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!

Seeing as we were yet again without showers but parked right by the beach, we started the day with a dip in the Tasman Sea. A little bracing by anyone’s standards, but I suppose it got the circulation going and we were still going to be clean.

Today we ventured forth further along the south coast towards Portland via Port Fairy, eventually ending up in Bridgewater – where our evening was one of those that you started traveling for in the first place.

Port Fairy, just up the road from Warrnambool is a cute small town, but this time it actually had something that many of the others didn’t – charm. Cute, attractive and it also had an amazing sweet shop – always a hit with yours truly!

On towards Portland and the weather began to take a turn for the worse. The dream of having barbecues most days in the glorious sunshine suddenly went a bit Pete Tong and the sun ran away and the gale force wind threatened to take our ‘kanga sangers’ off for an early rapture. And I nearly froze my tits off.

Pressing on to Cape Bridgewater proved more rewarding. We got the opportunity to walk part of the ‘Great South West Walk’ for about 1.2 km in some beautiful (but at points quite steep) hills along the coast to see a large non-breeding colony of Australia Fur Seals – a comical bunch who were well worth the trek. One feels quite jealous of seals at times – theirs is a life of spending most of the day sleeping a rock and occasionally wiggling around like a fat, wibbly sausage.

We managed to find another free spot to park up and sleep in – this time by some magnificent, picturesque lakes near Cape Bridgewater called Discovery Lakes. We were more or less the only ones there for the whole night (a battered van made an appearance for 5 minutes at about 11:30pm, but then went away. We never did work out what they would have been doing!) and we sat and had a picnic on a small boat jetty as we watched the sun set.
This was, naturally, the perfect time for a pipe as well! I believe the photos will tell it best.
What a wonderful way to spend a busy day. Ah, it’s a hard life!

A couple of shots from the walk to the Seal Colony – both of them overlooking Cape Bridgewater – nice eh? Some Australian Fur Seals chillin’ at the colony. Now THAT is what I call a sunset (this is raw from the camara, no alterations, no photoshopping!)! Ah, now I could get used to this….