We booked a second tour through the same tour company to see the Great Ocean Road. Again we could have done this on our own by hiring a car, but the tour included lunch and we decided to take the lazy way out. When the tour was almost over Katie and I were discussing the pros and cons. Had we hired a car one of us would have had to drive so that would have added to the stress and fatigue of the day. If we had done it on our own we also would have had to decide where the hell to stop and not stop. My opinion is that this is a plus as we ended up stopping quite a few more times than was necessary when we drove the Road to Hana on Maui during our honeymoon. That whole journey ended up being a 12+ hour ordeal with a lot of driving of windy roads in the dark. As Lonely Planet puts it "it's easy to fall into yet-another-magnificent-vista syndrome". So from that respect it was nice having the stopping points predetermined.
Picked up at effing 7:15AM. First stop, morning tea in some park with a beach around 9.
Great Ocean Road memorial. The Great Ocean Road was built after WWI as a way to employ the soldiers when they came home. It took 3,000 men 10 years to build it, funded partially by the government and partially by a trust set up by the citizens.
A brief stop with koalas and birds! The birds were very friendly, koalas were very lazy and very high up in trees, but they were wild Koalas.
Next stop, Temperate Rainforest. This rainforest has the second largest trees in the world, a mountain ash (behind the Redwoods of Cali). This rainforest also had some really interesting Myrtle Beech (not South Carolina) trees that were really wide.
The main event - The Twelve Apostles. Katie was feeling a bit burnt out on the sightseeing since it was late in the day and we didn't sleep very much the night before, having to get up so early in the morning. The last really cool view was Loch Ard Gorge. There is a story the busdriver told us about a shipwreck in the 1850's off the coast here during a really bad storm and how one sailor survived, swam mostly to shore and then heard shouting from the shipwreck. He swam back to the shouting, found a woman and swam them both back to shore. This stretch of the Great Ocean Road is called the shipwreck coast and apparently a lot of ships wrecked in those days but rarely did anyone survive.
Finally it was two hours back to Melbourne. Long ass day. Should have done the tours in reverse, but we wanted $2 pancakes at the hostel and they only did them on Thursday, so the early tour had to be on Friday.
Sorry this post is so terse, but it was a huge day with a lot to take in. Hopefully the pictures do it justice.
awesome pictures lately :)
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