We decided to squeeze in a two day tour with Wildlife Tours during our time in Melbourne, as we didn’t want to pass up the chance to visit the famous Great Ocean Road. It was a cool morning when we were picked up from St Paul’s Cathedral. As the day progressed, the wind and showers were a bit of a shock after our heat exposure in Uluru, but this didn’t ruin the amazing views along the coast.
We spent the first day driving along the world-renowned road, stopping off to soak up the atmosphere of the Twelve Apostles, Loch Ard beach, Cape Patton etc.
We also headed to Maits Rest rainforest walk, where we spotted one of the local carnivorous snails.
A highlight was searching for koalas near the roadside. We were able to view a few quite close up. We also fed local parrots that enjoyed using us as perches. I even got an extra little present from one of them – lucky me!
We spent the night in Torquay and enjoyed a delicious barbecue with our group, including a taste of a scrumptious kangaroo steak. In the morning we had a quick look at the famous Bells Beach and the different shopping outlets of the famous surf brands that are from there.
We then caught a scenic ferry across to Cape Woolamai and made our way to the wonderful Maru Wildlife Centre. For $2 per tub of feed, we had a great couple of hours hand-feeding kangaroos, wallabies, lamas, horses, donkeys and birds.
After a quick stop at Panny’s chocolate shop we them made our way to the beach. It was rugged and beautiful. Between the seaweed we ended up playing spot the washed up animal: in total we stumbled across a seal, an albatross, two puffer fish and a penguin.
Finally, we got to see some live penguins at the Phillip Island parade. After searching for them in the scenic rocks above the crashing waves, we made our way to the show stands and were lucky enough to get the best seats on the house, with penguins just a metre or so in front of us as theywaddled up onto the beach and off into the shrub to find their burrows. They were indeed worth going to see, and made a great trip even better.
Definitely one to do!
Tour: 2-3rd October’14
chrisandlaurentravel 