Although today's tour was not near as eventful as our Mornington Peninsula tour, it was still a must-see experience! Shane ended up being our guide again which we were happy about and believe it or not, we were in a van with 2 girls from New Zealand and a group of 7 from Houston, TX. Imagine being across the world for 3 weeks, not running into one other person from Texas (and only 3-4 from the US) and then being in a van for 10 hours with 7 people from the same city!
Because of the amount of driving that must be accomplished to take in all of the sights along the Great Ocean Road, there is no way to avoid all of the down-time time in the van. We had some short stops at lookout points and a morning break for coffee/tea and cake.
We were actually on the reverse ocean road tour so we headed all the way out in the morning and made most of the "touristy" stops on the way back. I highly recommend doing this, especially if you come over the Australian summer holidays. We visited most of the landmarks before they were too hot and before the tour buses started rolling in!
Our first major stop was the 12 apostles... Incredible! Although there are only five left standing, there are similar formations all along the coast and these were quite spectacular. The most recent one collapsed in 2005 after slowly being eaten away by the waves. I can only imagine how beautiful it must have been when there were 7 more of these standing!
I loved our next stop, the Loch and Gorge... Maybe even more so than the 12 apostles! Tyler got in the water for a few minutes and I was warm, but not hot enough to willingly jump in that cold water.
We actually made our way through 3 different ecosystems on this tour and the next major stop was a walk through the rainforest! It was only a 30-40 minute trek but Shane had lots of good info for us and it was amazing how different it was than the coast just 30-45 minutes away. I fully expected to see a spider as big as my backpack along the trail but I am forever grateful that the biggest insects I saw today were those pesky little flies (which were everywhere except for the rainforest it seemed like). I learned later that night that Australia has over 10,000 different species of spiders... Yuck.
Nothing like a 100m tree to make you feel small... And that's hard to do when you are 6'4" like Tyler.
The rest of the tour was fairly uneventful. A few bathroom breaks (I find it funny that the expression here is "going toilet") and one last lookout before heading back to Melbourne.
Because of the fires, we actually had to take a detour around some of the road. Over 160 homes were lost and even worse, it all started on Christmas Day.
The brush fires were just on the other side of the hill in the picture above and the fire actually jumped the road and went all the way down to the ocean.
Thankfully, no lives were lost but it was still so heartbreaking for the families affected.
We were back to the hostel by 7:45 and decided to try Chin Chin one more time.
NOPE! 2.5 hour wait for a Monday night dinner. Dinner at 10:45? Ha! Too hangry for that. I'm super intrigued and frustrated by this restaurant now but I guess it will have to wait for our next trip to Australia.
We found an over-priced restaurant in China down and scarfed down dinner and the free wi-fi, of course.
Tomorrow morning we head to the Whitsunday Islands... I CANNOT WAIT.
If you hate beautiful beaches, I would steer clear of the blog for the remainder of our trip.
I can't believe we are down to just 7 more days left of this trip... I'm prepared to start planning another already!
Goodnight!
XOXO
Elissa
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