Great Ocean Road

The drive begins in Torquay, where the surf shops outnumber cafés and the parking lot at Bells Beach fills with utes and board racks on any morning with swell. I pointed the car west and the road immediately tilted toward the coast, then away from it, then back again, a rhythm I’d maintain for the next three days. The Southern Ocean appeared and disappeared in my peripheral vision like something that didn’t want to be looked at directly.

The Road Itself

What I didn’t expect about the Great Ocean Road was how physical it would feel. This was not a highway with scenic pullouts marked in advance. It was a road built between 1919 and 1932 by returned soldiers using picks and shovels, blasted into cliff faces, and it still hugs the terrain the way a path made by hand does — tightly, with attention to each individual obstacle. Around Lorne, the road drops to nearly sea level and you drive with rock above you and surf below, sometimes both close enough to feel simultaneously claustrophobic and exposed.

Lorne itself is where Melbourne escapes on long weekends, a fact visible in the ice cream queues and the difficulty of parking after noon. I ate fish and chips on a concrete sea wall and watched a pelican stand motionless for twelve minutes, waiting for a chip to fall within range. It did, eventually.

Otway Rainforest

The road cuts inland near Apollo Bay and into the Otway Ranges, and suddenly there’s no ocean at all — just fern gullies and mountain ash trees that go up forty metres and block the light entirely. The temperature drops four degrees in about ninety seconds. Triplet Falls requires a twenty-minute walk through ferns that brush your shoulders, and the falls themselves are three separate cascades over mossy rocks that you hear long before you see.

I stopped at a small café in Beech Forest where they served a soup made from local ingredients that I couldn’t fully identify but ate two bowls of. The owner was from Geelong. She’d moved up here fifteen years ago. She did not miss Geelong.

The Twelve Apostles

Everyone goes to the Twelve Apostles and everyone knows everyone goes to the Twelve Apostles, and this creates a slight self-consciousness in the crowd at the viewing platforms. The stacks — there are eight now, not twelve, never were twelve, the name was marketing — rise from water the colour of cold jade and the surf hits them from every angle simultaneously. The scale is wrong in the way that geological scale always is: you understand it intellectually and your eyes refuse to fully process it.

I went at five-thirty in the morning, before the tour buses. For forty minutes I had the main platform almost to myself. The light came up pink over the land behind me and orange over the ocean ahead and the stacks turned the colour of something expensive.

Loch Ard Gorge

A kilometre west of the Apostles, Loch Ard Gorge is what the Apostles would be if they hadn’t been turned into a postcard. A narrow canyon cut into the cliff leads to a small beach enclosed on three sides by hundred-metre walls. Two people survived a shipwreck here in 1878. You can understand why they didn’t swim further. The beach is so enclosed that the Southern Ocean turns calm inside it, turquoise over sand, almost tropically still. It lasts about thirty seconds in your mind before you look up at the cliff walls and remember where you are.

When to go: March through May for warm days and thinner crowds. Summer (December–January) means school holidays and congested parking at every viewpoint. Winter is moody and cold but the light is extraordinary, and you’ll often have the Apostles to yourself at dawn.