Great Ocean Road Walks, Wildlife & Wild Coast

Nothing shouts passion for the outdoors like a busload of tourists, departing for a 10 minute stopover at the Twelve Apostles, elbowing their way forth through the swarms to the handrail, never glimpsing the natural wonder but through their iPhones. The Great Ocean Road has been subject to mono-maniacal marketing, so in going there you do enter the tourist fray, but the landscapes justify your presence and there are ways of avoiding the hubbub. Heck, all it takes is straying from the established boardwalks. In fact, it’s startling how much the more established infrastructure contains people, who treat it like some God-given cue.

We turned onto the Great Ocean Walk from Gibbons Steps car park and found ourselves alone within moments. No one else was walking along the dirt path cutting through the coastal shrubs; it was just us, with the road and farm pastures to the left, the ocean expanding towards Antarctica to our right, intensifying rainfall, and a little tiger snake that took a lunge at my leg. It was crazy how quickly everything had transformed. One moment, a tourist-packed landscape kowtowing to human need; the next, a desolate, snake-riddled, limestone wasteland. Needless to say, I loved it. This point, technically speaking, is at the end of the 100km Great Ocean Walk, which is designed to progress from east to west; other places along it are further away from the crowd again. Short on time this time round, we merely dipped in at various points. Moonlight Head, Wreck Beach, Johanna Beach, but we’re eager to complete it fully in the future.

Another time, we headed further afield, using Portland as our base, drawn in by the promise of the Great South West Walk. Again, we didn’t have the time to complete its full 250km. We started at the Cape Nelson lighthouse. Sea fog had obscured the horizon and drifted over the land, making for blurred edges, empty distance and intense humidity. Walking through the low visibility, along the cliff line dropping perhaps 30 to 50 metres to the ocean, over the air-pocketed, limestone rubble, grown over sparsely with unrecognisable shrubs, I half expected a big green alien to emerge from the fog, cook a shotgun and tell us to get off his property. Later, we encountered some slightly more friendly wildlife in the form of gannets near Portland and seals at Cape Bridgewater, from afar in both cases. The gannets are surrounded by a fence, to keep out human and four-legged predators; the seals are at the base of an ocean cliff. You could, in theory, paddle out to greet them.

MUST DO
• SUP boarding in Torquay or surfing at Bells or Johanna Beaches
• Hiking the Great Ocean Walk or the Great South West Walk
• Sandboarding or simply exploring Swan Lake sand dunes
• Falling beneath among the Otway forest and Californian Redwoods
• Wildlife watching in and around Cape Bridgewater and Portland

Image caption:
An anonymous surfer carving it up at Johanna. He’d paddled out just minutes before, and was instantly grateful.