Yesterday we left Melbourne and drove southwest toward a natural tourist attraction called The Twelve Apostles. This was a drive through endless dry, yellow fields of sheep and cows interspersed by eucalypts.
We didn’t see any (living) kangaroos, but at one time had to stop for an echidna crossing the road!
The drive took a few hours and eventually we arrived at the destination. Although it’s somewhat remote it was very busy (even on New Year’s Eve!) and mobbed with tourists. And here’s what we came to see:
There were twelve rock formations originally, but many have crumbled and only a few are still visible above the water. The top photo looks west, the bottom east.
The ocean itself was the bigger attraction for me: that’s (arguably) the Southern Ocean which has always been somewhat mysterious and exotic in my mind. Monsters live there, and only madmen dare to sail it.
The winds blowing up from Antarctica were cyclonic and inflated our windbreakers admirably, but it wasn’t exactly cold and out of the wind we even got a bit overheated. A path led us down to a beach (behind and east of where the above photo was taken) where I was able to dip my feet into the ocean…
It was cold! Though it’s farther than the horizon, from this point on Australia the next stop south is Antarctica and the ocean was giving me a hint of what to expect!
We continued to Ballarat where almost everything was closed (it was evening on New Year’s Eve and a Sunday…) so we were forced to enjoy McDonalds, which turned out to be as delicious as it had been for lunch seven hours earlier 😉
Oh and the new year? I welcomed it fast asleep!