TOO HOT FOR TWO BEANS

From Johanna beach in the Melba Gully national park, sandwiched by the Otways, we drive east toward the Twelve Apostles. On the way I navigate Jaimie toward Wreck Beach, famous for its scattered ship wreck remains for a spot of lunch, bare in mind its 35ºc in the middle of the day and we've already been driving for an hour. We take the turn off and the road turns from tarmac to dust and gravel.

Here, if the roads are untreated the dirt has the tendency to become corrugated, making for an extremely bumpy ride, down a steep hillside, on a very narrow track! Finally the road ends and we arrive at an arid, desolate car park 'somewhere'. Its then I happen to catch a sign which reads “366 steps to Wreck Beach”, nice work Storm! Jaimie's knee is fixing well but even just the drivings still causing some swelling, so we'll probably give the steps a miss!

As I'm preparing lunch Jamie goes to take a leak in the bush, when randomly a police man walks out of the shrubs rite where Jaimie is about to pee, ha ha hilarious! A little weird, he introduces himself and informs us that he's doing a routine inspection of remote areas, which makes sense, you could really imagine this guy spending large amounts of time in remote areas. He says he's looking out for arsonists and tells us with an intense briefing that theres a 'total fire ban in place', the name says it all, the bans occur when its been extremely hot and dry for a couple of days and theres fast moving wind. On days like this a bush fire can travel as fast as the blowing winds, a scary thought when thats forty miles an hour. “If a fire breaks out, your best bet is to head for the ocean” he says, great except for the half a mile of rugged bush land between here and there, so its either hobble down 366 steps towards the ocean or rally back up the hillside amidst a burning forest, not great odds. He gives us a card with a number to ring if we see anyone suspicious around (“suspicious like you?” we wonder). Strange to think someone would cause such carnage for a laugh though, the officer tells us 'a laugh' is the least of it, and implies he's caught people in some pretty perverted acts whilst admiring the destruction they've caused, bizarre.

We get back on the road (Great Ocean Road or the B100) and carry on toward the Twelve Apostles. By now its mid afternoon and the sun is central in the sky, the road in the horizon has that effect of a gassy heat blur over it, its scorching, too hot to be driving. Were very hot and very bothered, easy to become agitated in these conditions. When we begin to see the Apostles on the coast were in no mood to stop and play tourist, however spectacular they look, even from a distance. So we carry on up the coast to Port Cambell as we've spotted on the map that theres a swimming beach there, until now theres not actually been a lot of swimming. Of course theres constantly been the ocean at our side but its so rugged that the beaches are often unreachable and the waters treacherous with long, sweeping and endless bays which would quickly have you swept out into the deep, next stop Antarctica! There are news reports daily of swimmers loosing they're life's here. Luckily Port Cambell has what we need, a tiny little port town, with swimming in the old harbour, sheltered from the open sea by a lengthy narrow cove, the water is absolutely freezing but we don't mind after so long traveling in the sweltering conditions.

It finally begins to cool down around six o'clock so we decide to go back and see what all the fuss is about, The Twelve Apostles. Gigantic stacks of lime stone standing hundreds of feet proud from the ocean below, remains of a once present cliff front, formed over the last six hundred years, amazing!

 Its easy along this coast to feel like a tourist sheep, part of a much larger pack of tourist sheep, being herded from one 'Kodac' picture point to the next. Especially when the french people you shared an overnight camping spot with on your first night seem to be everywhere you are, as if we've formed a euro convoy! Easy to let such feelings detract from your experience, here however any thoughts of this kind are instantly eradicated by the sight of these stones, they're presence mesmerises as you are instantly dwarfed, no longer sheep but ants. 

We leave just before sun set, just as people are flooding in to see the stones as they light up deep red with the setting sun on a clear evening. Maybe next time, rite now we'd like to get set up somewhere before dark.