Up bright and early thanks to some calls from the UK, thought about going back to sleep but instead went down to reception and asked if they could get me on a tour which started verrrryyyy soon. Basically I went to reception at 7:30 to get me on a tour starting at 7:45 from a few blocks away. Somehow they managed it.

And the tour, as I guess you have already twigged was the Great Ocean Road tour courtesy of ATP Tours. Twas pretty busy, which was a shame because it meant I had to sit on the right hand side of the bus, and for the entire day the Ocean was on the left. Ah well.

Let me start at the beginning… Geelong… great story, basically back in the day when Victoria started out (I wont go into the history, you can find it on Wikipedia I’m sure) there was a little thing called the Gold Rush. The gold fields were approximately a day’s less walk from Geelong than it was from Melbourne. This of course sparked big problems for Melbourne as they were at the time slightly more established. What else could you do, but pay a surveyor to make a bogus map which positioned Melbourne closer to the gold fields than Geelong and have it given to everyone who lands in the area. Genius.

Onto Bells Beach, a famous surfing area / beach, however recently has become redundant on the global scale because its too difficult to surf. The other thing of note here… Kangaroo’s!

Breakfast time! Anglesey for hot chocolate, doughnut and a sausage role.

There were also public toilets, this is not that big of a surprise, but the graffiti in there was rather entertaining… and I quote (or close to): “One only needs two things – WD40 to get it going, duck tape to get it stopped”.

Lorne is swanky, swanky swanky, and apparently at weekends / holidays full of yuppies. Sounds rather unpleasant. When the township first started there were 12 hotels on the seafront, there are 2 now, asbestos aint a great building material… Or maybe it’s because all liquid waste is recycled a bit and used to water the grounds. Lovely.

At Kennett River we then randomly saw a Koala, admittedly we had only stopped there because the driver hoped to see a Koala. Incredibly luckily there was one about 10 yards from the bus and only 10 foot up a tree. A very rare opportunity we were told. There were parrots flying around as well as if there wasn’t anything strange about them flying around.

And then it was lunch time, this post got long enough already so will split it into before and after lunch I think.

More later I guess…