After seeing the 12 Apostles, we headed to the Otway Fly. The Otway Fly is a unique walk through beautiful rainforest commencing at a visitor centre and descending gently to a steel trussed tree walk. The ground progressively drops away taking you on a journey through the upper reaches of the rainforest vegetation down through the ferns of the forest floor to the tranquillity and beauty of the forest canopy. The tree top walk is 25 metres high where you experience a unique, close view of the flora and fauna of the rainforest, and before you know it you are staring out above the tops of some trees and there are also some spectacular stands of ferns to look down on.
There's a 45 metre high lookout, ascended via a spiral stairway through the under story to emerge amongst the crowns of the giants of the forest, and also a springboard cantilever that bounces precariously high over picturesque Young’s Creek. We'd done these before so we left them to Jackie and John to experience on their own - too high for me!
From the Otway Fly we headed to Apollo Bay. Apollo Bay has both swimming and surf beaches, as well as a large boat harbour and marina which is home to a major fishing fleet. Apollo Bay had many shops and restaurants to keep us entertained for the night - and we ended the evening in a bar with decidedly dodgy live music!
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| Our Apollo Bay accomodation |
After breakfast in Apollo Bay, we drove the Shipwreck Coast to our final stop - Lorne. Lorne is a seaside town on Louttit Bay. It is situated by the Erskine River in the
Surf Coast Shire. The sun was still shining so we headed to the beach, until it got a bit chilly, and then went to a wonderful restaurant - Flowers - for dinner in the evening.
As you can see by the photo below, the weather turned through the night, and we woke to a gloomy day and pouring rain!
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| Our Lorne accomodation |
We had breakfast in Lorne, and were still optomistic that the weather would improve, so we went to Bell's Beach. Bells Beach is the home of the world's longest-running surfing competition – the
Rip Curl Pro Surf & Music Festival. The competition was first held in January 1961 and then at Easter every year since. Jackie and John braved the rain to see the beach from the vantage point - Darren and I stayed in the car!
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| Vantage point at Bells Beach |
We had planned to get a ferry to Sorrento and drive back to Melbourne via the Mornington Peninsula, but because of the weather we decided to do some shopping at Surf City in Torquay and then head for home! It was a shame that we couldn't finish off the trip like we'd planned, but it was still a wonderful break away......and on the plus side, we went out for dinner in our local pub when we got back, where Darren and John had the biggest pies!!!!!!
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