GOR Day 1: Ocean

 One of the more popular road trips in southern Australia is the Great Ocean Road (GOR). 

Construction began after WWI, and took 13 years to complete. It took a workforce of 3000 men to build it, mostly Australian soldiers just back from the war. It was dangerous work—demolition along the steep cliffsides was done with pickaxes, shovels and hand explosives before the road could be leveled and paved. The result is a road stretching for 150 miles from Torquay to Allensford. There are many stops and sights along the way, so we split up the drive into multiple days. 

We started our journey by taking the ferry from Sorrento to Queenscliff. From the ferry we could see many of the fancy homes in Sorrento on the popular “Millionaire’s Walk” trail along the shore. 

We stopped at the Point Lonsdale lighthouse lookout (fair warning: there may be more lighthouses to come in this post!), and we could see the beginning of the stretch of sandstone cliffs along the coast. 

The cliffs erode over time as the sea washes around them, creating some beautiful formations and seastacks (that we’ll see later in the trip). 

We continued on to Torquay, and stopped briefly to watch the surfers catching waves at Bell’s Beach. Because of the holiday weekend, the parking lots at each roadside attraction are fairly full but luckily we’ve had good parking karma so far. Definitely the most crowded stop has been the Great Ocean Road Chocolaterie and Ice Creamery—this place was a zoo, thanks to excellent advertising and a popular product. Their fancy chocolates were heavenly. 

And they were exceedingly generous with their ice cream scoops. I can see that we are not going to lose any weight on this trip despite walking five miles a day!

At the town of Lorne, we took a detour off the main road to check out Erskine Falls. The viewpoint is at the base of the 90-foot falls so it was a long hike down. But after our snack at the chocolaterie, we welcomed the many flights of stairs down to the falls and back. 

We backtracked back into Lorne, which is a charming and bustling small town. They had an excellent museum explaining the history of building the Great Ocean Road. And the main street had tons of shops and cafes. Every cafe had a sign warning people to please not feed the cockatoos. These massive rowdy birds were perched all over town just waiting to swoop down and snatch any fallen french fries. 

I’m completely enchanted by the gorgeous parrots and cockatoos here— they come in so many bright colors. These Galahs (rose-breasted cockatoos) were just hanging around the chocolaterie. Their hot pink bellies really pop against the light gray head and wings, especially when they take flight. 

Just as we were leaving Lorne we stopped at Teddy’s Lookout for a nice view of the road carved into the hillside where it meets the ocean. Seeing this really helped me to visualize just how much work it took to build this road back in the 1920s. 

This stretch of the GOR from Lorne to Apollo Bay is by far the most stunning part— the road runs right along the coast and you can see the waves crashing on the rocks and beaches as you drive past. 

We had one last stop before we headed to our hotel in Apollo Bay. We finally spotted a koala in the wild! Well I should actually put “wild” in quotes because this koala basically lives next to a popular campground. Koalas sleep 20 hours a day and rarely climb down from their trees, so this little guy is pretty much a permanent fixture here. But I can understand why they are usually so hard to spot in the wild—they blend in with the tree bark and barely move. So I’ll still count it as a wild koala sighting. Can you spot it sleeping in the eucalyptus tree? (Hint: it is dozing just to the right of the main tree trunk kind of hidden by the leaves).