Great Ocean Road and Koalas

the famous Twelve Apostles - only there aren't twelve anymore

Every marketing textbook should start with the story of the Great Ocean Road. The only conclusion I can come to is that this was one of the greatest marketing achievements of all time. I’m not trying to be negative here - there are some great sites along the GOR, and it’s definitely worth visiting if you are in the area, but being practically a household name across the world would cause someone to expect a bit more. The coastline is beautiful, but not really better than anything I’ve seen on the west coast of New Zealand or the States. Most of the drive that we did was not even on the coast - it was inland and you had to park and walk out to the lookouts. I was expecting Big Sur type conditions - with the road tracing the coastline as it hugs every cliff and sharp bend. Nope. I mean, we drove 10 hours for this. I was a tad disappointed. So now that my rant is out of the way, we did get to see some cool stuff.

this island used to be connected by a bridge, and some people got stranded when it collapsed

So the coastline wasn't all that we expected, but that wasn't the only reason we were here. We wanted to see a koala. Just one koala. I know koalas eat eucalyptus, but it seemed like every tree was a eucalyptus. Where do they hang out? Way at the top, near the bottom? We had no clue. Our first day and a half we were constantly straining to spot one of these guys. Eventually we gave up trying, and were driving out to see a lighthouse when I spotted what looked like two koalas mating in the tree above the road. Don’t get too excited, it turned out to be a mother and baby, but we pulled over and started snapping photos. It was about this time when we started looking around us and started noticing koalas EVERYWHERE. There were heaps of them all around us - how did we miss them before? It reminds me of Harry and the Hendersons when they took Harry to the woods and all these other sasquatches appeared out of the woodwork. Nobody else remembers that? Most of them were just chilling out in the fork of the trees, but a few were moving around a bit eating leaves. You could get real close to some of them, especially one who was just sitting in a tree at eye level right next to the road inviting tourists to stop for photo ops.

Our favorite koala that we met was Bert - yes we gave him a name. This is how we met Bert: being the cheapskates that we are, we stopped by a grocery store for a rotisserie chicken and a frozen cheesecake and headed into the hills for a free campground where we could sleep in the car for the night (yes we did eat the whole cheesecake thank you, and yes we felt pretty awful afterwards). Anyways, as we’re sitting there enjoying our gourmet dinner we spot a koala climb down a tree next to our car and quickly scamper over to a neighboring tree. As we sat and watched him eat his leaves, we gave him the name Bert because I suggested bear and Steph suggested something lame that I can’t remember but ended in -rt so we compromised on Bert. It was pretty stormy that night with some pretty strong winds and we naturally got pretty worried about our buddy Bert, who was at the top of a pretty small tree. We needn’t worry, though, as when we looked up Bert was as calm as a cucumber, using the violent swaying of his tree to try to reach some juicy green leaves on a nearby tree. Crazy Bert.

didn't get a picture of Bert, so instead I'm showing you a double rainbow

Mission accomplished. We spotted some koalas. Now we had to make it back to Sydney for the final flight of our journey. Unfortunately we had to skip seeing Melbourne as we hear it’s a real cool city, but we used the time we saved to take the scenic route back through the Snowy Mountains. It was summer so there was no snow, even on Australia’s highest peak - you can take a chair lift to the top of that one so it ain't exactly snow-capped. It was a beautiful area though and not really what you expect when you think of Australia.

Snowy Mountains

Snowy Mountain Scheme - if you don't know, Wikipedia

We spent one final night in the car (apparently we love to sleep in uncomfortable places), got in a little beach time somewhere south of Sydney and we were on a plane back to Queenstown. Round the world trip complete! Done and dusted.