The Great Ocean Road. Truly amazing. It's a shame that a lot of people doing the east coast skip Victoria, because this was definitely one of the highlights of the trip so far.

Another early start (so much for not getting up early for 15 weeks!); we were picked up at 7am by our awesome tour guide. It was a really lovely small group, only 7 of us, and it was so nice not to have specific timings for everything.

Our first stop was Bell's Beach, where we got rained on! Apparently this is the most famous surf beach in Australia. I'd never heard of it, but then you don't need me to tell you that I'm not that way inclined! Couldn't quite imagine the place filled with surfers and spectators, it seemed so quiet and beautiful.

Next up we made our way to Split Point lighthouse...Sooz and I were very excited to learn that this was the lighthouse used in Round the Twist, remember - 'have you ever, ever felt like this?...' awesome!

The Great Ocean Road was constructed by servicemen from WW1 over a period of 15 years (!) and they have this slightly ugly archway and monument as a memorial to those who built it. Must have been pretty scary, seeing as the road skirts the cliffs a lot of the way!

From here we had our first opportunity to see some Australian animals - koalas chilling out at the top of some trees! We saw a few, most of which were asleep but one was munching away on some eucalyptus leaves. Seriously, they are SO cute. I want one. There were also some really beautiful parrot things, I'm not going to pretend I have any idea what they were called, but they were very colourful and pretty!

At this point we reached the main reason for doing this trip: the Twelve Apostles. Not that there are 12 anymore, in fact we were told another one had collapsed a couple of months ago. Such a stunning site though. The rocks just stand alone in the ocean, along the shoreline, and the colours are amazing; layers and layers of slightly varying browns and yellows. The only thing that would have made it better is a slightly bluer sky and less wind!

We saw various other rock formations along the way; the arch, the razorback and London Bridge (where we were told a funny story about how when part of the bridge collapsed a couple were stranded on the other side - turned out they were having an affair and this was how their partners learnt of their infidelity!).

On 6th Oct we left not so sunny Melbourne for a 3 day journey up to Sydney. The bus picked us up at 6.30am, not pleasant. And we were disappointed to learn it was a Rosa (which is a teeny not v comfortable bus!) rather than a nice comfortable coach a la Connections!

We stopped at various little towns, all of which were (in my opinion) slightly hideous, and have only reinforced my desire to NOT live in the middle of nowhere! The journey soon perked up at Wilson's Promontory National Park where we were able to walk in a field with kangaroos all over the place. Amazing creatures, although I'm not sure I want one of those. It was quite exciting to see our first real live kangas though, especially so close up. We also went for a little bush walk to Squeaky Beach, where the sand squeaks. It's got a lot of silica or something in it, which means it's supposed to be able to remove small scratches on a watch face and clean silver jewellery (unless our slightly crazy driver, Bogen, was joking with us - we haven't quite got the hang of Aussie humour yet!) - it didn't work on my poor watch which got damaged on my trip to the pavement in Manhattan!

We drove on to Lakes Entrance where we were staying for the night, but sadly couldn't see anything because it was dark and rainy! Next morning we were up and out early (AGAIN) despite the large quantities of wine drunk the night before, and drove on stopping for a walk in the rainforest. This was cool, but basically the same as the rainforest we walked through on the GOR trip. After this things started to go wrong. We were trying to get to Jindabyne, but snow (yes, snow - I didn't know it snowed here either!) got in the way and caused a road to be closed. Eventually we found a way through and it was really quite strange to be driving along a road through snow covered fields knowing we were in Australia!

That night we were staying at a ski resort in Thredbo (no skiing - the season was over) where we given a pretty disgusting beef curry for dinner and had a pretty uneventful stay with the exception of a fun snow walk. I still can't get over that! SNOW! Thank goodness we'd already been to NZ and had appropriate clothes!

In the morning we went to visit the Snowy Hydro Electric Scheme which was reasonably dull but not quite as bad as I'd expected, then made our way to Canberra.

Canberra is a weird city. It was designed and built all at once, so didn't grow over time like normal cities. And to be honest I didn't like it much. It's all very well having all this symbolism (it's based around a triangle with parliament at the tip, and the parliament building is built into the hill as opposed to on top of it to represent that the politicians aren't better than the people blah blah blah), but I prefer places with some character. All these modern clean lines have me missing nice English cities and towns which seem to have a bit more poetry to them! We were allowed to walk straight into Parliament (with an airport style security check) which was quite interesting, and then went to the national museum.

Back on the road we finally made it to Sydney, with an obligatory stop at the first of many big things on this trip...the Giant Merino Sheep. What a crazy country!

Once in Sydney we all met up at a bar called The Gaff and had a great night to finish our little 3 day tour together - free meals + free drinks = can't go wrong!