Feature:Victoria trip, Part V: Great Ocean Road
24-25 February 2005

Bell's Beach & Split Rock

After Bell's Beach, we drove along the Great Ocean Road to the next stop, Split Rock Lighthouse. The lighthouses along the shoreline here served a good deal of ocean traffic coming into the port of Melbourne, and there are various shipwrecks along the route that attest to the lighthouses' importance. The waters they light are ocean water, though exactly which body of ocean water is a little unclear. Closer to Melbourne, the waters are most likely Bass Strait, which separates the Australian continent from Tasmania, though farther along the road you could make a case that the Strait had ended and the waters were actually the Great Southern Ocean, which lies between Australia and Anarctica.

Split Rock Lighthouse takes its name from the land feature just below it, the "split" rock jutting out of the water (shown below, with D). It was once a manned station, but today is automated, like so many lighthouses around the world. Around the lighthouse itself, though, there were some short walking trails (like the one in the photo, left) to memorials for the families who used to live and work there.

After Split Rock, we went inland a bit to explore the forests across the road from the beaches. Our tour took us to the Sheoak River and Forest, and our driver deposited us-- three paying clients and two guides-in-training-- at the top of a trailhead, pointed to the signs we were supposed to follow, told us he would pick us up at the other end in two hours, and then got in the van and drove away.

We, in turn, watched him drive away, then headed over to the trailhead, began our bushwalk, and discovered 200 feet later an orange hazard fence and a sign explaining that the Sheoak River trail was closed because of damage that occurred in the heavy storms a few weeks before. Of course, we had no way of contacting the driver, and the two guides-in-training figured that the park was probably just being overcautious and we probably wouldn't encounter anything more serious than some trees down over the path. We all agreed that we were up for some clamboring over trees, should that even be necessary, and off we set.

We were not quite right, as you can see from the photo to the left. A huge wooden bridge had been overturned by the river's flooding, and so, two-thirds of the way into our hike, we had to decide whether to risk crossing on what used to be the bridge's handrails, or to turn back altogether. Again, we all agreed to press on, although we made a note to tell Steve, the driver, not to send groups on this trail until the park service fixed the bridge.

This hike provided our first of various opportunities we had to learn about the trees of Australia, and of Victoria in particular. The "sheoaks" after which the river and forest were named were actually exactly what they sounded like, we were surprised to learn. The oak tree actually comes in two "genders," or in two of whatever passes for genders in plants. The oaks that dominated the forest here were of the "female" kind... "she" oaks. We also started to learn about the many kinds of eucalyptus trees, which are ubiquitous in native Australian forests. Gums, stringy barks (some called "woolly-butts"), peppermints, and ironbarks are different families of eucalypts, and river red gums, blue gums, and mountain ashes are specific types of eucalyptus trees.

Near the end of our hike, we came upon a small waterfall and a shallow cave in the bottom of a valley. The cave was called "Swallow Cave," for the hundreds of small birds that lived there. (In fact, they weren't swallows at all, but we didn't really care.) The shaded valley and the darting birds provided a nice resting spot before the climb uphill to our pick-up point.

Of course, when we got to the pick-up point ten minutes late (after scrambling over the orange hazard netting on that end of the trail), the van was nowhere to be seen. The driver had noticed the signs on this end, and when we didn't show up on schedule, he figured we had turned back, so he drove back up to the trailhead. Fortunately, it was shady there, so we just waited, and eventually all was sorted out.

After the forest, we stopped for a break at a little general store outside the entrance to a campground. D was very disappointed that we hadn't seen many animals the whole time we were hiking by the Sheoak River, and she was particularly disappointed that we hadn't seen any koalas there. As we ate our ice-creams from the general store, though, we noticed a black lump in a tree above the campground office nearby. Our guide(s) confirmed that it was in fact a koala, so of course we had to get a closer look.

The koala in the tree (left) had seated himself for a long day's nap directly above the building that housed the office, so it was very difficult to get a good view. We maneuvered around, pacing around the building, trying to get a better glimpse, while our guides snickered, knowing that we were headed next to a place where we could see as many wild koalas as our hearts desired.

As we reluctantly started to walk away, though, D glanced up and caught sight of a second koala in the same tree (right), directly above the driveway and much closer to the ground. The first one was moving slightly, but this second one was out cold, propped up against the branch and clearly unconcerned about gravity.

Snicker as our guides may, this was our very first sight of mammalian wildlife since we had arrived in Australia, and it was very exciting. (We didn't count the single, extremely brief and extremely distant glimpse of a mob of kangaroos from the train to Canberra.) Our guides were correct-- we were headed next to a place where koala sightings were plentiful. Still, this first sight had its own magic to it.

The place we were headed was a small, privately run wildlife preserve called the Cape Otway Centre for Conservation Ecology. In the middle of the Great Otway Forest, just outside Otway National Park, this swath of natural land houses koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, and assorted other native Australian animals that have been orphaned or injured. Unlike some orphanages that operate like zoos (like Featherdale Wildlife Park, outside Sydney), COCCE strives to keep the animals unpenned and away from human contact as much as possible.

The main building at COCCE is completely self-sustainable and serves as a veterinary clinic, business office, residence for the owner/directors, and six-room bed & breakfast. They do give tours of the grounds for guests of the B&B, and for small groups of others by reservation only. For our tour, we were outfitted with a messenger bag that contained surprisingly useful items for our walk... binoculars, a small notebook, bottled water, a condensed field guide to the trees and birds of Australia, and some "lollies" (candy, in this case, gummi bears) in case we got hungry.

The first animals we saw were a couple of shy kangaroos watching us through the tall grass of the field. They tended to stick together, and once or twice we got to see the whole group hop off somewhere when one of them got spooked (or maybe just bored). Once we left the field to go into the forest, though, we didn't see any more roos...

... but that was okay because we started seeing koalas! At first they were hard to spot, high up in the gum trees and often far from the trail. After the first few, however, we started to get the hang of seeing a dark spot in the V of a branch, then lifting our binoculars to see what it was. A couple of them we even spotted before our guide from COCCE did!

Eventually, it was time to leave the koalas and get settled for dinner and the night. We stayed in a privately-owned campground very near Otway National Park. We were supposed to have a good ol'-fashioned "barbie" (Australian for "BBQ") for dinner, but it was actually a little too wet/rainy/misty to cook outside. So, instead, our guide(s) cooked up a barbie inside for us... a little strange, but okay in the end.

One of the best known sites in Otway National Park is a trail called "Mait's Rest Rainforest Walk," which, we discovered as we drove by, was closed due to damage from the storms a few weeks earlier. After dinner, our head guide decided that the rainforest walk was interesting enough that we should go ahead with our scheduled night hike there, and, since it was a loop path, if we came up against any "real" obstacles, we could just turn around.

In theory, the hike was to see glow-worms-- tiny, odd residents of Australian temperate rainforests that glow like neon green glowsticks after dark. We did get to see glow-worms, and they were pretty cool. We also got to climb inside a giant mountain ash tree whose center had rotted out (photo, above right). Our guide claimed that he had actually camped out inside that tree before... or maybe it was someone that he knew who had slept there...

We hiked on through the rainforest, stopping here and there for an ecology lesson, until we finally came upon the reason that the trail was closed. We should have learned from our bushwalk earlier in the day! It wasn't exactly a bridge turned over... it was more like a whole section of the boardwalk that had been smashed by a huge falling tree, which still blocked the path for a good distance on either side of the walk. We were ready to turn around, but our guides bravely forged a new path to the other side of the tree and its debris.

The next morning, we packed up our things and headed out of the National Park toward the Otway Fly Treetop Walk. On the way, though, we stopped at a quite unexpected destination-- a small grove of extraordinary California sequoias (left). It turns out that around the 1940s or 1950s, the logging industry was looking for trees to import that would be easy to grow and produce good straight wood to be sold off, so they planted a number of "test" groves of different varieties. Among them was this stand of sequoia trees.

Undeniably beautiful as the sequoias were, however, the repercussions of that project have been damaging for Australian ecology. Although the American Southern Pines that won out over the sequoias have indeed supported the logging industry to a point, they are not native to this continent, and so they do not support most of the animal and plant life that is native here. Evidently, they also raise the acidity of the soil, which makes it difficult to reclaim pine farms once they have been logged and replant Australian flora there.

The Otway Fly Treetop Walk was actually the one thing in the advertisements for this tour that most caught our attention. One of only three of its kind (all are in Australia), the walk is designed to give visitors a good view of the surrouning forest while minimizing the impact on the ecosystem. The steel grated walks slope upwards until they are 25 meters above ground, with signs at different levels to point out the differences in eco-communities at different heights. The stairs of the tower climb up to 40 meters above the forest floor, which is just about to the very tops of the trees.

Since we'd spent the day before learning about eucalypt trees and the trees of the temperate rainforest, we were well equipped to check out the trees around the Otway Fly. We saw a number of Myrtle Beeches, which we Americans kept hearing as "Myrtle Beach." The beautiful ferns at the lower level of the forest were much admired by Chad. And, there were a number of Mountain Ashes, which we had already heard much about-- these eucalypts are the world's tallest flowering plant. (We had stood inside one the night before.)

We got to see up close one of the features of some eucalypt trees that we had only been able to see from way down below on the ground. The tree pictured to the left here is dropping its bark, a natural occurrence that gives some kinds of eucalypt the name "stringy bark."

It was definitely a long way up there, but even though the walk rocked a little bit with the trees and the wind, it wasn't really nerve-wracking at all.

(Of course, all that steel gridding around us probably helped on that account...)

After leaving Otway Fly, we drove out of the forests and back to the coastline, to see a few of the most famous sights on the Great Ocean Road before returning to Melbourne that evening. One of these sights was the Twelve Apostles, a set of limestone rock formations just off the shoreline. Although all twelve cannot be seen from any viewing point on the mainland, these rocks are still among the most photographed sights in Australia... maybe the world. As you can see here, we've added to that growing number.

Cynicism aside, though, they really are a moving sight. The Apostles themselves support vegetation (shown right) very similar to that on the cliff face, which makes it easy to imagine the solid ground that used to lie between them. There are even sections of mainland cliff that are visibly being worn away...

...which means that in the future, there will be more than twelve apostles!

Actually, thinking about the future was one of the more sobering elements of viewing the Twelve Apostles. We laughed at the very unsubtle warning signs (shown left) telling people to stay away from the edge of the fragile limestone cliffs, but they reminded us of our trip to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan's Upper Peninsula two years ago. The beautiful cliffs there are also limestone, very similar in structure and appearance to what we were seeing on the southern edge of Australia. But the clifftops at Pictured Rocks are heavily protected, only accessible on foot, via a long and difficult hike. Our guide told us stories of when the Twelve Apostles was similarly remote-- only twenty years ago there was just a dusty shoulder on the side of the Great Ocean Road.

Now, to accommodate all the thousands and thousands of visitors who want to see this beauty, there is a huge parking lot, a pedestrian bridge over the highway, a museum and gift shop, helicopter rides for charter, and seemingly permanent crowds of people at the Twelve Apostles. We couldn't help but wonder if Pictured Rocks would look like this twenty years after someone decides to make it more open and accessible.

A little further up from this crowded viewing platform, we came to our last stop on the Great Ocean Road. The Loch Ard gorge lies at the western end of the Twelve Apostles, and was named for a Scottish steamer, the "Loch Ard." Just one day away from its port-of-call in Melbourne, the Loch Ard crew and its dozen or so passengers were celebrating the end of their long sea journey when the ship ran aground in the fog and sank near this gorge.

There were only two survivors: a young crewman and a young woman passenger who was travelling with her parents and sisters, who all perished in the wreck. The two made it to the gorge, where the crewman left the girl to climb up the cliffs to find help. He did, but they were unable to rescue anyone else. The popular sentiment in Australia at the time was that they should marry, but the two had other ideas: she returned home and he stayed in Australia, never developing more than a casual friendship.

The gorge and surrounding cliffs now have a number of walking paths, with signs indicating the various species, the history of the rock formations, and the story of the wreck. The large arched rock out in the water at the end of the gorge is one of the Twelve Apostles, but it also has its own name: Muttonbird Island. Its name derives from the fact that it is the only and exclusive nesting ground for Muttonbirds in the world. And Muttonbirds, we learned, are very funny birds. For one thing, they migrate yearly from this tiny island on the south coast of Australia all the way to Alaska and back again. For another thing, they have babies and then overfeed them to an extraordinary degree... the overfed babies bloat up like a beach ball up to five times the size of the adult bird. Then, the parents leave for the migration, and the baby birds slowly work through the fuel stored in their fat bodies until they are old enough to begin hunting for themselves.

So, with thoughts of overstuffed baby birds who grow up to fly further than most humans travel in airplanes dancing in our heads, we left the Great Ocean and the Road and began the four hour drive back to Melbourne. The two days were packed full and we were feeling it... exhausted but happy. By the time we got dropped off in St. Kilda, it was nearly 8pm. And, we were meeting Jono (one of the guides-in-training) at 7am the next day for two more days of adventures with Bunyip Tours...