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Apollo Bay Holiday Park, Apollo Bay, Victoria, Australia.  885km

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Today we saw koalas in the wild for the first time! We were driving on the great ocean road and we saw a few people standing by the side of the road. Suddenly Paola spotted a koala hanging from a branch right over the road. I parked the car and ran to get some pictures. In the meantime Paola tried to wake the children who had all fallen asleep. Shir was the only one that wanted to come outside. The little koala was busy grabbing and chewing eucalyptus leaves, oblivious to the roadside commotion it had caused. When we looked around us we spotted several more koalas in the trees nearby, but this one was right smack in our face. Lovely.

I’ll backtrack a bit now. We left greater Melbourne yesterday towards noon, waking up late due to the new daylight saving time (one hour ahead) and a general fatigue of the kids. We drove to Geelong, the major Melbourne suburb and a nice city in its own. The kids enjoyed a nice ride on a 100year old carousel. We were the only ones there on a Monday noon, and the attendant turned the carousel on just for us. Outside it was a windy and cool day so we did not spend too much time on the portside walk. After a crummy lunch in a local restaurant we headed towards the Great Ocean Road.

We passed by Torquay, which officially initiates the several 100km Great Ocean Road, and is also the birthplace of Rip Curl, a surfboard and fashion company. We didn’t get to see too much ocean before stopping for the night at Anglesea, the next little town along the way. We stayed at a huge but mostly empty campground on the waterfront, but our site was so far away that we did not see the ocean. We did see the jumping pillow and the playground, and that’s where we spent most of the windy afternoon.

Today was a bit sunnier and warmer but still windy. We left the campground and headed for the local golf course where we were told a mob of kangaroos usually hangs out. Our bad luck, we didn’t see any. We did finally get to see nice ocean stretches that reminded us of highway 1 in California but without the redwoods and pine trees. The ocean water here seems more turquoise than the California deep blue.

Our first stop was at Aireys Inlet where we took a short stroll along the cliffs to the lighthouse and back. We didn’t take the stroller as we want to get the girls walking more and more independently. Unfortunately, Orr and Shir had their own thoughts on the matter and 100 meters to the RV would not budge anymore. They just sat on the ground crying. Orr stopped after a few minutes and started walking again. Shir sat for another 20 minutes crying until I finally coerced her into walking.

We drove on to Lorne where we took an inner road into the Erskine Falls. They are a part of a large national park in this area is called Great Otway. The falls were very impressive, and we were equally impressed with Shir and Orr walking down all 250 stairs to the viewing platform. They also walked the first 107 steps back up. And then all hell broke loose. In the end we had to carry them up most of the way back to the RV.

We continued driving along the ocean road and a few minutes of rain produced a beautiful rainbow over the cliffs and the water that Paola was able to catch with the camera. And then a few minutes later we came upon the koalas. Or as Shir calls them “Kolalas”.

We continued driving another 30 minutes to Apollo Bay where we are camped for the night. Tomorrow we will continue to explore the area.

Good night,

-Hemi

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 5:15 am and is filed under Australia, Big Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.