Road Trip! The Great Ocean Road

The Great Ocean Road has been on my must visit list since I was a teenager so when Nick and I were planning our trip around Australia this was on my must do list. As I may have mentioned upwards of a hundred times we love a road trip but car hire can be pricy so we kept our eyes peeled for relocations. If you haven't heard of a relocation before it's exactly as it sounds, a rental company needs to get a vehicle from one location to another and so they let you hire it for a nominal fee (in our case $5 a day) in return for you moving it for them in a timely manner.

We had three days to get from Adelaide to Melbourne which was just right. If the weather was nicer I guess it would have been fun to have an extra day to fit in some beach time but as you can see from my photos it was rainy and windy for the majority of the trip so the slightly tighter schedule was no problem. On day one we drove, drove, drove (well Nick did!) from Adelaide to Port Fairy, about six hours, so that we could kick off our first proper day on the road with a walk at Tower Hill Wildlife Reserve near Warnambool. We'd read that this was a great place to spot wildlife especially early in the morning and our getting out of bed at dawn was rewarded with some fantastic kangaroo, wallaby, and emu sightings.

Aren't emus just ridiculous? They move in a really bouncy way which is so fun to watch. We also had the pleasure of spotting a koala high up in a tree nibbling on eucalyptus leaves which was pretty cute but not as amazing as the koala sightings later on in this post! There are signs at the park telling you which walks are best for wildlife sighting, flora & fauna sightings etc so you can choose which things you're interested in and get walking.

Our next stop was Warnambool where you can watch whales from the Logan's Beach lookout. Female whales come into this protected and sheltered area to calve and nurse between June and September so you'll see small whales playing as well as larger whales. My camera's zoom wasn't good enough to capture the whales and you'd definitely benefit from some binoculars but we could definitely see them out there which was fantastic.

The Twelve Apostles is definitely the most famous rockscape along the Great Ocean Road but there are many, many others that are both as stunning and far, far less busy. We kind of came at the road backwards as most travellers come from Melbourne towards Adelaide. They often just visit some of the hits as part of a short trip or, if they're on a longer trip they don't make it to these locations until much later in the afternoon. I really enjoyed our way of doing things as we built up to the star attraction and we hardly saw anyone at any of the spots further west.

Bay of Islands was our first stop closely followed by The Grotto. These were two of my favourite spots, Nick suggested skipping the walk down to the grotto itself but I overruled him and insisted and it was well worth the extra walk even in the pouring rain!

London Arch came next and it was actually raining so much that I couldn't get my camera out! You'll just have to trust that it's worth checking out. It's basically a larger version of The Arch (pictured below) but further out to sea. It was getting more and more blustery by this stage but I loved the way the waves looked, the sea was so moody and there was mist on the horizon which made it super atmospheric and cool looking.

The Razorback and Tom and Eva came next and I loved both of these unusual rockscapes, there are some great walks you could do along the cliff face here if it isn't blowing a gale when you visit.

Loch Ard Gorge is where things started to get really busy. We'd barely seen a single other person at any of the preceding lookout points but this car park was jam packed with cars and tour busses and just getting up and down the stairs to the beach was a waiting / shoving game as everyone decided to stop on the stairs to take photos / wait for the rest of their group / generally dither about.

Last but by no means least we arrived at the Twelve Apostles. The visitor area for this place can best be described as a clusterfuck and we were there in off season! We managed to find a spot in the car park without too much trouble but the building itself was clearly built before Australia had an influx of tourists from Korea and China who like to travel in large groups and it isn't handling it well. I could barely get into the building to shelter from the rain let alone contemplate the queue to buy a cup of tea. That said the crowds thinned out towards the viewing points and we were able to see everything and take photos which is all that really matters. Peace is nice but it's not something that I would ever expect at a large tourist attraction.

This was such a stunning way to end our day! So cool right? We were pretty tired after all of our adventuring so we drove on as far as the YHA eco hostel at Apollo Bay where we planned to sleep that night. I loved this hostel so much, the design was amazing and it has the comfiest sofas in front of a log fireplace in the communal lounge. It was recently built with eco credentials in mind so there were loads of cool things going on to save energy and water.

The next morning we backtracked a little as we'd skipped the Cape Otway lighthouse the day before and Nick had read that you can often spot koalas on the road leading to it so we swung by to check that out. The lighthouse was a bust as there was a huge entry fee to even get into the area and look at the lighthouse so we just took a short walk that left from the carpark and went to a lookout where we could catch a glimpse of it from a distance. The trip wasn't wasted though because there were indeed koalas in the trees along the road towards the lighthouse. This was by far the best koala sighting of the whole trip. I zoomed quite a lot to get the first photo but we could still see her clearly (those ears!!) but the koala in the second picture was just really low down in the tree.

Aren't koalas amazing? I can't even handle how cute their ears are. They were both moving around a lot, eating, changing position and climbing up and down. It was lovely to watch. The best thing to do if you want to see koalas on this road is to just drive slowly and look out for groups of people standing around staring into the trees! Sounds ridiculous but that's how we found these little cuties.

Have you ever driven The Great Ocean Road? Would you like to? I think it's up there with one of my favourite travel experiences so I'd definitely recommend it if you're panning a trip down under.