Great Ocean Road - The Trip Home

Port Fairy - from the sublime to the ridiculous. It used to be called Belfast, and presumably after the 8,000th tourist told them what the connotations were, they changed it - to Port Fairy!

The original name however was the give away, and this quaint fishing village by the Ocean was filled with raven haired, pale skinned people, with believe it or not, the smell of peat coming out the chimneys at night. Unfortunately it copped the rain big time, with the local supermarket seeming to be raining inside as well as out as staff run around with buckets.

We enjoyed our meal out the night before, despite the Irish theme continuing, with an absolutely plastered Irish couple at the table next to us. The girl spilled drinks over the table all night (clearly they'd been in the pub all day), and if the guy thought it was drink money well spent, I wish him luck, as he basically had to carry her out the restaurant.

We leave Port Fairy with 300k to go. Rather than the indulgence of wandering back down the Great Coast Road, we hit the A1 road straight through the countryside back to Geelong, and then the freeway to Melbourne.

Our one stop off is about 40k into the journey at Warrnambool. This is the home of Logan's Beach - one of the great Southern Right whale breeding grounds at this time of year. If you want the gory details they're called "right" whales because they're the right one's to kill. They're pretty slow, carry a lot of blubber, and float when they die - nice!

We saw nothing and just managed the dry 15 minutes between the Ocean squalls so left quickly.

Our one other stop in the 5 hour dash was in some bogan farming town for sandwiches and coffee. I'm sure I left just that little bit quicker than I arrived.

Looking back on the trip we enjoyed it despite the weather. It turned out to be so much more than a road drive though, and we missed so much: the Otway Fly Walk over the rain forest (sadly a bit like the walk over in "I'm a Celeb Get me Outta Here"), the Bay of Islands which we briefly passed, seeing endless sea stacks crammed in a bay, looking like a fleet of stone long ships, The Arch, what's left of London Bridge, and generally longer walks in the Otway National park.

Looks like we'll have to go back again and ignore the beaches.