?I dropped my pills.? ?I can?t find my phone.? ?There is corn muffin in my belly button.? It was the first five minutes of our Great Ocean Road trip and I already sounded like a senior citizen. All I could do was hope someone packed the adult diapers, because I had also just drank 42 ounces of water. This was going to be one crazy trip. Woop woop. It was the height of Australian summer, early January 2008, and the weather had already spiked to 40 C (104 F) more than once since our friend Matt had traveled down for the holidays. It’s the sort of heat that is so damn hot, when you first step outside, you think, hey, this isn’t that bad. And then approx. 2.47 seconds later, it feels like you walked into a massive oven on broil as that giant ball of fire known as the sun singes a hole in your head the size of a quandong (a small native Australian peach). And then you think back to the poor suckers in Chicago who are only in the middle of the WORST WINTER EVER, and magically, you are thankful for your quandong hole. Even if you are Matt, quite possibly the whitest man in Australia. Apparently, Matt is so white because he is sort of allergic to the sun in large doses. You think he would have told us that BEFORE we started our trip on the Great Ocean Road, the largest and most scenic coastal drive in the world that happens to be filled with heaps of sunlight. But he didn’t, and thankfully, only burned a bit. Matt made a friend early on in the trip, an econo-size bucket of sun screen that he dubbed “man jam”.
So with Matt and man jam in tow, my husband Adam and I started what would be the best road trip of our lives along the Great Ocean Road. We were starting off in South Australia, which technically isn’t part of the Great Ocean Road (it goes from Warrnambool, Victoria to Geelong, Victoria, near Melbourne), but still offers some great coastline action and a nice little slice of South Aussie life (read: FOOD). We headed south, and in Kingston, near the start of the Limestone Coast and a wine region known as the Coonawarra, was this little guy, Larry the Lobster.
I’ll be honest, it was sort of hard to miss him, but then again, I have a weakness for large statues of things I like to eat. I was gonna stop anyways. It turns out Larry was a giant advertisement for the specialty of the area, lobster/crayfish. He was quite close to Kingston and Lacepede Bay along the jetty, which is over 100 years old and still working. The town is a quiet but beautiful coastal town that is popular for holidays. I had read in a brochure about a fish and chip shop along the bay that had really good lobster pate, which I had never heard of (wouldn’t it take like, 40 lobster livers to make a single serving???)so this was our first major stop of the trip. Two interesting but very different facts about Lacepede Bay. #1: According to the February 8, 2004 Sydney Morning Herald, in 1840, a ship called The Maria wrecked off the coast of Lacepede Bay. The crew and the passengers all survived and made it to shore, but some of the sailors the local Ngarranjeri women. In retaliation, 25 out of 26 survivors were killed, with only a little girl spared, who was raised by the Ngarranjeri people until more Europeans arrived. Super interesting because it illustrates the relationship between Australians and Indigenous Australians. While the concept of white men landing on a foreign continent and mistreating the indigenous population is not a new one, what surprised me about Australia is that there was still this strong negative attitude towards the Aboriginal people.
#2: Lacepede Seafood shop. Their seafood is cheap and tastes delicious. It is a fair dinkum Aussie fish and chip shop. Families hung around inside and out, waiting for their deep fried goodness, while other customers patiently waited to order seafood to take home, everything from whole lobster to oysters already cut on the half shell and served with cocktail sauce. It was tiny and adorable and full of fishy goodness that I know was fresh because, hello, the ocean is in their back yard that I wanted to scream, take THAT, Long John Silvers!
The Lobster pate was more of a lobster salad, with cooked lobster meat in a sort of mayo sauce, but it was still delicious with the little crackers and lemon they gave you and surprisingly affordable (I want to say around $6 AUD).
We also got a MASSIVE box of fried seafood goodness for $7 AUD. This came with 2 pieces of fried fish, fried calamari rings, fried shrimp, fried chicken, and heaps of chips.
We found a picnic table out behind the shop, right next to the water, and ate our relaxing and artery-clogging cheap-ass meal. And all was right with the world.
We hopped back in the car, but made sure to stop at a random beach #1 of nearly 10 random beach stops.
This was one of the best parts of the trip, just experiencing the different beaches, the different tones of blue in the water, how the sand at one beach was smooth but another was littered with shells. And especially watching how each beach brought Matt (and man jam) closer to their inner diva.
Adam found this random reef-rock structure thingie growing out of the ocean and had to climb it, shoeless. Stupidly, I followed.
Great pictures, but my feet were scraped raw from the reef-rock thing. But Adam didn’t mind, because he found cool things like this: a super tiny shell.
After all that reef climbing, we were hungry again. We kept driving south until we reached a dusty little town called Penola, home of one of my class mates who happened to own a local cafe called Divine. The food offered was simple, local and delicious. We tried a local produce platter with Mettwurst, cheeses, dried fruits and chutneys, which is a popular dish you find across many regions of South Australia.
There is so much good local food in South Australia, this is not a surprise, but Divine offered a great glimpse of the area’s food producers. We also had an orange poppy seed muffin served with lime syrup and creme on the side.
It was a fun new way to eat an old favorite, and I loved it. The cream was rich but the tart syrup balanced out the dish nicely. That night, we stayed in Mount Gambier, or The Mount, as locals like to call it. It is a beautiful little town in the Coonawarra region, but the food? Well…not really worth writing about here. Totally worth writing about: the Blue Lake. It really is a ungodly blue color, at least six months of the year, perhaps because it is built on a volcano. No one knows for sure, but I like blue, so I wasn’t complaining.
I had read about a place called Portland Bay Lavender Farm in a travel brochure. It was just over the border to Victoria in Portland and I convinced the boys to stop because I saw the farm had a shop where it sold lavender products, including FOOD. That’s just how I roll. We parked by these giant rows of lavender and walked up the store, but our path was quickly blocked by an adorable weiner dog. He ran up to us, stopped exactly three feet ahead of us, and rolled on his back, begging us to scratch his belly. Fricking adorable. Every few seconds, he would get up and run over to another person and do it all over again–you could tell this guy had experience. But that was where the fun ended. The lavender shop hit us with an overpowering scent of you guessed it,lavender, which only distracted us for a second from the fact that every item in the shop was indeed, lavender-colored. Crocheted lavender scented pillows, photos of lavender and lavender soap just didn’t seem to appeal to us. An older grey-haired woman approached us wearing, yup, purple, and started slathering all kinds of lavender oil and lotion and fragrance and oil fragrance on us while running through her little sales monologue. The boys loved this part. The scary part was how she held our attention–her speech and rubbing were so intense, we were almost afraid to walk away from her. Then–THEN we realized there was no food. When we tried to leave, she blocked the door and charged us $2 each!!! Apparently, it was because we were allowed to use the bathroom and pick as much lavender as we wanted. Great. Just what I needed on my road trip–more lavender.
And every hour for the next day and a half, someone at some point would shout, “Shit! I can still smell the lavender!” Needless to say, we couldn’t stay in the tiny lavender hot box of a car for very long. So I drove down this tiny, very long road until I found this:
The water was such a vivid deep blue and there were huge rocks, much different than the beaches in South Australia. We couldn’t even walk on this beach, there were so many rocks. But look how frothy the waves got here–too cool. There was just a lookout point, but with shots like this, I’m not complaining.
Remember how I said the beach brought out the diva in Matt? Here’s your proof, taken at random beach #3.
Random beach #4, probably one of my favorite, because the sand felt like walking on velvet squishy love and the water was this crazy bright shade of turquoise I hadn’t seen yet.
All of these beaches were found before we even started the “official” Great Ocean road. You gotta love this country! I had so much love for this beach, I even frolicked a bit.
Finally, we had reached the start of the “official” Great Ocean road. And it wouldn’t be a Great Ocean road without a world of cheese.
What is not to like about a world of cheese? Especially when friendly folks like these guys greet you.
Cheeseworld was a total disappointment. It was a tiny room that was barely two cheese cases big. Thats it. I’m from South Australia, folks. We have gourmet cheese shops every five blocks. Even the truck stop cheese shops in Wisconsin were better than Cheeseworld. The only thing we got was a chikko roll, which tasted like a deep fried egg roll. I’ve also had chikko rolls that taste like corn and cheese.
This roll? Yeah, nah. Shortly after the world of cheese disappointment, we started seeing the sights this road was known for, starting with the Bay of Islands. You can see portions of the earth that were literally warn down by the ocean until they eventually broke off. Sort of cool…sort of scary, with lots of native birds.
Thank GOD we saw this sign on the way out of the Bay of Islands…I had totally forgot by that point. Can you tell how many tourists drive these roads?
The next sight was called the London Bridge, because the ocean had shaped it to look like a giant bridge. And you know, Aussies used to be Brits…you get the picture.
This was the other side of the London Bridge, and the water was moving so fast, the frothy waves were practically all you could see.
Next came the 12 Apostles, a sight that used to feature twelve separate sets of stone and earth carved by the sea. I say used to because one or two of them have already crumbled into the sea, so there are only like, 9 or 10 left. They really need to change the sign.
After we saw the Apostles (which had way too many tourists at, btw), the road started getting really windy and hilly. On one side, you could see rolling green hills for miles, and the other side had huge dramatic cliffs overlooking the ocean. We stopped at Castle Cove, a gorgeous lookout on one of those dramatic cliffs I was talking about. The beach looked so pristine, like no one had ever walked on it.
Castle Cove also happened to have a path from the top of the cliff down the mountain to the beach. We thought it would be fun to randomly hike down it, even though we only had flip flops on. The ground was half earth, half sand, and it made traction impossible. It took around 15 minutes to get down the mountain, but it was a small mountain and had a crappy set of steps you could sort of walk down. The beach was hands down the most gorgeous thing I have ever seen. Here, the water was icy cold (perhaps because we were so close to Antartica) and the waves were huge and foaming white. The sand was so soft, it felt like bunnies were hugging your feet as you walked. And then we tried to go back up the mountain. Um, yeah. It was tough. No, it was fricking impossible. It was mainly sand from the beach on up, and as we tried to run as fast as we could to get the hard part over, it only got worse. I felt like a contestant on The Biggest Loser, and I was totally losing. It took us nearly 30 minutes to get back up the mountain.
About half way up the mountain, we had a little visitor in the form of a 6 foot tall kangaroo. He was blocking the path we needed to talk, and couldn’t have been more than 10 feet away from us. Too bad we were still huffing and puffing from the hike, or we might have actually gotten a picture. We stared at each other for a bit, and Adam tried to tell him a riddle to see if he would let us pass. Then myself and the roo ran in opposite directions, and we continued on our way. We couldn’t get over the different street signs we saw along the Great Ocean road, especially the signs for local wildlife. It was just so different from the typical deer or duck crossing I used to see in the States. We loved them so much, we had to be them. There was the koala sign.
And the platypus (that I later found out was really an echidna).
By the time we reached the end of the Great Ocean Road, it was just about sunset. The road started winding around a rainforest, and the beaches still looked beautiful in the fading sun light.
This sign marked the end of our journey.
And here we are, the tres amigos, safe and happy in Melbourne!
~LTG!
