The Great Ocean Road

Before arriving in Melbourne we tried to book a day tour of the Great Ocean Road on the Saturday but everything seemed booked up as we'd left to too late. When we walked in off the street to Tourist Information they had an operator with a couple of free seats for the day so we took it. Waiting for the driver to arrive at the tour operators office the next day, seeing all the t-shirts for "Ramsey St." and finding out that they were also the operators of the official "Neighbours" tour, I knew we were in good hands. The weather was much better than Friday and there was barely a cloud for the whole day. Made loads of stops on what turned out to be a long 14 hour tour (that still only managed to give you a rushed 20 minutes at everything), including Bells Beach (which I'd vaguely heard of from the end of Point Break), the Twelve Apostles (definitely the highlight), a rainforest walk and a chance to see some wild koalas..sleeping..in the wild!..next to a camping site..in the wild! and plenty of cliff top scenery. Every other tour must have been doing the exact same stops as we came to recognise other bus logos and their passengers. Kind of to my suprise there was a huge contrast in scenery throughout the day's drive. Passed through plenty of landscape that looked like dry bush, plenty of strip motels with rusty "Vacancy" signs (lots and lots of McDonalds' and Hungry Jacks - with attached playgrounds - very reminicent of driving across America). And yet at other spots plenty of cows and landscape that wouldn't have looked out of place in Ireland.