Road trip - The road to Melbourne

We spontaneously decided that it would be good to go in a helicopter the morning we woke up in Port Campbell; neither of us had been in one and we could have a good look at the remaining apostles.

Our ride...

It was a pretty spectacular experience (and price tag). They are really smooth machines and look fairly easy to fly. When we left the airfield later in the car it took us quite a while to go as far as we had in the chopper in a couple of minutes, so they are deceptively fast too. I thought I would have problems taking photos through the windows, and I did.

Apostles

The GOR at its most iconic

Tourist centre...supposed to look like a cuttle fish or something

So on we went along the GOR, which got prettier as we drove. We drove past vast areas which looked like the playgrounds of rich urbanites with futuristic looking houses lining the sea. Some were even on stilts! Bastard rich people.

Holiday homes of the wealthy Melbournites

Both of us were quite disappointed that we missed the turn off to a ‘tree walk’ in the forest. We arrived in Lorne and the pictures of it in the information centre looked pretty impressive. We learnt, however, that it wasn’t too late to go see a water fall and also play nine holes of golf. The waterfall was shit but the golf course was quite interesting. As usual a triple drop scuppered my round.

Not Victoria Falls...

1st and 10th hole. Par 5. 9 iron second.

We saw an echidna on the steep drive up to the golf course. It wrapped itself up into a tight little spiky ball when we got out of the car to examine it.

So we left Lorne after our game of golf. We thought it would be great to stay at the legendry Bells Beach and so Torquay (closest town to Bells and Jan Juc beaches) was our next stop. We decided that with hindsight we would have stayed at Lorne because we were both pretty unimpressed with Torquay. By the time we got there it was pretty cold and no good for swimming. The cold weather had arrived even when we were in Mount Gambia. We were both incredulous that we needed jerseys when day before we were sweltering in 45 degree heat.

A frigid day at Jan Juc

We soon realised that Torquay was pretty dead. Stephen went in to investigate the only hostel and reported that it was full of old people moping around the kitchen. We decided carry on to Geelong which was also rejected after a few minutes looking around. (Prince Charles went to school there I learned a few days after being there, now I can’t separate the image of the boring old git from the boring city.)

But now, on Wednesday evening, we were driving past Avalon airport (where we would depart from on Saturday) on our way to the capital of Victoria.

Final stretch