Sunday, January 10, 2016

Day 5: The Great Ocean Road

After feeling the heat our first day in Melbourne (literally), we decided to hit the road and explore the scenic Great Ocean Road. It took up pretty much our entire day, so I was going to let the pictures tell most of the experience but now... boo to the guy who stole my phone.

We drove about 3-4 hours south of Melbourne, dodging the bush fires that closed off parts of the road, curving through the hills and rain forest, and popping out on the coast to see our first stop: The Twelve Apostles. This was pretty cool, it's a lovely place where the ocean and time has carved out these stones that are a little separated from the rest of the coast line, Since we did the self-guided tour, I'm not sure what the story is behind the naming of it, so we'll just have to use our imagination. So here's the story: the 12 stone apostles saved stone Jesus who was about to be ruined by the weather phenomenon called Pontius Pilate. They were unsuccessful which is why we only see the 12 Apostles today. However, through his death, stone Jesus was able to save the 12 Apostles which is why they are still standing today. The real story is nowhere near as good as the one I just made up.

Next we went to see the Loch and Gorge along the road--very pretty and picturesque although I have no photos of it. Matt enjoyed that one of the rock formations was called The Razorback. Go Hogs?

After that, it was more driving and following the stunning coastline and rainforests until we made it to Appollo  Bay where we ate kebabs and enjoyed the views before getting back on our way. We had burgers to eat after all! Probably the best burger I've had in a long time. It was a burger that had pulled pork (we all know I'm a sucker for barbecue), barbecue sauce, swiss cheese, and the fixings. Oh so good. We all enjoyed our various burgers immensely, with the exception of Daniel who got the hot hot heat burger and was a little overwhelmed by the spiciness.

Oh, I should also note we learned a lot about how impatient we all are. With so many tourists like ourselves driving around this thing, I'm sure you can imagine there were some slow freaking drivers. And even though I experienced for only the second time ever how bizarre it is to drive on the wrong side of the road, I was not one of them. We started to recognize that not all car brands are created equal--take Nissans for instance, these seemed to have the slowest of the slow drivers. And this one Toyota Delica (I'm still not even sure what type of car this is other than its slow).

For example, we were on one winding road behind a Nissan, and they were quite the bashful bobs (for all our Mothers who may be reading this, we were using the appropriate amount of caution ourselves!). We were behind  them for about 10 km where there wasn't an opportunity to pass on the winding road, but there were small side lanes available at intervals where slow cars could let the faster ones pass. This Nissan, they were a bit dense so they NEVER did the right thing and pause in the slow lane so we could pass them. We tried hand signals, we flashed our lights, but nada. No such luck. It got so frustrating that Brooke suggested we turn them in for littering so they'd get pulled over. This is just one of many silly people we encountered on the road.

Again the few pictures I have from our day :( are below.

We saw the Twelve Apostles! This is what the rock formations behind us are called.

Everyone was pretty scared when I first started driving, it was  the wrong side of the road afterall and we were in the middle of the city with no idea yet how to get out of said city. But I like to think things settled down and I stopped hugging the left curb :)

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