great ocean road

If you are ever in Melbourne, I highly encourage leaving the city briefly and touring down the Great Ocean Road. There are loads of day trips, some 2- and 3- day jobs, and you can drive it yourself pretty easily. But it is completely worth it; this goes double if you are also not from the Californian or Oregonian coast.

It was just a day tour, and a small group, so we didn't have a lot of time to dawdle, but it did remind me why I like traveling independently more than with a tour sometimes. We passed through all of these tiny seaside towns with charming names - Anglesea, Torquey, Apollo Bay - that were all delightful and lovely, but also that warranted only a bathroom stop before we had to get moving again. The time it takes to wrangle even a small group tour of 20 or so is still longer than it takes to manage a trip in a rental car, so I definitely feel like I got less of a view of these towns than the ones Susan and I drove through in New Zealand - even the ones we spent less time in there.

Tours do have their benefit, though. It was glorious, for instance, for one day not to have to plan for myself how I was getting anywhere, when to eat, where to eat, when to go, when to stay. The banal logistics of everyday living become much more of a consideration while traveling, and being a part of a bus takes me out of that. Also, tours help me get to do certain things, like go to Egypt and Jordan as a lone white female, and feel relatively secure.

Anyway, back to the road: Gorgeous. The coastline is rugged and lovely, and very reminiscent of coastlines in California (especially the Santa Barbara/central coast areas) or Oregon (except warm and sunny). The water is blue and the wind kicks up a lot of waves, which makes for great surfing, dangerous swimming, and lots of sandy beaches.

The trip includes other attractions down that way as well - we saw some koala napping in a eucalyptus, and a temperate rain forest, and the Otway hills. We saw the "Shipwreck Coast" (apparently, people coming to Australia during their gold rush had to face a southern landing, which was made difficult by the extreme winds and rocky shores).

And because the cliffs are made of limestone, being worn away by the water, there are all these "structures" to see - the Lon Bridge, which used to be a long bridge with two semicircular arches below them, until the nearer one collapsed one day, stranding two tourists out there (you used to be able to just walk out from the parking lot).

The absolute highlight was absolutely the Twelve Apostles. Even though there are only...seven now, I believe? One just collapsed last year, but there have not been twelve in a long time, if ever. These huge limestone towers just climbing up out of impossibly blue water. It's worth all the tourists, the winds, the herding onto and off of buses, all of it, to see them. They look so perfect and beautiful on postcards, and they looked just like that in person, too - one of the beauties of nature, really.