Great Ocean Road part 2..

20090424SW6649
Originally uploaded by s webster

Rain Rain Rain & more rain. I know we are in a rain forest but this is crazy. It has been raining for the past 4 days and not light rain either stuff that is blowing sideways.

Ok I’ve now driven the Great Ocean road 4 times. After leaving Lorne we headed to Apollo bay. The hostel there is excellent. It was built in 2005 has 2 kitchens, one on top of the other as well as 2 lounges with a fire place in the bottom lounge with the chimney going up thru to the top one. There are floor to ceiling windows all thou out the building. This lets the sun in when it is shining. (All of 1 hour while we were there).

The first day we got there we sat back and relaxed. I wandered down to the beach and walked along the pier. At the end there were two families fishing tho they didn’t seem to catch anything while I was there someone had lost their boots in the ocean and they floated by. I took some pictures and wandered back into town as the rain started and it was getting close to supper. Tho I did stop at an Ice cream shop to get some fresh Honey Malt + Honey Comb ice cream in a waffle cone. This shop makes the ice cream on site and has won awards for it. It was great! I went back to the hostel to see what the guys wanted to do for supper as well as find out if there was room for us. They were going to have some pasta so I decided to head out and find the fish and chip shop. I got me a Blue Grander and chips all for $7.50 it was much better than the place that I had found in Sydney.

The next day I drove the guys back to Lorne (1.25 hours) so they could apply for jobs. Once that was done we drove back to Apollo bay (1.25 hours) stopped for some ice cream and headed out to see the 12 Apostles (1.6 hours). It actually stopped raining for about 30 min while we were there tho the wind was howling covering me in salt water. We got some good pictures then headed out to find what else we could see before the sun completely set. We found the bay of Martyrs here a ship had crashed on the rocks and 50 sailors had drifted into a cavern that night the cavern glowed purple from the phosphors.

We looked around a bit wanted to go down to a lower view point but it was closed. I managed to slip on some wet mud and land on my ass. I kept my camera up tho one whole side of me was covered in mud. At least I wasn’t wet as well. I just stood in the wind and let it dry me out it had stopped raining for 5 minutes. The sun set and it got dark so we headed back to Apollo bay (1.5 hours) this bit of road is extremely twisty. With 25km/h U turns most of the times you can only get up to 35km/h and the trees over hang the road where they drop the leaves. So it becomes extremely slippery when it’s been raining.
The next day it was storming again. The wind was howling and the rain coming down so we decided to stay in and relax. We did end up going out to pick up a pizza around 7pm tho it had calmed down a bit by then.

Monday started out nice as we checked out at 10am (we didn’t move all that quick in the morning and we always sat and had tea before leaving) off we went to the Otway Fly Tree walk. Of course it wouldn’t stay dry today so it rained. The Otway tree top walk is a steel structure that lets you walk up at the top of the trees and look down on the forest floor. Let just say I had an interesting time up there. Tho somehow I did manage to climb all the way up to the top of the look out. After our walk we headed on to Port Fairy we stopped in Warrembole to see the whales but we were too early to see them they don’t show up till sometime in May. We got to the hostel made supper and watched Red dwarf. I tried to have a shower the next morning but all there was for water was cold and Ice. So my hair got washed and I didn’t. We headed for Ballerat to see the Gold.

We arrived at the hostel around 4:00pm and checked in. Humm this is quite a small hostel with only 4 rooms and we were the only ones there. We headed out to see the gold museum. They closed at 5:00pm so we didn’t go in. Instead we went shopping to get supper and the guys needed to get some stuff for the new jobs they were starting on Thursday. We went to wallmart! I bought some pens as the one I had with me died. We then proceeded to the supermarket to buy things for supper, after which we went back and cooked up some food. We ended the night by watching some more Red Dwarf!

The next day I drove the guys to the train station as they were headed back to lorne to start their jobs. I then went and spent the day at Soveren hill. This is where there was an uprising during the gold rush and 22 people were killed in 15 minutes. The town is nice and you can walk in a gold mine. I watched the blacksmith pour a gold bar... it was only worth $120,000.00 but for some reason he wouldn’t let me take it home! I don’t know why. I was really disappointed with the sound and light show that they did at night. For the $45.00 I paid you would think they would have live actors as well. I would not recommend it to anyone. Yet they have people going to it every night and some nights they run it twice.

I returned to Melbourne the next day stopping at Australia’s only Castle. They wanted $20 to walk around it so I just took some pictures from the outside. Thus ends my Great Ocean Road Trip or does it. Stay tuned to next weeks’ adventure.