Riding the Great Ocean Road

I had to fiddle with the mixture screw on my bike today as it was struggling up the hills more so than the other two bikes. It was running OK but lacked a bit of poke. On closer inspection, it had been set to run too rich, which would part explain why it had been coping well on hills but ponged a bit. So I set it back to standard plus a quarter, and it ran well all day. The valve clearances probably need resetting too as they sound a bit tappetty, but its not urgent and I’ll do it in the next few days. Gordon needs to do a few jobs on his bike tas well; whoever fitted this 12v charger had stuffed it into the headlamp and then taped it all up. Needless to say, the headlamp stopped working very soon after we started riding, revealing the rubbish bodge. What with the initial electrical problem that Nadine had with her bike ( the newly fitted spark plug cap was the wrong Ohm rating) then its probably just as well that we’re now doing our own servicing instead of relying on people who don’t do great jobs.But that is the way that thing go when you travel.

There is so much to see along this stretch of Great Ocean Road that we knew we wouldn’t get far in distance terms today, but would see some pretty spectacular coastline. There are a few towns dotted along the route, mostly small country jobs based on dairy related stuff. So it was no surprise that we ended up first thing at Allensford, cheese tasting. We just happened to drive by and it wasn’t planned but it was worth it.

They make mostly Cheddar cheese there, which was a bit odd because under European law, only stuff that comes from a certain area can be called it. So Cheddar has to come from Cheddar, champagne from the Champagne area of France, Stilton from Stilton etc. Mind you, I dont think it works for hamburgers. Maybe its because it was made to the same recipes by the early settlers and thus became established here. But then its out of European jurisdiction anyway. 

But whatever the reason, it was really good cheese, and we spent about an hour there being talked through the various concoctions by Julie, a cheese lady with a 12 year vintage herself. And we bought some for lunch.

Not far from that, we stopped at Childers Cove. It had been the site of a ship wreck in 1839 when a ship called ‘children’ came to grief but today there was only water, blue sky.... and dead birds visible. 

The birds looked OK - healthy, unmarked and apparently uninjured but they were definitely dead. We had no idea why but found out later in the afternoon that they were Muttonbirds,  one of the most common types of Sheerwaters. These birds do an annual migration to the Aleutian Islands, right up by Alaska, and then back, a round trip of 30 000kms. But its quite common for returning birds to die close to home thanks to exhaustion, and fall into the sea. That’s what had happened to these little fellas. Shame, after all that effort.

The countryside round there was very familiar looking too. It was just like south west England - Cornwall or Devon. Green fields, low bushes, Holtsein cows and no gum trees. Its funny how places can remind you of places so far away.

After that, we picked our way along the Great Ocean Road, stopping off at various view points and places of interest. 

Its shipwreck central along the coast here, partly due to the rock outcrops and partly due to the storms and bad weather that prevail in  the Southern Ocean.

Bay of Islands

The Grotto

London Bridge - which really did fall down in January 1990, trapping two people on the end bit. (It was previously joined to the land by another arch) 

Port Campbell where we ate lunch

Razorback - where the erosion was really evident and due mostly to airborne spray, with a bit of wave assistance at the base.

Loch Ard Gorge. This is a sad story. A clipper ship travelling from Gravesend, UK to Melbourne in1878, ran aground in fog just hours before docking safely in port. It had been at sea for several months, and this was its first contact with land for many weeks. The captain  tried to stop it hitting the cliffs and nearly made it, but it scraped a low bit of the cliff and went down. There were 54 people on board (including crew) and all but two died and only four bodies were ever recovered. The two survivors - one crew member and a young woman - managed to swim ashore and sheltered in a cave on the beach until they were able to climb up the cliff. The man - Tom Pierce- was later given an award for trying to help people, but the girl went back to Ireland. And in a final twist, poor old Tom died some years later in another shipwreck.

The cemetery. This is in the middle of nowhere in the park, very overgrown and hidden, but it contains a few graves of locals, plus many of those who died in the Loch Ard sinking.

Muttonbird Island. Just off the coast, this is a haven for this bird which is part of the Sheerwater family. The young are fed up by the parents and get really fat before they mature, and were used as an important foodsource in years gone by. When they mature, do, they spend their time commuting between their island and the Aleutian Islands near Alaska. They even return to Muttonbird island on the same day every year; how cool is that?

12 Apostles. This was an astonishing sight. The rocks in this coastal vicinity are limestone and contain various shells etc. As a result of the contents, they erode at different rates and get worn into weird formations by wind and seawater. That’s how the Apostles were formed; stacks standing in the sea just metres from the cliffs to which they were formerly attached. Some of the stacks have now disintegrated but there were originally twelve.

As we rode long the ridge towards Lavers Hill, it got very windy and cold, so we stopped there for the night. Its quite a high and exposed up here, so wild weather is not unexpected but the lady in the cafe next door reckoned that even this is unusually cold for this time of year. Oh well.