G

There are so many places that are famous and that we hadn't heard of until they were under our noses. One of them is the Great Ocean Road. It was reputed to be a beautiful drive and that is why we'd taken the long way to Adelaide: to see it. Before 1919 there was no coastal road in this part of Victoria. What travel there was, done by a population orders of magnitude smaller than todays, was by boat or inland 20-30 kilometers to the nearest road. That changed because there was a need for the road and there was a reason to build it: to give work to jobless returning Diggers, the World War I Doughboys of Australia. An hour after our first sighting of the ocean we came to the official entrance to the Great Ocean Road: A giant wooden gate,resembling in some ways a modest Japanese Tori gate, that spans the highway and that is dedicated to the hard work of the builders

After Torquay, and after the Tori Gate, we went on to Lorne and turned inland. Out camping guide told us there was a campground up in the hills and we found it easily. Compared to the places we'd camped on our trip Sydney-Melbourne the Big Hill Campground was rather plain and dull, but it had two great attributes: it was fly free and it was people free! We had about ten acres of a man-made meadow to ourselves and slept a peaceful night in out tent. (Or at least we did until just before dark when one of the ubiquitous Wicked Camper vans showed up. But they came so late and were so far away it was as if they weren't there.)

The next day we went on to Lorne and then Otway National Park and stopped early at the Bimbi Campground. On the way in to Otway NP we saw some cars stopped and learned they were watching koalas in a tree. Without them we'd never have discovered these animals ourselves — just as in South Africa we could never find lions or other big cats without the clue of stopped humans. Bimbi advertises itself as — and it certainly was. Three trees near our tent had clearly visible koalas in them. Although normally nocturnal, these residents were very active — we could see them chewing away on ucalyptus leaves. One even climbed down from its tree and walked majestically to another. The next morning before leaving Bimbi we made a two-hour excursion to Station Beach. A beautiful coastline that we would like to explore more sometime.

We left to see what everybody talks about: the sea pillars. Or that is at least the name we have adopted, since we can think of none better to describe the Twelve Apostles, Loch Ard Gorge, the Arch, and another half dozen groups of fingers of rock that were once part of the coastal cliffs but now stand isolated at distances that vary from less than 100 meters to 500 or more and that vary in size from too small for a helicopter to land to big enough for an estate. As we arrived at the Twelve Apostles a light drizzle turned into a major downpour. We and another hundred tourists, largely made up of three bus loads of Chinese, braved the storm and went out to look. Was it a Heathcliffe moment? Well, not quite. We were there long enough for the storm to abate and for us to get a good look. So it is from experiece, not through drawing a hasty conclusion, that we say while super impressive, we liked Loch Ard Gorge (named after a ship that sank there) more and wonder why all the publicity is given to the Twelve apostles.

We spent that night at a camp ground outside . We made a reservation by phone. It would be better to say that we arranged that the attendant was there, since otherwise the place was deserted. He, the attendant, about 25 years old, was axious to tell us his story: he'd had a motor cycle accident and came back from the dead. Initially he couldn't talk and now, after much therapy could speak with hesitation. Most interesing was his command of words: most would come to him, but not numbers: to say, for example, six, he had to say "one-two-three-four-five-six". After Kilkakory we turned inland and went north to the Grampians, passing through a series of towns that reminded us of our gold-rush ones, Rushworth and Maldon. Here they were named Koroit, XX, and Dunkeld. They'd been founded when a living could be made in the countryside by farming. Now many have moved away to the cities, leaving behind semi-frozen villages and towns.

Title