Great Ocean Road 25th - 30th October 2010

Day one of Road trip shall be known as completely unorganised chaos day.

My cold had kicked in with full force and I was so spaced out I could barely communicate. Selena & I have spent so much time together now that we've thankfully developed our own language which involves grunts, mumbles, sniffs, abbreviated words, made up words, body gestures, facial expressions and mind reading. We quite often answer a question without the other even asking it and this thankfully helped me communicate with the outside world on this day.

We spent the morning catching up with emails, booking hostels and other travel maintenance kind things and then set off to the Wicked van hire place. We got the train to West Footscray, hahaha (no not the one 5 minutes from my house, it's actually a place in Melbourne too), and then in my cloudy haze I got directions off a workman who told me where the bus stop was. He was obviously having a laugh as the bus stop was nowhere to be seen and we decided to walk it instead. OMG - what a stupid, stupid, stupid idea! Over 2km later with 18kg back packs and god only knows how heavy our stuffed to the brim day packs are we arrived at the rental place. Our beaten up old van that was spray painted with 'Living the Dream, on the run from students loans & taxes' (although more like credit card bill) was sitting in the car park - couldn't have said better myself! We picked up our van called Tiki Tuk, drove out of the hire place and realised that we didn't even have so much as a map, and didn't have a clue where we were going other than (everyone point forward now and say) 'to the Great Ocean Road'.Best stop off and pick up some supplies and a map me thinks. We brought an obscene amount of munchies, a map and a triple CD for the car and set off towards Torquay (oh my god it's just like being at home with all these names - nice to know where all the original convicts came from at least hahaha).We got there pretty quickly and decided to carry on towards Lorne. We found a camp site full of bikers who even though we tried to avoid, turned out to be very helpful and polite and even called the out of office number for us. I think they took pity on Selena as I was walking around like a Zombie and was so spaced out I tried to open the van with the key to the toilet block! After we realised what I was doing and Selena regained her composure from laughing hysterically at me, we decided we couldn't be bothered to cook as we were so knackered and we ended up eating anything that didn't require cooking which was a random concoction of a Chicken, kitkat Cookies & Cream Chunky, tuna and cheese on crackers and crisps.

Day two - the 12 Apostles!

The next day I was feeling slightly more with it and dare I say starting to feel slightly more human as I had finally had a good nights sleep, which was very much needed after 6 nights of hardly any sleep.

Today we drove along a stretch of road along the bottom of Australia called the Great Ocean Road and what a wicked day we had. :) Our first stop was a waterfall signposted at the side of the road, and so we pulled over and went for a walk to find them. It actually reminded me of the Waterfall on Peter Andre's Mysterious Girl song. After that we headed back along the Great Ocean Road towards Adelaide and also towards the 12 Apostles.

After a couple of hours we were half way from where we started and the Apostles and we decided to stop off for some lunch. We went into a gorgeous road side cafe and ordered a chicken schnitzel burger as we were both curious what it was. It's simply chicken breadcrumbs, but it was absolutely gorgeous. :) I got chatting to the woman that worked there and was pretty much interviewing her on how, where and why they get all their stuff from different suppliers as I've been thinking for a very long time now that I would eventually like to set up a cake and sandwich shop back home one day.We also got some cakes for some more snacks - gotta keep up the strength on these long drives and set off towards the 12 Apostles.

We eventually got there and walked over to the viewing areas. The views of the Apostles was absolutely breath taking! There are lots of different vantage points and we walked around here for a couple of hours just staring at them. They are absolutely spectacular. There were originally 12 of them, but one fell down about 3 years ago and some are obscured by the winding cliff edges along the coastline.

Once we had taken in the views and pinched ourselves to realise we were actually here, on a road trip driving along the Great Ocean Road and standing in front of the 12 Apostles, we carried on driving along the coastline until we Reached London Bridge.

This was originally a giant arch reaching from the main land to a rock formation just off the coast, and the 'London Bridge' arch fell down in 1990 (can you believe that was 20 years ago?!) I don't know how true what I'm about to say is as I overheard it from a tour guide and you know how they make stuff up for a more interesting tale to tell. Apparently it collapsed mid day and it was a miracle no-one was hurt or injured. There was also a large group of school children on a school trip about to cross it when it collapsed in front of them. Thankfully there was no-one on the arch when it collapsed but there were 2 people now stranded on top of what had no become a island. One of the school teachers jumped in his car and drove to the local Police Station. When he was telling them that London Bridge had fallen down they naturally thought he was joking and needed some kind of medical attention, but they finally sent a car out to the location and the rescue effort then began. The biggest problem was that there was a huge sailing event where Yachts race around the coastline from Sydney and there big storm. Because of this all of the helicopters were on existing rescue missions rescuing sailors from their boats and bringing them to shore, and as the area is so remote they had to wait 7 hours for another helicopter to be flown over to pick them up off the rock and bring them back to the mainland.

Even more amazingly, (and again I'll say apparently cos this is so bizarre I really don't know if it could be true) hearing of the breaking news story channel 7 news sent a 3 seater helicopter, loaded with a Pilot, Cameraman and Reporter to land on the rock and get an interview with the couple. The couple realising they had not come to rescue them refused to give them the interview and even though the news crew were there quite some time trying to convince them to give a report, they eventually took off leaving the poor couple still stranded on the rock! I'll have to You Tube that cos that would be absolutely hilarious to watch!

All day we'd had loads of cars sitting right up our ass the whole way along the road and it was here we learnt why. A woman came up to us and asked us how it was to drive and that they'd been following us for ages driving really close trying to get a pic of the back of it. Ahhhhh, yes that explains it.

Day three

This was bit of a random day and we did A LOT of driving. We eventually left Port Fairy in the morning (it took us over half an hour to escape the town as we couldn't find the way out!) and we set off towards Adelaide.

There wasn't a lot to see this day and we drove and drove and drove.

We decided we'd had enough of paying to stay on a camp site and decided to just rock up somewhere at the side of the road. Well with my overactive imagination convincing the pair of us that we were being stalked by truck driving serial killers who were going to come back and get us in the middle of the night, and the swarm of Mosquitoes that were circling outside, there was no surprising we didn't venture outside the van! We rocked up there at 6pm and it was a very long night. To pass the time I started writing a running commentary:

Dinner, night 3

Firstly, I'll try and write this without passing out, the reason I say this is because Selena is having some erm I'm going to be very polite here and call it a flatulence problems (which she has very frequently, seriously I've never known a digestive system like it!) and is letting out some right corkers. The biggest problem is that we're hiding out in our camper and cannot go outside or open the windows due to the amount of flies and mosquitoes. Thankfully we have one window with a mosquito net (that is covered in giant mossies) but is not letting in any breeze. I have suggested she aims her bum at this window and takes a few of the feckers out! Hahaha.

We decided to make a cup of tea and within 2 or 3 mintues of being eaten alive by giant Mosquitoes we put everything back in the van and instead threw the contents of our snacks on top of the 'kitchen side' (which is a tiny piece of kitchen side in the back of the van) and dived into the camper. We then went on a killing mission to make sure we got all of the little b******s before deciding what to eat for dinner. Ohhh decisions, decisions. Let's start with the pack of family biscuits, 30 Assorted Creams - 5 of your favourites! We both started sampling the biscuits and decided on an anti clockwise movement and gave our opinions of each biscuit before starting the next round. Here are our results.

Also whilst we love to be dunking in tea, we're drinking Pepsi Max so we don't have to stand outside and get bitten to death.

All biscuits in this pack are 'an incredibly delicious biscuits filled with (different flavoured) cream'. Surely the marketing team could have come up with a better descriptive phrase for each of the biscuits?

Orange Slice

Biscuit of rich tea consistency (a little bit thicker), Selena say the filling tastes like a cream version of an orange ice gem.

Notes - firstly it appears you should be able to break them in half, however, the lines are not married up on each side, making it a very messy job. = FAIL

Delta Cream

Is a wanna be orio, however it fails miserably.Not a lot to say on this other than the creams doesn't taste of anything and the biscuit doesn't taste of chocolate. = TASTELESS FAIL

Kingston

Is the nicest looking biscuit in the pack.However, it is a confused biscuit and doesn't know what it wants to be.

The biscuits look like a mini hobnob, however they are flavoured with coconut and sugar.The chocolate flavouring in quite nice. = CONFUSED FAIL

Shortbread Cream

They would never get away with calling this a 'shortbread' back home. The biscuit is bit shortbread but I don't think even so much as a k*** of butter has been used. It has a very nice soft consistency, however the cream has a slight taste of orange instead of Vanilla (and yes this happened throughout all of these biscuits within the pack). = THAT'S NOT SHORTBREAD FAIL

Monte Carlo

Last but not least. This biscuit is a jammy dodger wannabe. It's not a bad biscuit if you scrape out the cream, but without the cream and the jam it just tastes a bit dirty. Definitely the weirdest biscuit in the pack. = WANNABE FAIL

To conclude Selena's favourite is the Shortbread Cream and mine is the Orange Cream. However, these biscuits in no way shape or form compare to the biscuits we have at home. I hope you've enjoyed this live time report of our dinner, and thankfully it has managed to kill a whole 20 minutes. It's now 7pm and we need to find a way to entertain ourselves for the rest of the evening without leaving the van.

We've now been laying here for nearly an hour tormenting the scary mosquitoes on the window net. This is just how bored we've become, we've actually been having races with them to see who can attract them the quickest by holding their finger by the netting and then we were trying to trick them and put our finger nails on the mesh - OMG they went mental! Now there is absolutely no way I'm going outside. I'd need a blood transfusion within 5 minutes with these hungry fellows.

Now I'm going to give you an insight into a very big dilemma that we had. We both needed to go for a wee and we couldn't go outside due to the swarm of mosquitoes or the risk of serial killer truckers. The solution we came up with will remain between ourselves and that van, but we again nearly died laughing. If this time has taught me anything it is that under no circumstances should I ever be allowed to bored again!

Day Four

I'm going to completely cheat here and say that these will be written up from the note form that they're currently in and posted another day. :) Sorry peeps, but I have things to see and this is taking forever!

Xx.