Day 7 Great ocean Road and the Grampians

The weather this morning was not conducive to a helicopter flight over the 12 Apostles, so we decided to check out a few other rock formations then head north to the Grampian mountains.

                                  

                                   

                                               

The entire area here is known as the “shipwreck coast” due to the high number of ships that had met their fate in these dangerous waters in the days before GPS. There are approximately 638 known shipwrecks along Victoria’s coast, though only around 240 of them have been discovered. Perhaps the most famous is that of the Loch Ard, an iron-hulled clipper ship that was lost in 1878 while sailing from England to Melbourne.Voyaging along the southern Australian coast the Loch Ard was caught in continuous fogs that left her captain mistakenly thinking he was some 50 miles out from the treacherous rocks and cliffs. Instead the Loch Ard was dangerously close to land and on 1 June struck Mutton Bird Island to the east of Port Campbell. Frantic efforts to save the 1700-tonne ship failed and she was dashed on to rocks. Only two people from the 54 passengers and crew survived. A cabin boy called Tom Pearce helped save a young woman Eva Carmichael, who had been washed on wreckage into the cove now known as Loch Ard Gorge. After they spent the night in a cave Pearce climbed the gorge's cliffs and eventually found help.

Our first stop today was to visit the bay where the two survivors made land fall. 

                              

From here we continued up the coast to the Bay of Islands, another area where many a ship sank in fog or storm (or due to just plain bad navigation).

                               

Just before heading north away from the coast, we paid a visit to Tower Hill,  where you can drive down into the base of an extinct volcano which now serves as a nature preserve.  There are several hikes in and around the preserve which give you a chance to meet some of the local flora and fauna, more koalas, emus and a variety of birds and insects. The area was turned back over to Aboriginal people whose ancestors populated the area before the European invasion. They now run the nature preserve.

 

         

 The remainder of the day was taken up with driving up to the Grampians National Park in western Victoria. We planned to stay in Dunkeld at the southern end of the park, then spend tomorrow morning hiking.  Our hotel in Dunkeld has a destination restaurant and we planned on eating dinner here until we saw the menu.  The offerings were really bizarre, and really, really expensive.  Neither Jeri nor I found anything remotely appealing.  We decided that we had very pedestrian taste in foods, and found a pub across the street that fit the bill perfectly.  Before dinner, we took a walk around the local arboretum and saw hundreds of parrots and Galahs.