Off we headed then towards Port Fairy and to see the Great Otway Coast line with all its lookouts and what not. The first of these stops was the Gibson steps. Not really sure who Gibson was, or what he did other than maybe making some steps, but either way there was a staircase running down to the beach stuck to a cliff which was about 70 foot high. Down on the beach you get a real sense of what it might feel like to have been washed up on these shores… especially before old Gibson had made them steps. The coast line is well known for its ship wrecks, in fact there are hundreds of them hidden under the sea just off the beaches. Down on the beach at Gibsons steps looking up at that cliff face you could only feel scared and alone and sure to die if you had been washed up there. From down there you can also see one or two of the Twelve Apostle columns or towers or whatever they are. The next stop then, logically was the rest of them. To be honest, and I don't know why, they had been built up in our minds to be a lot more impressive than they were. Maybe it was the weather not being right, but I will say this, they are no Cliffs of Moher!!!! That said, they are definitely amazing looking, and you can see most of them from the few viewing platforms that are built at the top of the cliffs. The rest of them are either hiding behind bigger ones or hiding behind cliffs and things, so of course the offer expensive helicopter "Flightseeing" tours to see them. On we went by car to the next set of features. I may get the order wrong from here but I will go into detail of each after wards. There is Loch Ard Gorge, London Bridge, Thunder Bay, the Arch, and one or two more which I have forgotten and I don't have written anywhere handy (its in the car and Regina won't go out and get it)

Loch Ard Gorge was my favourite. A ship, whose name I forget, crashed against the rocks just outside the opening to the gorge. Only two people washed up on the beach, an Irish girl and an English fella. If you imagine the gorge as being a natural port with a very small entrance and very high walls. There is basically two big arms of cliffs reaching out in the sea and forming a small pool inside, they washed up in there with cliffs all around them and inside this natural gorge port thing. Looking at the pictures after wards I am not sure that anyone who hasn't been there would be able to visualize it, unless all gorges look the same and you have seen one of the others. The one think I know for sure is it got a lot more gorges when Regina stepped down into it. We went down on the newly made steps to the beach, and you can look out through the gap in the cliffs to the sea, where the two would have washed in. It was pretty rough out there, and since I assume they didn't crash in the kind of weather we had that day, it would have been a scary prospect for getting in on that day. One of the sign posts mentioned Gibson helping them out too, maybe he built the steps afterwards. They also mentioned that the two of them recovered on the beach with a bottle of whiskey…. I wonder who it belonged to?!?! Anyway, we did a few little walks around that area for about an hour or so, where we also saw Thunder Bay, perhaps an ironic name as it was fairly quiet. We also saw a few more arches, and the Razorback cliff. The Razorback cliff was mad. A thin strip of cliff which had broken away from the rest of the land, couldn't have been more than a few meters wide but was about fifty metres long, and used to be much longer apparently. At the top the wind and spray from the sea had eroded the rock into a razor back, hence the name, and at the bottom the waves were slowly smashing away at the rock from beneath. I hope the pictures of that will be more obvious than Loch Ard.

I think we stopped in the town of Port Campbell next as it was lunch time and I was hungry. We had fish and chips down by the beach, twas grand out!!! Then on we went again to London Bridge, which as the name suggests was a bridge formation that had partially fallen down. Now it was just an arch really, but out to sea. You can see this pretty easily from the photos. The Arch was an arch, nothing spectacular about that. Last stop then I think was the Bay of Martyrs where you can look out at the Bay of Islands. I think we should probably have stopped at the Bay of Islands itself but we didn't, so we had a nice long range view of the Bay of Islands instead, but they were cool still. Hundreds of little islands all dotted just off the coast in the hazy distance.

There was one more stop, we saw a sign near Port Fairy for a whale nursery, so off we went on a detour. We got there only to realize, as much as we had expected, that we were too early and calving season for whales wasn't for a couple of months yet. Oh well, on we went again to Port Fairy. The Great Ocean Road had ended well before Port Fairy, and the roads got kind of straight and boring after wards. There was probably more things to see and do along the way, one thing we did miss was Wreck Beach and we planned to try stop there on the way back instead. There is also a Tree Fly Top thing, where you can walk along a walkway thing up in the canopy of a rainforest, we skipped that as it was quite expensive, surprise surprise. The initial plan was to spend two nights in Port Fairy and then decide what to do from there, we were dropping the car back in Melbourne on the Sunday after, this was a Monday. Not sure that is important though, so no more waffling for the sake of it.

So, the Great Ocean Road had been done, essentially. The word great gets tossed around a lot these days and in that sense I guess you could say it is pretty great. If like me however you think that word should really only apply to genuine greatness (no examples provided), then it wasn't really great. It was good though, and I love coastlines like that….. I might try watch that BBC tv show called Coast when I get home, even though it's the British coast and not Australian.I am glad in one respect that the floods sent us down this way instead of up the East coast, of course not knowing what that would have been like makes it easier to say that doesn't it. Besides, nobody really wants to visit somewhere the size of Europe only weeks after it had been covered in water, we will both never forget the smell from our house after it had just a foot and a half of water, I can only imagine what Rockhampton will smell like for a long time yet. Well, time to end this entry to the blog. I will finish this chapter with a few days in Port Fairy, a return visit to Apollo Bay and three days in Melbourne, but we have to go to Melbourne first. Bye for now