Melbourne: Great Ocean Road

So we are going back in time a bit here. School seemed to catch up with us and we forgot about the blog. After O Week, UNSW has "Week 0" which is supposed to be another prep week with a bunch of seminars on how to write essays and cope with stress and incredibly boring and useless things. So, instead of attending the seminars (which were NOT required), we decided to take advantage of the time off and jet down to Melbourne for 5 days. We left Sunday March 1st (yes, we are going way back in time), and came back Thursday March 5th.

On Tuesday we did a 12 hour tour of the Great Ocean Road, which is the coastal road that goes down South and to the West of Melbourne. We got picked up downtown on our super cool bus (which we have now seen everywhere in Australia) and started out on the tour. It took about an hour to get outside of Melbourne until we started to hit all the surf towns where Rip Curl and Billabong started. The tour involved a lot of driving, as the main goal was to see a sunset at the Tweleve Apostles. We stopped at various points along the way though.

The first stop was to see some kangaroos hopping in the wild. This was our first kangaroo spotting since we have been here, and even though they were far away we were very excited. The next couple stops were some scenic lookouts at high points along the drive. The views were absolutely beautiful and I've never seen so many nice shades of blue in the water. The weather was a little weird though, with gusting winds and rain at points. It made travelling at high speeds along cliffs in a little rickety bus a little worrying at times, but we made it alive!

From one of the beautiful lookout points along the coast.

The second major stop was to see some koalas in the wild. Again, our first real koala sightings, so we were on the lookout as soon as we got to the park. We finally spotted some koalas and got out of the bus to take some pictures. They are incredibly lazy animals, and all but 1 of them we saw were sound asleep. One did manage to wake up as we were looking at it, gave us some glares, yawned and then went back to sleeping.

The one koala that was awake and gave us a yawn!

The third stop along the way was the Loch Ard Gorge, a gorge where a ship crashed in 1878. There were only two survivors of the 51 passenger boat who climbed up the large cliffs to get rescued. We walked around the Gorge for awhile, taking some more beautiful shots. Before we went down into the Gorge though we had our first spotting of some of the 12 Apostles and other rock formations just off the coast, which we would be watching the sunset at later in the evening. However, because of the crappy weather, we didn't get to see much of a sunset from the 12 Apostles, but as we were leaving the Gorge the sun was poking through the clouds and we got to see a bit of a sunset.

The island archway, near Loch Ard Gorge.
Beautiful sunset over the Gorge.

We finally made it to the 12 Apostles (there are only 11 left now) just in time to see the sun disappear behind the massive clouds. The sights were still beautiful though and a nice end to the long day before our 3 hour bus ride back to Melbourne.

A couple of the Twelve Apostles