The Great Ocean Road

Sandwiched between two days spent mooching in the CBD, a change of scene was called for, and came courtesy of a trip down the Great Ocean Road, southwest of Melbourne.

As we discovered during the 90-minute drive to the starting point for our tour, Rob – our driver and guide for the day – is an expert when it comes to running tours in this part of the world.  In a past life, he took small groups of Australians and Asians down to Apollo Bay (further down the Great Ocean Road than we would be going today), stopping off at the Twelve Apostles along the way.  From Rob’s description, these tours sounded pretty grim: twelve hours spent on a bus, with just twenty minutes here and there to stretch legs and take photos.  And so was conceived Rob’s own one-man tour company, using many of the same locations, but providing a more satisfying experience by getting people hiking and out on bikes rather than sitting on a coach all day.

Our first port of call would be the small coastal town of Anglesea.  With clear skies, by 10am the temperature was already nudging twenty-five degrees.  But with Christmas just a few days away, that didn’t stop us from fueling up with coffee and mince pies before we got going!

The first leg of our adventure was a 10k hike along the coast, vaguely back in the direction of Melbourne.  As has been our experience everywhere we’ve hiked so far in Australia, the footpath was excellent and we didn’t really need the map we had been provided with.  What we could have done without however were all the flies.  They were relentless, and made stopping for even a few seconds something you tried to avoid doing.  If any of the photos here show us smiling, this may have been through gritted teeth, because they really were maddening!!

(As an aside, when we mentioned the flies to Rob later, he commented that a) you get used to them and b) they’re a lot worse in Central Australia!  Makes me wonder whether those bush hats with corks dangling from the rim really do serve a useful purpose!).

The tour would probably be best described as ‘supported’.  Rob didn’t accompany us on the hike because he was busy driving the car back up the coast road to meet us at the agreed rendezvous point.  He did this several times throughout the day, so we were usually not more than an hour away from running into him again.  All in all, it was a great arrangement: we always felt he was close by and would be able to sort out any problems we might run into, and by having him performing the role that he did, we didn’t need to double-back, or use a loop that would inevitably have taken us further away from the picture-postcard coastline that we were a stone’s throw away from for most of the day.

We didn’t see much wildlife along the way, although at one point I did spot the most enormous ant!  It was easily an inch long, and looked just like you’d expect an ant to look… if you were looking at it through a magnifying glass!  Later, we found out that we’d had our first run in with the Australian Bull Ant!

At the end of the hike, at one of our agreed rendezvous points, Rob had prepared lunch – hotdogs, cooked on the barby of course!  Half way into our feast, a couple of Aussies who we’d overtaken back down the path lumbered over asking whether there was any water available.  Despite it being a blisteringly hot day, they’d decided it would be great idea to save weight by not bringing any water with them, and were now faced with another 10k hike back to their car without a drop to drink!  Well… Rob came to the rescue, not only feeding and watering them, but offering to drive them back to Anglesea while Kit and I started the next leg our the trip.

It was time for a change of gear, and we spent the rest of the day cycling.  It was only a 20 kilometre ride, and not particularly challenging, but it was great to get the wind in our hair, if only because it did a reasonable job of deterring those flies!  We stuck to the coastline for most of the afternoon and saw some great beaches, eventually meeting Rob again at the beach at Torquay (these Aussies really didn’t have much imagination when it came to naming their towns and villages!).  Finally, we cycled on to a remote spot called Impossible Point where there happens to be a nude beach.  We were instructed to “go and get our feet wet” while Rob packed away the bikes, so we did, and spent 15 minutes on the beach wondering why anyone would want to take any clothes off with that many flies about!!!

Although a 10km hike and 20km on bikes would not usually have presented too much of a challenge, having the sun beating down on us all day did take it out of us and once we were done paddling, we were more than ready for 90 minutes of chilling in Rob’s air-conditioned car as we were driven back to Melbourne!