We woke up and departed the motel heading for Sorrento, a small town that had a ferry that crossed the bay leading to Melbourne. It kept us from driving up and around Melbourne and gave us a chance to park the car for the 40 minute transit and see the sites on the water.
We got off the ferry at Queenscliff and headed for Geelong, then to Torquay, which would begin the Great Ocean Road.
This is another one of those things that people say you just gotta do. You can’t say you’ve seen Australia if you never driven the Great Ocean Road. Fabulous. We drove from Torquay down to Cape Otway National Park.
After Cape Otway, we lost most of our views of the water as we continued our drive to Peterborough, but the reason was simple. There are cliffs lining the ocean in this part of Australia. Since the roads are built a safe distance back, we saw a few hundred meters of grassland, and then nothing. Just sky. In a few places, we could park and walk to the cliffs edge and see some spectacular rock formations, each with names like “The Arch,” or “London Bridge.”
The most well known of these formations is called the “12 Apostles.” Why it’s called that is an amusing story, particularly when you consider that there are only 9 of them. They used to be called the “Sow and Piglets.” Nobody visited them. I mentioned before about how Australians are great at marketing. They undertook a big campaign to rename the Sow and Piglets to the 12 Apostles. Tourists came to see them. The name stuck. The fact that there are only 9 of them hasn’t slowed them down a bit.
The 12 Apostles
Coastline and small beach
The Arch
View looking down on the Grotto
Inside the Grotto
London Bridge
Once we arrived in Peterborough, we headed straight for the motel, finding absolutely nothing else of interest in the town or in the neighboring town of Port Campbell.
