Tuesday, 30 April 2013

The Great Ocean Roadtrip!

by Tasha in Australia, In Transit

Here's the thing about Tash and I - we love to road trip. Adore it. Absolutely and without qualification. There's no better freedom than to load up on snacks, blast some classic rock and cruise off into the sunrise at 100km/hour.

Unfortunately (with a relatively last-minute exception), we're not likely to have the opportunity to road trip, once we leave for Asia. We're aiming to do as little flying as possible as it is both environmentally unsustainable and expensive as hell.

However most of our overland travel will likely be in the form of train and bus trips, rather than renting our own car (again - expensive as hell!). Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with busses or trains, and I'm certainly looking forward to taking some of the world's most famous rail journeys - but honestly, cruising on a train for 11 days can't compare with you and your automobile, when the only limit on where you can go is where the roads can take you.

A few weeks ago, as a kind of 'last hurrah' to our homeland, we set out on one of the most lauded road trips Australia has to offer: the Great Ocean Road. As time is short and getting shorter - we could at most take two full days, and that was being generous. But our aim was always to reach the small border town of Mt Gambier, a recommended 3 day round trip. It was a blatant challenge to our roadtrip prowess - but one we were determined to meet head on and stare down until it whimpered like a small child.

We set out early. And when I say early, I'm talking 4am-three-hours-before-sunrise early. We made a beeline straight for the Citylink Freeway, driving through the dark, empty suburbs of a Melbourne still in bed. There's something so oddly serene about seeing familiar streets completely abandoned, and we can make all the claims we like about "expediency", "getting a head start" or "beating the traffic", but personally, it's that sensation of being the only people in the world that will always get me out of bed and into the car at an otherwise Godforsaken hour.

Soon enough we were out of the city and coming up on the beautiful picturesque southern coast - still in pitch blackness. In our headlights, we could see repeating street signs we had never seen before, reminding international drivers which side of the road Australia drives on. While these did make us chuckle, they were also more than slightly nerve wracking to see, as the coastal roads on the south end of Victoria had become alarmingly narrow. If an international driver did swing around the corner, there's every likelihood that our glorious travel plans would be cut unduly short as we plummeted to our sad and untimely deaths in Bass Straight.

And it's a long ass way down
 Instead, as sunrise approached, we found ourselves in driving distance of the Cape Otway lighthouse. This, we thought, seemed like a no-brainer. The chance to pull over, stretch our legs and eat breakfast watching the sun come up from a lighthouse? Hell yes! Sadly, it seems the Fates were conspiring against our clever plans. When we finally arrived at the lighthouse parking area, all we found was a closed information kiosk, an empty carpark, and a giant white wall with a single locked gate. Upon further investigation, we discovered two equally unfortunate facts:
  1. The lighthouse was, in fact, closed until 8:30am, more than a full hour after we arrived, and,
  2. It costs $18.50 per person to even go and see the freaking thing!!
Therefore, sadly, rather than viewing a majestic sunrise from the base of a majestic lighthouse, we instead had to make do eating our breakfast while watching an, admittedly, equally majestic sunrise over a cartoonishly evil forest that had sprung up out of the gloom. (Does "evil forest" do it justice? I feel like it needs to be capitalised... Evil Forest! Much better!) Realisation dawned that the darkened trees we had nonchallantly passed in our rush to beat the dawn had, with the harsh light of day, transformed into the childhood-nightmare-inducing forest from Disney's Snow White.
 
See....I am not exaggerating!
With a healthy dose of fear, trepedation and the knowledge that the Evil Forest harboured the only road out from the Lighthouse, we pushed on yodeling all known Disney songs on the tops of our out of tune voices.

Belting out Circle of Life...Nope! Still Evil!

When you're driving long-haul, time stops being measured in minutes and hours, and starts to pass in the form of songs and albums and topics in the endless, sprawling conversation about nothing that makes overland travel so unique. It was three epic debates, two albums and four songs later that we started to see signs of our impending arrival at one of Australia's most famous and the Great Ocean Road's biggest natural landmark: the Twelve Apostles.

Not pictured: 12 of anything

The Twelve Apostles (of which there are currently 7, and have only ever been 9) are the world's largest free-standing limestone stacks, and are perhaps most notable for the stunning degree of accuracy with which they were named. We pulled in to the tourist information centre and set out, camera in hand, to take some beautiful landscape shots in the fresh morning light. 

Fresh morning light that quickly became overcast every-time I lifted the lens. Lens down - sunshine, lens up - gloomy clouds. I began to feel as though the sky itself was conspiring against me - a insidious plot confirmed as I handed the SLR to Tash and the sun broke through. Snatching it back I raised the lens just in time for the fiendish clouds lept to consume the sun once more. Defeated I handed the SLR to Tash to take the only clear shots we have, and instead occupied myself by swearing my revenge on the heavens themselves. 

My forsaken exploits and Tash's visual bounty can be found on our Flickr page, even despite my cursed luck with the sun. We moved on a short time later, spending no more than a few hours along shipwreck coast, and I felt we were generous with our time. If that seems a touch anticlimactic after the 5 or so hours we'd driven to get to this point... I kind of agree. Don't get me wrong, the scenery is absolutely beautiful, and it is definately worth seeing, but that's really all it is. Beautiful scenery. It didn't spark any great adventures, lead to any hilarious mishaps, or really do anything other than be beautiful to look at.

Although we did see an echidna. So, y'know, there's that.


STAY TUNED NEXT WEEK: For the Dramatic Finale of "The Great Ocean Road Trip" or for spoilers you can check out all the photos from the full trip here.


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