Otway National Park

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Off to our next stop which was planned to be the Otway National Park. We stopped off at Torquay for Kerry and Dave to do some shopping as it is known as a big surfer town with lots of good shops.

We were now starting our drive along the Great Ocean Road. One of the big towns along the road, Lorne, has a music festival that starts on 30th December. It was just our bad luck that we were trying to get along that stretch of the road the day before - along with everyone else. We were nose to tail in traffic for 3 hours. There are no roads off the main one so once you have joined the traffic there is no way to go but forward or back. As this is the only road that goes that way we had no choice but to crawl along at a snails pace.

Once we got past Lorne the traffic was normal but it did mean what should have taken us a couple of hours took much longer. We started looking for a campsite but of course all the campsites within a reasonable distance of the festival were full. The Great Ocean Road is always busy at this time of year anyway so we had to go past the beach areas.

The first one we came to that would let us camp we accepted. It wasn’t the one we had hoped to camp at but as it was getting late we decided we had better stay put. Speaking to people on the site later who had tried 7 sites before getting into this one meant we probably made the right decision.

We did however camp on the children’s play area as it was all that was left and we weren’t the last as they kept squeezing people in.

The site was quite a nice one although we were quite exposed to the wind which was quite strong. It was also quite cold. We decided that Melbourne was a bit too cold for us and Kerry was glad she lived in Adelaide.

The big plus for this site was that there were lots of koalas in the trees. Just as I was leaving the tent in the morning I startled one that was on the ground, having come down from one tree I watched it walk (very oddly) across to the next tree and climb it. They make a pretty loud noise as well at night.

We also saw plenty of kookaburras here and one landed on a branch right where we were sitting.

We took a drive to the Otway Fly which is a long wooden walkway at tree height. There were a lot of people so we didn’t see any wildlife but it was definitely different. It was fascinating to see the ferns from above and see the patterns they make. There was also abseiling to the ground but we declined that.

The weather stayed a bit grim, with showers, it was cold and very windy. We were hoping our next site would have better weather.

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