... and there

Unfortunately we had to discover it was impossible to rent a car between Xmas and New Year's. There were just too many tourists flooding the city, and they obviously had planned ahead - in contrast to us. So after visiting quite a few car rental companies we gave up looking through the ads of organized tours again. Two days was what we had in mind for a visit of the Great Ocean Road, it was supposed to be a road trip in our own car. Now we had to face the facts, there were only one and three day tours offered. We had no choice and took the one day opportunity, still there were heaps of offers but I think we were quite lucky with our choice! The next morning we found ourselves in a bus with 14 others, mostly Japanese, on the way west. First funny discovery: the music for the trip came out of an iPod with playlist fitting the scenery or the upcoming sights. Very cool.
Our first stop was at an Aborigial Culture Center, where we were shown some more or less interesting facts and things (including some emus). Didn't really know that there were still Abos living in tribes, practicing there religion, for most of em you see in Sydney are old drunken bums sitting on the street in Redfern! In the end we listened to a pretty cool didgeridoo performance and than after walking through their enormous garden for a while had to be back on the bus.
We went on to Bell's Beach, a famous surf beach where the world's oldest surf competition is still on every year. Quite nice there, unfortnuately we didn't really have enough time to go have a swim. On our way there we stopped to see some Koalas. Yeah, these admirable creatures get to sleep most of the day, eating the rest of the time. Very impressive seeing them sitting just there, not really caring about us.
For lunch we stopped at Apollo Beach, where Marc and I relaxed and had a swim in the very cold water. How refreshing, some nice views and sand in my pants included. No waves. During the afternoon we had another stop for a short rain forest tour, the cold type. Only there and (tata) on Tasmania. What a preview. While driving next to the cliffs listening to some Moby tracks arranged to underline the scenic athmosphere it first came to my mind that I might be off not too bad having somebody else to drive the car while I was spacing out. They even had some games, mostly these metal puzzles, to shorten the ride.
In the late afternoon we finally came to the Apostels, which are just too touristic in my opinion. I had a hard time taking some pictures (notice the one that broke down lately) not showing all the busloads of families, daytrippers (yeah, like us) and wannabe backpackers hanging out there. First I thought the planned 45mins our stay was meant to last would be very short, but I had enough time to explore what could be explored (well, I might have wanted to climb down to the beach, but that is a different thing) and I was just about to get really annoyed about the masses when I realized I had to get back to the car. Marc even did a helicopter flight (what a tourist ). Not far from there we visited the shipwreck coast and Lock Ard Gorge, where we managed to climb into the very interesting cave, full of stalactites and -mites. Brilliant. Our last real stop was the London Bridge, which is not only cool to see but features a funny story.
It tooks us some hours to get back to Melbourne, including a dinner stop, and summing the day up I think we were really busy. But on the other hand a selfmade two day tour in a rented car would probably not have provided a lot more time to see stuff, for it would have come with the hassle of driving and finding. I guess it turned out to be okay and as I (spoken today) know that we could make good use of the extra day in Melbourne, I am satisfied with that.