12361

Australia: Day 20: Great Ocean Road: Day 2

Since Stella and Kristina were still sleeping in the morning, Bruno and me decided to go to a quick hike in the forest. A piece of our track was also a part of the Great Ocean Walk, that stretches 104 kilometres from Apollo Bay to Glenample Homestead, located near The Twelve Apostles.

Camping in Blanket Bay

View to our camp-site from the forest

Sunrise

Our koala successfully guarded our tents through the night and now it was a good time for his short daily nap.

Cape Otway Lighthouse is the oldest surviving lighthouse in mainland Australia. Since there was a quite high fee to enter the area, we skipped that.

Two bears

Castle Cove near Glenaire

Otway Fly Tree Top Walk (pdf brochure) was also too expensive for our pockets, so we checked some dinosaurs. On the photo, Thick Headed Lizard (Pachycephalosaurus).

 

Our next stop were Triplet Falls (fed from Young's Creek), located in the Great Otway National park, on a an hour round trip hiking track.

 First sightseeing stopoff in Port Campbell National Park for travellers heading West along the Great Ocean Road.

Descent on 86 Gibson Steps to the coast.

The two offshore stacks, locally known as Gog and Magog are the first two rocks in the ocean and don't belong to the 12 Apostles.

Entering Twelve Apostles area

 

The Twelve Apostles is a collection of limestone stacks. The apostles were formed by erosion: the harsh weather conditions from the Southern Ocean gradually eroded the soft limestone to form caves in the cliffs, which then became arches, which in turn collapsed; leaving rock stacks up to 45 metres high. The site was known as the Sow and Piglets until 1922 (Muttonbird Island, near Loch Ard Gorge, was the Sow, and the smaller rock stacks were the Piglets); after which it was renamed to The Apostles for tourism purposes. The formation eventually became known as the Twelve Apostles, despite only ever having nine stacks.

Loch Ard Gorge, named after the clipper ship Loch Ard, which ran aground on nearby Muttonbird Island on 1 June 1878 approaching the end of a three-month journey from England to Melbourne. Of the fifty-four passengers and crew, only two survived: Tom Pearce, at 15 years of age, a ship's apprentice, and Eva Carmichael, an Irishwoman immigrating with her family, at 17 years of age.

A visible example of the process of erosion in action.

The arch of the Island Archway collapsed in June 2009.

 

A cave at the end of the Gorge

Swimming in a Loch Ard Gorge

Stella and Kristina on the lookout

 

Cemetery. Only four bodies were recovered from the accident that took 52 lives.

Our car, VW Golf, was doing its job perfectly.

Still not finished with the rocks for today. We checked the London Arch, known as London Bridge before the collapse in 1990. 

Kristina, Bruno, Stella, me and London Arch

 

Free grill sites in many places in Victoria also attracted us and we had a nice barbecue with Bruno as a master chef near Lake Pertobe in Warrnambool. After the dinner we moved a little bit outside of the city and camped on a field near the road.

Second day on Great Ocean Road with Stella, Kristina and Bruno. Blanket Bay Campground - Cape Otway - Triplet Falls - Twelve Apostles - Warrnambool.