Great Ocean Road - (Melbourne to Adelaide) - Day 1

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We had an early start today. Pick up time was at 06:30 am, you can imagine the happiness of my 8 room mates when my alarm went off at 05:30 am

Let's just say I made a swift move towards the exit and left the room before anyone had the time to make their feelings known to me.

And in the early hours of the morning with an empty stomach begging to be fed, we started our 3rd tour in Australia, the Great Ocean Road, Melbourne to Adelaide. Just a little bit of history about this tour.
After the first world war, the goverment decided to create this road to honor the soldiers dead in combat and donated many of the adjacent lands to their widows or families as a way to compensate them for the loss of their husbands/children. This road goes all along the coast and it's quite picturesc, on the negative side it is also very popular so in most places you have to queue up to take your pictures.

After spending a week in the unspoiled territory of Tasmania all these touristic places kinda put you off a bit...you were used to wander around and being the only person taking pictures so you could take your time...now it's more like, quick!, take it! that there are people queueing up!

We started by going to Torquay, which is surfer's paradise and the birth place of the most important brands in surfing gear. There are some great outlets there if you are into surfing.


From there we went to the local beach Bell's beach which apparently is very good for surfing and this is not because of the big waves it doesn't have, but because of the speed of the rip on the waves... or so I've been told. :-)

There were quite a lot of people surfing, not sure if that's the norm or wheather today it was a good day.

After that we went to the beginning of the Great Ocean Road there, there was another beach where we had our first group picture

And second group photo

 

The above picture is what happens when you give the camera to some passing tourist, she probably thought we would be using some kind of microscope in order to see the content of the photo.

The views from the road are quite picturesque

Despite of being a very touristic route it doesn't mean there aren't any animals around.

That is a wild koala! :-) there are lots in this area.

Then we went to visit Hopetoun Falls

Then we stopped at Apollo's bay for lunch and from there we went to the Otway fly treetop walk. I personally got quite disapointed with it, all those plastic dinosaurs along the way and the artificial metal bridges and towers just didn't do it for me but I can understand why some people may like it.

After that we went to se the 12 apostles, the highlight of the day. These are rock formations by the seashore, they've been eroded by time, sea and weather and now they are like 12 small "islands" very close to the coast. We took a few pictures before and after dusk. Despite of having a blue sky all day, by the end of the day there were some clouds which helped to get better pictures, the colours just before the sunset were totally amazing, but judge by yourself.

PHOTOS 12 Apostles

I promise, there is no photoshop involved, the colours are the real colours!



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