The Great Ocean Road: Day 2

Despite sharing our fairly cold room with a couple of Irish backpackers we had a pretty good nights sleep and got up at 9am after about 10 hours sleep. After queuing for a few hours for the shower (considering the other guests were backpackers and thus have no grasp of personal hygiene they seemed to all be well acquainted with the shower) we managed to check out. On the way out we our our first 'Flamin Galah' since being in Australia, and thought this deserved a picture of it's own...

We headed back into Apollo Bay for some breakfast in a little seafront cafe. As we'd grown a little tired of the 6 existing music tracks on my USB drive when we got back to the car we transferred the songs from Cats onto it so we could listen to that as well. I'm glad to say we now both know all of the songs in the album word for word- in fact I don't know why we're bothering to go and watch it next month- we know the storyline like experts and could pretty much re enact the whole thing in the front room should we wish.

By the second day we were starting to get a bit sick of the never ending sun kissed beaches with the mountainous backdrops stretching into the horizon, and were longing for cold and windy Brighton beach. When we hit Port Campbell we stopped for a while to see the 12 Apostles which is, by all accounts, the main reason people to the Great Ocean Road in the first place.

Essentially these are, or at least were, 12 large rocks poking out of the sea in interesting shapes and named appropriately- 'Razor Back', 'Salt and Pepper Shakers' and the 'Question Mark' to name but a few. I say 'were' because originally there were 12 but over the past few years erosion has taken its course and now they are down to 9. They've stuck with the name 12 Apostles though, I suspect because they can't be bothered to change all their stationary, merchandise and marketing material every time one of them falls down.

Anyway, Lucia and I are now very knowledgeable on the 12 Apostles because we took a helicopter ride over them and our pilot was imparting these useless nuggets of information. It was the first time I've ever been in a helicopter and it was fun- I am considering a career change! The picture below was taken from the 'bird'

We then went to grab lunch in Port Campbell, passing 'Bay of Martyrs', 'Bay of Islands' and the formation known as 'London Bridge' (picture on the left) on the way, which was a lovely little costal town with a lot of character but the sort of place you got bored of after a couple of minutes.

Our never ending quest to find a weather forecast in a newspaper continued. All the papers I read could tell me the times that all of the planets were going to rise and fall and what the weather is due to be like that day but nothing beyond that. It also devoted large parts of its forecast to what the weather was like yesterday, which at best is a little pointless because it is usually too late to change your plans at that stage. And anyway, that's not a forecast. It's an observation.

After Port Campbell we went to a hostel in Warnambool which I managed to book last minute at risk of us sleeping rough for the night if not. Lucia was not amused when I told her that we would be sharing a room with up to 8 other backpackers, and even less amused when we turned up and they tried to put us in a room with 16. We decided that it would be better to take a risk with the other hostels, hotels or B&Bs in the town so cancelled our reservation.

We toured around Warnambool for about 30 minutes going into everywhere with a bed, which was either full or way too expensive. We were just about to give up and set up camp in the back of the car when we stumbled across a lovely B&B called Herb's Hus. We spent a couple of hours relaxing, eating the home cooked goodies and watching the rugby (good old Herb had sky sports), before heading out to Breakers which served mediocre and somewhat overpriced food, then going home and dozing in the nicest bed I've ever slept in.