Great Ocean Road: waterfalls and beaches galore

I suck just a bit at updating my blog. But I figure I’m going to need to apologise a lot for delayed posts, so I’ll just get on with it, shall I? ;)

Great Ocean Road. It’s a road. By an ocean. And yep, it’s pretty great. Better than great, it was stunning. I can prove it.

The people: mixture of internationals and Aussies – perfect!

The internationals: me, Kathryn (Canadian), Milan (Dutch), Rachel (fellow Brit), Frankie (American) and Ejaz (Dubai)

The Aussies: Jonno, Allie, Rhian, Josh, Tim, Tony, Sam – they mainly come from Victoria, apart from Allie and Rhian who are NSW girls (Sydney) and Tim… from Darwin… (Northern Territory)

Places: If I’m honest, we went to a lot of places, and this weekend was a few weeks ago now, so accuracy won’t be my strong point at this moment… BUT, the places we did definitely go to were:

Bells Beach, known for its surfing. I think this was the beach where we climbed unstable rocks, then found a sign prohibiting exactly this. Oops. There was also squishy seaweedy stuff which I can’t say was very pleasant to walk on.

Beach I Can’t Remember. We ran into the sea, splashed around, started the trend of constant wet clothes.

(stolen from Kathryn’s photos… there might be a bit of that)

Then the Round the Twist lighthouse. I relived my childhood, sang the theme tune very loudly whilst getting a piggy back from Allie. We were oddly attracted to the spindly trees and Frankie started his routine of peeing in every beautiful place we stopped in. Men…

   

Great Ocean Road sign. It’s a sign for the Great Ocean Road. We climbed it slightly, took pictures in the road when no cars were coming. Badass.

 

Lorne for lunch. I bought a bracelet for my slowly increasing collection I’m wearing. I plan to get a bracelet from every place I travel to. Just like Frankie pees in every beautiful place, I’ll be more socially acceptable and get a bracelet in every beautiful place. There were lots of cockatoos (the Aussie pigeon, pretty much) and I fed them chips straight from my hand :) I was told every local would hate me for it, but I think the cockatoos appreciated it.

   

Erskine Falls (a very scenic waterfall). I was lucky enough to be in the car that didn’t get lost, so we had an extended period of time there. Let me tell you this much – chilling out on a rock, toes in the water and looking up at the waterfall is undeniably relaxing and spectacular. Never mind that there were warning signs about snakes. Pfft.

   

Apollo Bay is where we camped. Cooking together, drinking, playing ‘I have never’ and snuggling together for body warmth in tents. In a slightly tipsy state, me and some of the other internationals had our minds boggled when we re-realised that we were looking at different stars in this hemisphere. We could see the Southern Cross. Not only that, but the stars were so ridiculously clear (something I’m not used to living in London) and it seriously looked incredible. A sight I won’t forget for a while.

  

We also jumped off a pier in Apollo Bay. I was cold and hungover, so it wasn’t top of my list of things I wanted to do that day, but knew I’d regret it if I didn’t. I loved it. I’ve always wanted to jump off something into water (is that weird?)

Struggling slightly to get through the bars!

It went better for me than it did for Ejaz…

Hahaha.

Castle Cove. We saw an echidna.

Johanna Beach. There were rocks. And flies that apparently suck your blood.

London Bridge. The story goes that it fell down when two people were on the edge of it, making it a random bit of land on its own that they were trapped on. We pretended they were on a romantic date. Turned out the guy was cheating on his wife with London Bridge girl. Haha.

Loch Gorge. Jumping photos. Pretty cave. And I really quite liked it.

 

12 Apostles. I only found out on this day that you don’t pronounce the ‘t’ in ‘Apostles’. But it was beautiful anyway. Actually, breath-taking. Seeing them at sunset was the best plan ever.

 

I apologise for the length of this post, but at least there are pretty pictures to look at if you can’t be arsed with the reading :) Just a little bit more to go…

On the Road: I was a superb koala and wallaby spotter. Frankie mooned. Road trip music and lots of singing along. Wrote our names in a bit of rock. Cows in the middle of the road. Visited Jonno’s house where we all fell in love with his mum.

     

There’s so much more to say but I’m even freaking myself out with how long this post is.

What you can take from this is that you should go to the Great Ocean Road. And I’ll come with you (weather permitting). Because it’s awesome.

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