Oh right, the Great Ocean Road.
Feel free to look through my Photos! on facebook. Most of the pictures are from the Great Ocean road but I did take a few in Melbourne. They don't really do the trip justice.
So I had the job of driving through Melbourne, and after we got out of the city we drove for another hour until we got to this town called Geelong and from there we got on the Great Ocean Road. If you look at it on a map, you can see that for the most part the road runs right along the coast for almost the entire way, with about 10 miles of road running inland (everything is in kilometers and liters here, but I still haven't gotten used to using them yet). It's a pretty unbelievable drive, and if anyone is everyone in Australia I would absolutely recommend it. Since it's such a touristy spot there's actually signs along the way that say "Drive on the left side of the road in Australia". I was actually in the backseat for the entire length of the Great Ocean Road, mostly because the roads were so curvy and basically run right next to cliffs the whole way and that makes me super anxious. Yeah laugh it up.
So the forecast for the weekend said the weather in Melbourne was supposed to be sunny every single day, but when we got through Melbourne all we had were cloudy skies, and while the drive was still awesome, it wasn't as nice as we were all hoping it was going to be. The road passes through some pretty cool towns along the way, but for the most part its just scenic coast and beaches, with a lot of scenic lookouts to stop at along the way. One of my favorite parts of the drive was that even when we weren't directly on the coast, the land around us was absolutely amazing. Mostly farms to be honest but nothing like the flat expanses we have back home.
Our goal was to make it as far down the road as London Bridge, which is this really cool rock structure that looks like a bridge and used to be connected to the mainland, but according to Adam (one of the guys I traveled with) it fell a few years ago and actually stranded a few people out on it, so now it's not connected. Around 4pm we stopped to get gas at the information area for the Twelve Apostles, which are these really amazing rock structures that used to be connected to the mainland millions of years ago, but now just stand straight out of the water. The clouds had been moving all day and miraculously with our five minute drive down to the actual site of the Apostles, the clouds parted completely and we were able to take the view in as the sun was setting. I wish it was easier to describe emotions and feelings in blog form, and the pictures don't do the area we were in justice, but it was absolutely amazing.
Since we wanted to see London Bridge before the sun fully set, we got back in the car and drove about half an hour down the road to stop at the London Bridge site. All the rock structures are pretty similar, but each one is as cool as the last. Most of the viewing areas are a couple hundred feet off the ground, but another area that we went to called Loch and Gorge was the site of a shipwreck in the 1800s I think. We couldn't see the wreck from above the water, but the coolest part was that there were actually stairs that led down to the beach, hence the pictures in my album that are mostly dark ones of us on the beach. We actually think we found an aboriginal carving in one of the rocks but we're not completely sure (aboriginal are native Australians, basically native Americans but prosecuted worse than they were in the U.S.). Since we didn't want to attempt to drive the van down the road at night, we decided to camp out in the parking lot and get up early to drive the road as the sun rose. So we cooked some dinner (we basically survived on sausages, chips and beer the entire weekend) and hung out for a bit, then decided to take a walk down one of the trails that led to a different lookout we hadn't seen yet. One of the best ideas of the entire trip. Since we basically weren't near any major population it was so dark out that for the first part of the night the stars were amazing, and as the moon rose we were able to see everything without flashlights. I can't begin to describe how cool it was to just stand there and take everything in. We were at this rock structure called razorback, and we all kind of just had really great "I can't believe we're actually in Australia" moments, which seem to happen pretty often here. Then we headed back to the van for a few hours of sleep all looking forward to the drive, albeit the few hours of sleep we were about to get.
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