The uncertain number of Apostles

After collecting Lizzie the car, first port of call was the nearest electical shop to get a cable to connect my mp3 player to the stereo (and also a newsagent to buy a map, but this was of secondary importance). Thus armed against disorientation and Australian radio, I set off to Eden.

Calling somewhere Eden could be considered to be tempting fate somewhat, but it turned out to be a lovely  place. It’s set on a peninsula sticking out of the south-east of Australia, and has a long beach which was being battered by choppy waves when I had a look. Since there was a backpackers hostel there, I decided to stay overnight in Eden rather than try my luck somewhere in the middle of nowhere later on. One of the other guests was travelling with a toy monkey who has his own Facebook page, so I felt slightly less mad for having given Hedrin Bear his own profile a few days earlier.

Eden is also home to the killer whale museum, a small but fascinating place to spend an hour or two. Pride of place is the skeleton of Old Tom, leader of a pod of orcas who swam into port to alert the whalers that there were whales around, and then led them to their quarry. Once harpooned, the whalers would allow the orcas to eat their tongues and lips before dragging them back to harvest the blubber and oil. This co-operation between man and orca has never been documented anywhere else in the world. Tom was found washed up on the beach, local opinion being that he came home to die, and after that no other orcas took his place and the co-operation ended. Of course, Australia is now an anti-whaling nation. Strangely enough, I didn’t notice any whaling museums being advertised when I was in Japan – or any mention of whaling, for that matter. It’s almost as if they don’t want to remind foreign tourists about it.

I spent a lot of the next day driving, having decided to swing past Wilsons Promentary on my way to Melbourne. It’s a national park on a peninsula to the south, and by the time I was approaching it it was time to find somewhere to sleep. After a few aborted attempts in Yarrow (everywhere was either full or looked pretty dodgy) I eventually found somewhere in a small town called Foster. The nearby chippie did garlic chicken balls and a portion of chips which would burst a horse. That’s something I’ve noticed about Australia, when you ask for a portion of chips they just keep shovelling the damn things until you have at least twice as many as you’d ever eat.

It was a grey, drizzly morning when I drove down to the peninsula. There was a bush fire last year, and most of the trees are blackened by the fires – but still alive, and sprouting new growth. Fires are an essential part of life here, many plants only release their seeds when exposed to extreme heat. The undergrowth was destroyed, but has sprouted back by now. Since the sky was the same colour as the sand underfoot, it was a stunning sight – all black, green and grey. The only other splashes of colour were occasional bright red globules of hardened sap on the tree trunks.

I walked up to Mount Bishop (from the Lilly Pilly Gully car park) to see the view from the top – nice, but obscured by cloud and drizzle – then started driving again. The aim was to find somewhere near the start of the Great Ocean Road and stay there for a couple of nights, but I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to negotiate Melbourne from one end to the other during the late-afternoon rush hour.

Melbourne is a huge city for its population – instead of being built upwards like most cities, it has just spread out over the years and the suburbs cover a huge area. The road went from the Australian standard of single lanes (with occasional short overtaking lanes) to two, then four and five lane motorways. This is all very well and good, but when Bruce and Sheila are used to driving their ute 300km down a dirt track to the nearest shop, they aren’t going to have a clue how to deal with a road like that. Standard Australian driving on large motorways seems to be: find a lane and stick to it, then go as fast or as slow as you like. Undertaking was as common as overtaking.

The traffic got thicker nearer the city centre, and when it looked like I was approaching a toll road I diverted onto another highway through the city and found myself heading west, more by luck than by judgement. I escaped Melbourne unscathed, arrived in Geelong (about 70km west of Melbourne) at 5:30-ish and decided to base myself there for the Great Ocean Road drive, since it was starting to get late and I hadn’t booked any accommodation.

This might have been a mistake, because Geelong is a dump – a surprisingly large city with precisely no redeeming features. Having failed to find any cheap places to stay while driving around (plenty of motels, but I was looking for a hostel since I figured there was a decent chance of finding a passenger or two to do the Great Ocean Road and split fuel costs with) so I had my evening meal in McDonalds and made use of their free wi-fi. The only hostel in Geelong is a hotel in town which is more well-known as a bar and live music venue and advertises “backpacker-style accommodation”.

I asked at the bar if they had a dorm bed available for two nights, and the young lady scrutinised an almost entirely empty ledger for a minute or two before confirming that they did. Many hostels have a key deposit (usually $10 or $20) which is returned when you check out. This place had a bond for the room, which was either my passport or $100. Call me sentimental, but I have a strange attachment to my passport and decided to go for the cash option. First, though, I asked what time they opened for check-out in the morning. “About ten o’clock” was the answer. I said that this wouldn’t work, because I’d be leaving at about 7am on the Friday. She promised to get back to me the next day with a solution to this little problem.

The dorm room had two other blokes in it – Australian, middle-aged, one of them snoring with what sounded like a combination of lung problems that would have felled a lesser man. They had both been there for a while, and the room reeked. I opened the window to let some air in, and went down to the TV lounge and dining room (above the pub). Two French girls had checked in just after me, and were responding to the standard of accommodation with espressions of disbelief – probably similar to the one on my face. I abandoned the idea of recruiting any passengers for the drive the next day, they were the only candidates and they weren’t interested in speaking English to anyone. To be honest, I can’t say I blamed them.

I watched A Current Affair with one of my dorm-mates, and the main story was the star of a sitcom in the 70s whose female co-star had just publicly accused him of touching her up during filming of the show, when she was about nine years old.  I have mentioned A Current Affair before, it makes Brass Eye look like Panorama (although the dear old BBC have been doing their best to do this as well in recent years, but I digress). It’s tabloid TV that treats its audience as if it has an IQ under 80, and it’s distressingly popular.

While teasing the audience with all the sick and shocking allegations that numerous women had come out of the woodwork to make against this man, my roommate opined that somebody should “shoot the c***”. Now if these allegations are true, I’d probably agree. Since at the moment they are unproven allegations, surely it would be better to find out if they’re true first, rather than just a bunch of gossip-hungry ACA viewers desperate for attention and a fat pay cheque from the tabloids for their possibly made-up stories? It’s hypocritical titillation dressed up as news, and it’s sickening. At least the UK’s “news” outlets haven’t quite descended to this level, although it’s a close run thing.

Anyway, I left early the next morning to drive out to the Great Ocean Road. I stopped in Torquay for breakfast, and had a look at the beaches there. Australia certainly has a lot of beaches, and many of them seem to be quite nice. No time to go for a swim though, there was a lot of kilometres to cover. Soon after Torquay, the Great Ocean Road started properly, with a wooden arch over the road and a few statues and plaques. I had no idea of the history – it was built as a memorial to people from Victoria who had served in the first world war. The Great Ocean Road trust was founded in 1917 to build the road and provide employment for 3000 returned servicemen.

Now more than 1.2 million vehicles pass under the arch every year, to see the landscapes, seascapes, national parks and nature reserves and savour “one of the most beautiful ocean drives in the world”. It was a hot day, and air was hazy in the morning before it cleared up in the afternoon. The road itself… well, it’s pretty good. I’ve driven on more exciting roads, but it is a very long road next to the sea – except for the bits which go through the jungle, which seems to be about half of it. Never mind, though, the sections on the coast are great fun, with plenty of places to park and see the view while an Israeli family in a camper van parks behind you and blocks you in.

I took a slight detour to Cape Otway to climb the lighthouse. I had to wait near the top until the class of schoolchildren were finished being spoken to by their teacher and then filed down the spiral staircase, and enjoyed the look of slight panic on the face of the one who had tried to spit on me from the top a couple of minutes earlier. Again, the view from the lighthouse was rather obscured by the haze, but it’s probably wonderful on a clear day. I resisted the temptation to spit on the schoolchildren from the top.

There is a plaque near the lighthouse commemorating Frederick Valentich, a 20-year-old pilot who disappeared over the Bass Straight while flying from Melbourne to King Island on 21/10/78. His last recorded words before his radio cut off at 7:12pm were “that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again, and it is not an aircraft…” No trace of him or his Cessna VH-DSJ were ever found.

On the way back to rejoin the Great Ocean Road I stopped near a collection of parked cars and gawping humans. I had seen them on the way to the lighthouse, and guessed that they were looking at koalas. Indeed they were, and I was able to get a good look at a few of them hanging around in branches and not moving. They do seem to be living the good life.

I had an early-afternoon lunch in Port Cambpell from the unfriendliest fish & chip shop I’ve ever encountered, then started back to visit Loch Ard Gorge. The gorge is cut into sandstone by the sea, and is named after a ship which was wrecked there. It’s very pretty, and I would happily have spent time visiting more of the area but the afternoon was wearing on so I continued towards the Twelve Apostles. There aren’t actually twelve of them, but never mind. The Apostles are limestone columns jutting from the sea – like the Old Man of Hoy, but more numerous and less sturdy (two of them have been destroyed by erosion in the last five years, although one of them apparently wasn’t considered to be an Apostle). Very impressive, but I didn’t bother trying to count them – to be honest, it’s not at all clear what’s supposed to be an Apostle and what isn’t.

After that, the long drive back along the road to Geelong. Still a stunning drive, but being stuck behind people going 20km/h below the speed limit (with very few overtaking lanes) does get a bit wearing. There was a band playing in the venue directly below my bedroom (until about 3am, apparently, although I still managed to sleep through it). After a couple of pointed enquiries, the staff kindly gave me my $100 back in the evening so I could check out early and get my car back to Melbourne for 10am.

Negotiating the morning rush hour on the Friday of the Grand Prix weekend proved not as stressful as I had anticipated – the traffic slowed down in a few places, but I managed to find my way to the rental place with over an hour to spare. After watching some of the practice sessions on the TV (and hearing the cars from a couple of miles away – they are astonishingly loud) I went out in the evening to meet up with Sylvia, Libby and Maeve from Tasmania (not from Tasmania, etc.) and a few other folk to have drink or three.

I had to change hostel in the morning, accommodation being a bit of a pain in the arse on Grand Prix weekend (and with the International Flower and Garden Show and Comedy Festival also running). That evening the Irish girls invited us to see an Irish comedian, by the very Irish name of David O’Doherty. He had some very funny bits in his show, and some very meh bits. Entertaining, though. I nearly didn’t get to see him though, if I’d kept waiting for my trout from the cafe/restaurant in Federation Square then I’d probably still be there now. Never mind, they took it off the bill – not that we could tell, because they gave us someone else’s bill. It was less than ours, so we paid it anyway. Normally I would never do such a thing, but the level of customer service they had shown justified it.

Sunday was Grand Prix day, and also time to move into my next temporary accommodation – cousin Julie and Mark’s place. Julie took me to Queen Victoria market to look at all the tacky tourist nonsense, before heading home via the supermarket and bottle shop with a lamb chop and a load of beer and wine. Mark cooked a wonderful lamb roast, despite his disappointment at Mark Webber failing to win yet another Aussie GP. Never mind, there’s always next year.

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