The 12 Apostles, Great Ocean Road
Today saw a first for us on our trip to Australia – tourists. Lots and lots of tourists, mostly Asian and European. They were at every viewpoint at which we stopped this afternoon, and along the way we met many, many tour buses. I guess that this really is a very popular part of Victoria.
The day started with a stop at the Crags, just before we got to Port Fairy. This was our first view of the spectacular coast today. At Port Fairy itself we walked around Griffith Island. There is a large colony of “Muttonbirds”, short tailed shearwaters, that live here. They fly out to sea by day and back at dusk, so we didn’t see any. Their chicks are in underground burrows, up to two metres deep. We did see some small black footed swamp wallabies.
Enid trying on hats Flagstaff Hill village at Warnambool
At lunch we stopped at Warrnambool to visit the Flagstaff Hill tourist village and museum. This is a restoration of a mid 1800’s sailing town. We very much enjoyed the artefacts in the museum (there are many shipwrecks along the rugged south coast of Australia, so many that it has the nickname “The Shipwreck Coast”) and the restored buildings. A couple of them were staffed by volunteers in period costume. The best one was the milliners where Enid got to visit with the seamstress who had made several of the hats on display, and try on some of the bonnets. We spent about three hours on the site, and it reminded us very much of when our boys were young and we took them to the Fortress of Louisbourg, and Upper Canada Village.
As we left Warrnambool we were looking for the Allansford Cheese and Butter Factory. I saw a sign that pointed into the town, so we drove that way, but couldn’t find any place. When we got back on the Great Ocean Road, there it was, so it isn’t in Allansford at all, but just to the east of the town. We did go in and tasted their cheese, most of which are spiced cheeses. We bought some cheddar and a little bit of herb cheese (frankly I’m not very impressed with Australian cheese as North American cheddar is much more flavorful).
It was after that we began to meet tourists. We stopped at many of the viewpoints after Warrnambool: the Bay of Islands and the Bay of Martyrs, London Bridge, the Arch, the Loch Ard Gorge, and finally the Twelve Apostles. Each of them is spectacular in its own way, though the Twelve Apostles is no better that the others, despite being the icon of the Great Ocean Road. It is however the most developed and where we saw the most tourists. Even though it was late in the day there were still several busses of Asian tourists around photographing each other in front of every possible viewpoint, as they seem to like to do.
We stopped for the night at the Princetown Camping Reserve. It is a good place to park for the night, has power and showers, all for the reasonable price of $20. Tonight there was a cricket team here practicing, as there is a cricket oval here as well as the campground. It was fun to see many kangaroos out at dusk, and several of them were boxing, something we haven’t seen before.