Great Ocean Road

I just got back from a delicious "modern Australian" dinner with a few colleagues, which is my excuse for why this post might have more pictures than words. As far as I can tell, "mod oz" cuisine basically means "Western food with a lot more Asian influence than normal," or "pretty similar to everything served in San Francisco except without the delicious tacos." But on to the road.

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, Katrina picked me up at my hostel and we set out for the Great Ocean Road. This is a stretch of highway that hugs the coast and gets somewhere eventually, but mostly is just fun to drive and is on a cliff overlooking an ocean, meaning that it's a tiny winding strip of land with a guard rail to prevent you from plowing into the water. In other words, the perfect place to start learning how to drive on the left side of the road!

She drove most of the way from Melbourne to Lorne, a sleepy beach town that was pretty dead in the middle of winter. Just before we got on the beginning of the Great Ocean Road we stopped the car to take a few pictures and generally bask in the road, the water, and the light. Then we switched and I drove the last hour to Lorne up gently curving roads.

We had some dinner on Lorne's one road with commercial activity, and turned in early in anticipation of this sunrise:

I don't think seeing the sun come up over the Pacific is going to get old any time soon.

Katrina went for a run on the beach while I went back to bed and snuggled under the covers - it was cold! After a delicious breakfast of toast, eggs, salsa, yogurt, banana, and granola, as well as some strong coffee, we hit the road.

Thanks to my guidebook, we had a loose plan of things we wanted to see, but mostly we were just excited to drive. She started in the driver's seat, and we turned off the GPS since there was really only one way to go.

I wasn't kidding - there's the road, and then the ocean. This was taken in a moving car.

It was a beautiful day for a drive, and I'd made a pretty good playlist. Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out how to hook up our phones to the car - sometimes they would work, sometimes the car wouldn't recognize them. We listened to the radio at the beginning, but that faded out quickly - there's not a lot going on on the GOR, so then we opened the windows and listened to the water.

Traffic.

After going around many twists and turns, and then through some gorgeous valleys and green fields, and then some more twists and turns, we drove through Apollo Bay, a more major touristy beach town, and looked back fondly at the tiny hamlet of Lorne. We pressed on, deciding to stop for lunch on the way back.

The green part of the drive.

Right around noon, we hit the Twelve Apostles, a geological formation that occurs when softer rock can't withstand the ocean's pounding. Stronger rock stays standing, leaving these massive chunks to hang out in the middle of the water.

These photos look fake, but they're real.

Some random facts: the stacks are made of limestone, and were named "Sow and Piglets" until the early 1900s.

You can take a helicopter ride out to view them.

There are currently nine stacks, and it's unclear if there ever were 12. Waves are contuinously (slowly) making new ones and knocking the old ones down, like the rock pile you can see in the middle, just to the right of the large stack in the foreground.

Proof that I was there.

After poking around, we got back in the car and drove back for some lunch, then headed back towards Melbourne (still on the GOR) by way of Bells Beach, site of the world's longest running surf competition and the home of Rip Curl and Quiksilver.

Bells Beach

We eventually made it back to Melbourne, and it was a little sad to come back to civilization after our road trip. Thankfully I have this to help me remember the drive: