Our flight is scheduled to get Australia by
Melbourne’s airport at 6:45 AM. We have a lot of time for the
immigration tasks as the rental car office is not opening until 9 AM.
Once we’ve got the car, our first day in Australia
is for one of its highlights: the Great Ocean Road. Driving through it
we’ll enjoy its nature, cliffs and coastal landscapes until Port
Campbell, where we’ll spend the night.
You can download the image above to get a bigger
version of the map.
After
When we get our baggage back, after a long line
for passport control, we’re thinking about how hard this day can be
after haven’t been able to sleep in our night flight. Plane landed at 6
AM, before the scheduled time and we still have even more time than
expected until being able of taking our car at 9 AM. Besides, we’re one
of the few people spared from the customs and
biological checks, and this puts us out by 7:30 AM.
We take some breakfast again at airport because
meals in Jetstar are scant even being paid apart. Then, I go to a
telephone store to get an Australian SIM card with unlimited calls
within Australia and 1.5 Gb of data by 30$ (this is always going to be
Australian dollars).
At 8:30 AM we take a taxi to the car rental
office. The driver complains for the short ride after waiting for 2
hours at airport his turn to take someone. Maybe I’m doing it wrong,
but I give 30$ to him for a bill of 15$.
After all the paper tasks for the rental, and
after getting full of fuel by 40$, we start our trip at 10:15 AM by
road 43. Then we get into M80, which is a ring motorway we use to get
the M1 to Torquay, where Great Ocean Road starts.
We’re stopping at some of the several lookouts
along the road. They have beautiful views over the beaches with surfers.
We park at Split Point lighthouse because my wife
needs a toilet, but the like the bar we get into as much as per
deciding to advance our lunch time and enjoy their delicious hot dogs,
with big beef sausages, around 12 PM. I eat one with extra cheese and
bacon as we look around the place, all about50-60’s American culture.
This is why it is labeled as 60’s diner. They’re very proud of their
“museum” and encourage us to explore every corner. We enjoy a lot this
meal and their courtesy, as we’re provided even with maps and advices
about the places to visit on Great Ocean Road. This is the Freestone’s
Roadhaven and we’ve paid 27$ for three hot dogs and our
drinks.
One of these advices makes us go to Erskine Falls
where, after a short ride between eucalyptuses, we park for a walk down
to the river and through a forest full of ferns. This is a really
beautiful place and a don’t-to-be-missed landscape, where we take
amazing pictures.
Another of these advices makes us stop in Kenneth
River, where we immediately detect people taking pictures to something
at tree tops just at the entrance of the park, pointing where is what
we’ve come to see: there is one koala at the top of an eucalyptus tree,
but we find another one in a lower branch of another tree. There are
cockatoos and a sort of small parrots too.
Soon after the road leaves the coast we get into
Otway
National Park, which was the place where we thought for wild koalas
sightseeing, but we don’t see any on the trees along the road. As we’ve
already got that in Kenneth River we don’t spend too much time here
looking for the animals and drive back to the Great Ocean Road.
This road, in its part out of the coast, is
through green
hills and meadows full of cows and sheep. It is beautiful but, with all
our pending sleep, is the hardest part for us. We wanted to get the
Twelve Apostles by sunset time and that’s what we manage: we park at
5:20 PM and it gets night at 6 PM.
We’re not the only ones wanting to watch the
sunset here
and both lookouts are crowded. It is challenging avoiding the people
for our pictures. In the best lookout, the one in a peak over the sea,
there is no way of having a picture of any of us alone.
We reach Port Campbell in a 10 minutes’ drive from the
amazing
views we’ve got in Twelve Apostles and it is already dark. Our room is
big and we only leave it for dinner: seafood chowder and porterhouse by
49.50$.
biological checks, and this puts us out by 7:30 AM.
