The Great Ocean Road and the promise of wide open spaces were calling and not even a heavily sedated jaw from the dentist would stop us from answering that call!

Melbourne traffic was not even a hitch as we headed out of town and onto the road heading west. In our "posh" camper van, home for the next two weeks, we were free to come and go as we wanted! And with the weather promising to be sunny and hot for the next few weeks, it was promising to be an outstanding time on the road and going, once again, where the wind took us! Fantastic!

The Great Ocean Road was built by veterans of WWI as a memorial to fallen comrades in arms. There is very little mention or sign of statues or memorials. But this road is enough of that. If the trenches of WWI were a hell on Earth then this memorial that they built is the complete opposite of that. Here a road snakes along sculptured bays and coves, through lush national parks and mountain ranges, quaint coastal towns and where the wild wind driven surf pounds away at the rugged coastline. Man made hell is nothing compared to heaven spent coastal beauty like this!

The southern Australian coast is home to some of the legendary surf spots that rank as near mystic in the right surf circles. So much so, that they even have a museum of surf at Bells Beach! It is here that the founders of companies like Billabong and Rip Curl had the ideas that have eventually led to companies that every main street shopper is familiar with! You don't need to be a surfer to appreciate the huge, nay colossal potential of the number and variety of breaks that exist along this coastline.

Strictly speaking, the Great Ocean Road starts a fair bit further west of Melbourne and ends just before a town called Warnoombul. But the road really follows the coast closely all the way to Robe, in South Australia before starting to head inland and northwards to Adelaide. It was here on this coast that prodigious settlement occurred way back when immigrants came flooding in. Here are places with names so familiar, that you could almost believe that some weird supernatural act has taken place. Here are names from the maps of Southern England that dominate the topographical landscape. Names like Richmond, Kingston, Portland and even Peterborough - Ing's hometown! How could we not get a photo of that?!

Not to be outdone, even London Bridge gets a mention! On this coast, made famous by the 12 Apostles (not Christ's disciples obviously, but the sea eroded sea stacks with the same name!), the sea continually erodes the soft rock that makes up this coastline. The sea first makes caves into the coastline, the cave is extended until it makes an arch. The sea continues to erode away until the overhanging rock cannot bear its own weight and then it collapses onto itself to form an island. The island is further eroded until it is a sea stack and then, it too falls down into a pile of rocks. This process takes hundreds, if not thousands of years to complete.

However, one couple were very fortunate not long ago. London Bridge was a peninsula of coastline with two symmetrical arches underneath. This couple made the usual trip to the end of the peninsula for the outstanding scenic shoots to be had. They thought nothing of the crossing over until a few minutes later, one of the arched collapsed with a giant crash into the sea creating an island! Only a helicopter could save them! A few minutes earlier and London Bridge might have claimed a few victims in amongst the falling rocks!

Here on the Road, there are there legends galore. One involves an escaped convict called William Huxley who escaped and made a cave home. But lack of survival abilities meant that he suffered terribly, but was rescued by a local Aboriginal tribe. He stayed with this tribe for a total of 37 years! After which he moved back to "civilisation" and because of his unique skills as a white tribesman, he was pardoned and appointed a high ranking police office for the district!

Another is the sad tale of the ship the Loch Ard. Long before lighthouses marked the treacherous coast, ships floundered a-plenty on these wild shores. With so many shipwrecks along this stretch of coast, it earned its name of the Shipwreck Coast. What was so tragic about these wrecks was that the ship was only a day or so away from reaching its destination having sailed for three and a half months from Europe around the notorious Cape of Good Hope! This part of the coast is not known as the Shipwreck Coast for nothing!

The Loch Ard was taking the dangerous inside tack between Kings Island and the mainland to get to Melbourne when darkness and heavy weather descended on the ship. The captain and crew were highly experienced, having made the trip numerous times before. That night, the fee paying passengers had a party to celebrate their imminent safe arrival the next day.

Unfortunately, the day dawned with the ship floundering on the rocks literally a stone's throw from where you stand. With the weather cold, grey, wet and heavy and the surf pounding the cliffs below, it was not hard to imagine the death of a ship and her crew and passengers dragged under by the crashing surf. The only survivors were a young officer and an 18 year old lady.

Since then, the gorge is known as the Loch Ard Gorge as a memorial to those that came so close to a new home. Their bodies were recovered and buried on the shore close to where the vessel came to grief. With the shriek of seagulls, the never ceasing rumble of the sea and the whistle of the cold, icy Antarctic wind lends a very sober air to this naturally made gorge, now memorial.

Mainland Australia, besides being incredibly vast, is heartachingly beautiful. Everywhere you look, the landscape is stunning. Looking out over the land, you have a real sense of vast, wide open spaces that contain places of incredible beauty and stunning scenery. But these places also contain inhabitants that are incredibly irritating(not the native Aussies!) and fanatically determined to do what nature intended them to do. It was these b******s (and I use this word deliberately) that ensure that the world eventually thought that a wide brimmed hat with a bunch of corks hanging down was a tourist gimmick! Have you ever heard of the Great Australian Wave? Or the Great Australian Salute. It was these b*****s that brought them out.

It is estimated that there are 120 trillion flies in Australia (Ed: that's around 60 billion per Aussie, although the tourists seem to get the brunt of them!) And a large swathe of them want to land on your face and suck whatever moisture they can from whatever place they can! Hence, the great wave or salute was a way of ridding yourself of them! But you can only looked ridiculous for so long before you tire and they win! Corks on hats goes a long way to solving those problems. But they give you a black eye if you are not careful! But Ing laughed when I suggested we invest in our F.O.F. nets (you can imagine was that stands for?!). (Ed: I admit I ate humble pie (in large portions) for the next week!)

As beekeepers have net gauze to keep bees from their faces, so we had our nets! They were lifesavers. Our campervan, nicknamed the Apollo Bomber, was like a giant magnetic to these flies. As soon as you had literally come to a stop, a swarm had descended on the Bomber! And any open window was invaded in the inevitable search for moisture. Most of which is easily accessible in your eyes!

On a short walk, I counted 35 flies resting on Ing's back (no, it wasn't because she was smelly or anything like that!), but with one of these nets on, flies could just f"*k off! And this was the coast! What was the Outback going to be like then?! Blimey!