Great Ocean Road - Day Two

We leave Apollo Bay in the morning, leaving the coast for a little while to go through the Otway National Park.

Bizzarely, in an area suffering from a 10 year drought, this is a rain forest. We randomly stop off at the Maits Rest car park and suddenly walk into a slightly cold and certainly damp rain forest environment. Ferns erupt everywhere, with the biggest Eucalyptus I've ever seen punching through the canopy way up into the sunlight. I guess with the moisture, it was no suprise to see some of the most stunning fungi.

We then head out of the rainforest back to the coast and down to the Cape Otway lighthouse. The whole Ocean Road coast is known as a bit of a shipwreck area, and is filled with lighthouses, with this one jutting out the furthest south.

On the way, we go through a landscape with signs saying look out for 'roos and Koala's. 'Roos proved elusive, but about 10 mins before the lighthouse, Caitlin spotted her first Koala. After nearly crashing (I swerved to the verge, slamming on the brakes when Caitlin shouted "Koala!") and narrowly avoiding the 3 cars behind us, we stop for photos.

Koala's are truly stoned on whatever they eat, and definitely meet the 18 hour sleep per day category. We shouted, we clapped, we waved, we contemplated throwing sticks but he wouldn't move.

On the way back to the car, knowing what to look for, we spot two other Koala. Similarly they wouldn't move, despite me climbing half way up one of their trees. During this 20 minute interlude we have about 15 Aussie cars wandering by, I imagine saying - "God - pommies taking pics of those Koala's again". I got my own back 10 mins later, by looking reasonably disinterested at what could have been one of hundreds of UK lighthouse sites, watching excited Aussies running around.

After the Cape we hit the Ocean road again, randomly stopping at another car park. This turned out to be Castle Cove. The view from the top looked promising, but after a surpisingly short walk to the beach (considering the height of the cliff) we end up watching some stunning surf. Similar to yesterday in Torquay with its reliability, but these are regulalry 8-10 foot waves. The roar as they hit every 10 seconds is awesome, and the sandy colour of the waves as they hit the beach shows how much they're chewing up the landscape. We had 20 mins being mesmerised by this before the weather, and a worry about children being swept away forced us to leave. Confusingly this means that stopping at every beach has its merits.

After the Cove, with deterioating weather we arrived at probably the most iconic part of the road - the 12 Apsotles. The weather was pretty grim, but we managed to get some pictures (despite driving rain splattered all over the camera lense), appreciated the view, and narrowly avoided deciding on the toursity helicopter trip. There were other sites near here including the Bay of Islands and the Loch Ard area, but the weather was grim and we had kilometeres to go.

At his point we had a fairly long way to our second night stop - Port Fairy. As the road went inland at this point, despite somewhat litiginiously still being called the Great Ocean Road, we went for getting the miles in rather than touristy wandering.

By this time it was absolutely chucking it down as only Austalia can. Like the the English with snow, Aussies can't drive in the rain for toffee. As a Scot however, I'm peculiarly trained for both, and we drove on at a suicidial pace, regularly passing the big multi cyclinder Ute's as they crawled (sensibly) along.

Finally we arrived at Port Fairy, the details of which I'll leave until the last day notes.