Wildlife Tours Day 1: Great Ocean Road

Actually I am not in Melbourne anymore, but in Lancefield. Alas "waarbenjijnu" is not familiar with Lancefield ;). So therefore the location remains Melbourne!

I have decided not to write one blog about my three day tour along the Great Ocean Road and the Grampians. I will divide it up and -for the next couple of days- I am going to write about my tour experiences.

I will mix this up with my life here in Lancefield, where I arrived last night. It is great to see my Australian family again (after 17 years!!!).

Back to last Wednesday morning, the start of the tour. I got picked up at 8.00 am (and not at 6.00 am, which was the case with the Red Center tour :P). I was glad that I could get a seat right next to the driver/tourguide. I had heard that the Great Ocean Road is full of sharp turns. I hoped that sitting in the front of the tourbus, would make me a little less susceptible to motion sickness. It sort of did.

But the first part of the Great Ocean Road was just a little too full of sharp turns. I could not really enjoy the scenery (motion sickness was there, even though I was sitting in the front of the bus). But that all changed when the turns became a little less sharp. Motion sickness subsided and I quickly realized that this WAS a truly beautiful area.

Especially when we drove up to the legendary 12 Apostles (actually ther are only 8 left at the moment, since the other 4 have dissapeared in the sea). The driver/tourguide (his name was actually Ryan, so that's what I will call him from now on) recommended a helicopter flight over the 12 Apostles. He said it was awesome. I always wanted to do a helicopter flight and this flight was actually very reasonably priced. So I decided to spend some of my birthday money to get on the helicopter :).

Afterwards, I was sooo happy that I did. It was absolutely sensational, being in a helicopter is not scary at all (fortunate to have clear skies and no wind). Just WOW, and we (there were two other people with me on the copter and the pilot of course) had such a beautiful view of the 12 Apostles and the surrounding area. I took so many pictures while being up in the air :). Still have to check out how many of those have turned out all right. We saw some other awesome bits of the Great Ocean Road, with among others: Apollo Bay, Loch Ard Gorge, London Bridge and the stunning Bay of Martyrs. I have come to the conclusion that the Great Ocean Road is indeed an area in Victoria that should not be missed :).

At the end of the day, we made our way to Warrnambool, where our hostel was located. We had to make our own dinner (bought a nice salad at the local Coles). Each of us went to bed rather early, it had been a busy day. We were all (app. fifteen of us) sleeping in the same room. But it was such a spacious room that it didn't really matter.

A little bit more about our tourgroup. Ryan the driver/tourguide was very nice (Martina he looked like Sjoerd ;)). He knew a lot about the areas we were exploring. And he was a pretty good driver. I did have some trouble with motion sickness when we were on the Great Ocean Road, but it wasn't too bad...

The actual tour group consisted of people of several different countries. There were about six Frenchies who could barely speak any English. Since my French is not good, I did not really have a decent conversation with any of the French people (I mean "O secours un serpent" or "Je m'appelle Minoemie, je suis le chat de Julie," doesn't bring me very far lol :P). There was also a couple from Canada that never showed any interest in the other group members. Fortunately there were some people COULD talk to. A girl from Ireland, a girl from South Korea and a couple from Germany. Overall there were no obnoxious and annoying people on the tour, which was very nice. But they were not nearly as interesting as the people on my EMU Run Tour (through the Red Center).

This is it for today. More tomorrow about the drive up to the Grampians and finally a decent hike (my body really needs the exercise apparently :)).