesque proportions. Without a doubt an idyllic setting, but we have to leave exploring this 100-year old town to another day.

Further up the road is Port Campbell, our final destination of the day before

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© dreamstime.com

DISCOVER

September. We spend the rest of the day poking around the local shops, buying souvenirs for family and friends. u Day 2, 7.30pm We make our way to Flagstaff Hill a re-creation of a 19th century port that

Clockwise from above: Twelve Apostles viewpoint; Flagstaff Hill, a re-creation of a 19th century port; Split Point Lighthouse.

Facing page: Helicopter rides offer a dramatic viewing of the famous rock stacks.

GUIDE TO The Great Ocean Road AUTRALIA

u Day 2, 8am The Great Ocean Road

Start your journey throughout the region from Melbourne in Geelong and the Bellarine Peninsula and discover beautiful beaches, great eateries, a fascinating heritage and an enormous range of recreational opportunities from fishing and golfing to diving and surfing.

n Getting there

We opt to stay the night at the Light Keepers heritage-listed cottages. Paul Thompson the manager keeps us regaled with tales of ghosts, drunken lighthousekeepers and exploding sheds. The sandman visits as soon as my head hits the pillow in the comfy cottage. Vivid dreams of shipwrecks, vintage airplanes, and pretty Reubenesque women mark the passage of the night.

Double daily flights to Melbourne.

Actual miles = 4,566 miles

After a quick breakfast, we hit the road for Port Campbell, the location of one of the main attractions of the Great Ocean Road journey, the Twelve Apostles.

The road returns to the coast at Princetown, a small town that bridges the Great Otway and Port Campbell National Parks. While the town of Port Campbell has a charm and lifestyle of its own, attractions like the Twelve Apostles, the Bay of Islands and Loch Ard Gorge overshadow all else.

The Twelve Apostles are giant, 25million year old limestone sculptures, stranded forever off-shore by the retreat of the land and the constant attack by the

relentless elements. No photo, video, or words do justice to the spectacle that is the Twelve Apostles. We experience it from all perspectives, first a bird’s eye view, through the glass bubble of a Great Ocean Road helicopter, then a fish’s eye view aboard a Port Campbell Boat charter. These artworks of nature should be seen to be experienced, and they are painted afresh everyday.

Nothing we witness during the rest of the day comes even close to Twelve Apostles, the second time nature seems to have silenced us, and we head on towards Warrnabool for the last leg of our journey.

features lighthouses, sailmaker’s loft, bank, town hall, chapel, etc. We are also there for the spectacular sound and laser light show titled “Shipwreck” which captures the tragedy, romance, drama and excitement of sailing the high seas.

This amazing attraction tells the story

behind the sinking of the Loch Ard and the miraculous survival of teenagers Eva Carmichael and Tom Pearce. As the water from the nine-metre aqua screen blows across your face and your seat rocks beneath you, you are there with the protagonists on the deck of the Loch Ard. The only other survivor from the Loch Ard is the Minton porcelain peacock that was on its way to the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880 before it made an unscheduled stop on the Shipwreck Coast.

Visitors to Flagstaff can see the original peacock now valued at US$2 million at the maritime museum here along with other relics from various shipwrecks, including an exquisite diamond ring from the Schomberg wreck.

After the show we check into a small B&B for the night, eager to catch some shut-eye before the long trip back.

For some the Great Ocean Road may just be, well a road, but for travel junkies, it is a highway to adventure.

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u Day 2, 3pm Warrnambool, the largest city on the Great Ocean Road has a rich maritime history and the coastline is notorious for shipwrecks. It is also home to Victoria’s “Southern Right Whale Nursery” with the whales returning yearly from June to

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