The Great Ocean Road and the Black Spur

Time to leave the indigenous culture behind and catch up with Kate. After extended time in hotels (lovely as they were), it's nice to be with friends in a home.  Kate and her family provides energizing hospitality, and home comforts, and then she  and I leave the family behind so she can show me the remarkable southeast coast of Australia

Kate is driving a standard that is better suited to hill-climbs, which the car will be doing.  I am sitting on the wrong side of the car remembering why I don’t drive in foreign countries.  

And then there’s this:

I don’t know what I’d do if I were driving and a kangaroo ran across the road.  Another good reason for me not to drive in a foreign country.

As we cruise along the two-lane Great Ocean Road heading south, the view of the coast ranges from beautiful to spectacular.  Sometimes in clear view, sometimes glimpsed between trees, I see the blue waters of the Pacific and golden sands of the beach at the foot of some tremendous cliffs.

  

The turbulent Pacific waters have eroded areas of the coast over millions of years.  The stone that withstood the waters' force created caves that wore away to arches.  The tops of the arches wore away leaving limestone stacks along the shore.  Now even the stacks are collapsing. 
When Europeans first named this area, they called it The Twelve Apostles.  Now only nine remain; limestone pillars as high as 70 feet, studding the coast along the cliffs.  The most recent pillar collapse was in 2005.

The Twelve Apostles

That pillar collapse was probably nothing compared to The London Bridge collapse. The Bridge formed when the softer rock underneath eroded, leaving a rock bridge connecting the outcrop to the mainland. 

London Bridge

But in 1990, the connecting stone crashed into the sea, stranding two people atop the remaining rock, sixty feet above the roiling Pacific waters.  Ultimately they were rescued by helicopter.

The Grotto formed differently.  An ancient swamp percolated up from beneath the surface, and ate away the rock until it created a sinkhole at the ocean’s edge.  A window of rock separates the pool from the blue water beyond.

The Grotto

We leave the Great Ocean Road behind and head for the Black Spur, a gorgeous wooded mountain road with ash trees reaching two hundred feet to the sun. Sunlight  filters through the leaves to the ground below so that lush vegetation can grow below as well as above.  The wooded beauty evokes New England forest to me…old growth, majestic and lovely.   

And next, Kate tells me, we’ll see Faerie Penguins.     Faerie Penguins????

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