Today was the last part of the Great Ocean Road.

Today we saw a big historic lighthouse, got smiled upon and let in for free (yay!), saw the beautiful Twelve Apostles, and encountered the beach, bogans (chavs to those reading from the UK), fireworks and ‘fast food shame’ in Warrnambool.

Cape Otway was a major lighthouse, telegraph and signalling station and post office for much of Australia’s history and only closed quite recently in the 1970s. The exhibits there are well presented and interesting – I didn’t actually think I’d be that interested in the history of a lighthouse but they make it interesting and I’d recommend this as a stop for everyone doing the Great Ocean Road. What’s more, the very kind chap at the entrance desk let us in for free! Thank Mr. Kind Man at Cape Otway, and we hope your house didnt’ burn down in the Victoria fires (he wasn’t expecting his house to still be standing by the end of the day!).

Later along the road you get to the Twelve Apostles which is a permanent fixture on the Victoria tourist trail. These are the remains of the limestone coastline-that-was and they are stunning. Pictures below still make it difficult to convey just how weird and unique they are (they are tall but quite small islands isolated from the main coastline by millions of years of erosion. Some of them, unfortunately, are on their way to collapse from the sea’s natural erosion.

We continued, briefly making a stop for lunch in the pitifully boring ‘town’ of Port Campbell (if 500 or so can be called a town – it is in Australia!) and ended up in the large town (again, by Australian standards) of Warrnambool (with a colossal population of 24,000. Whoa!). This also marked our completion of the Great Ocean Road, which finishes just before Warrnambool.

Upon first finding a beach spot to park, we were aware of a small but significant chav presence along the sea front which would could be a problem for us if we wanted to sleep there. I have no desire to be woken up by drunk bogans knocking on our window and giving us trouble in the wee hours of the morning. However, it turned out that we’d rocked up on the last day of some local festival, and there was a big fireworks display happening from the end of the beach. Aha! This is where all the crowds came from.

So it actually ended up being a very nice evening of watching fireworks, walking along the beach and then playing MahJong with Bernice for a bit on the beach with our makeshift table – strange but very cool! We had our lamp which bathed the area in a eerie glow all around us beyond which there was just pitch black. It was like playing MahJong in the Void or some such!

Before this though we raced to Warrnambool library to make use of their internet. Surely the library in a large town like this would have public wi-fi access? They do in smaller towns, so surely they would here. Wrong. After checking out a list of wi-fi cafes that they gave us, we were left with only one place that was a)open and b)gave free wi-fi. We had to buy dinner there as a result, but we felt dirty, ashamed and like cheap filthy whores.

The place? McDonalds. Forgive us, we had no choice! But it could be very useful to know that they provide free wi-fi – pretty hard to come by here in Australia.

Me being silly on the top of Cape Otway’s lighthouse!

A snapshot of the gorgeous Twelve Apostles….

…and another of them looking better – without me in the photo!

Thankfully we didn’t see or hear our ‘friend’ from the previous night (see previous post) and were able to get up and out without any more traumatic encounters.

So at last we really started to drive and took a route down to Geelong (the ‘Gateway to Colac’ as I’ve heard it described once!), down through Torquay (even more surf obsessed that it’s Cornish counterpart back in the UK) and picked up the Great Ocean Road – one of the things that you never stop hearing about when you say you’re going on a road trip around Australia.

And it’s for a good reason.

The view of the Great Ocean Road (GOR) is amazing. Every little point you want to stop and take photos, but if you did that then you’d never reach anywhere, ever!

It’s also very well constructed and although a very windy road there are plenty of ’slow vehicle passing points’ so you can get rid of those idiots giving you rear love up the exhaust pipe and let them pass.

We made a brief stop in Lorne for lunch and lovely walk along the beach, then carried on to Apollo Bay further down the road.

It’s a quaint little town, but not really much else to do apart from be on the beach and chill out there and in the cafes along the GOR, which of course is pretty great.

En route to Apollo Bay we stopped at Split Point Lighthouse – a major contribution to ship safety through the Bass Straits. Now I hope that that doesn’t really excite you all that much, but many of you might be a little more interested when I tell you that Split Point is where the, er, ’seminal’ Australian children’s series ‘Round the Twist’ was filmed and based.

Can’t say that it particularly excited me either. But it completely made Bernice’s day!

Bernice’s moment in front of the Lighthouse!

A view from the Great Ocean Road

Bernice on the beach at Lorne.