Cycle-Touring in Oz: The Great Southern Touring Route

Cycle-Touring in Oz: The Great Southern Touring Route Harry Smith Last year I got a letter telling me my air points were about to expire. Checking the figures, I found I had just enough to get a free trip to the east coast of Australia, and after consulting the atlas for possibilities I settled on a two-week cycle-touring trip in late November taking in Melbourne, the Great Ocean Road, the Grampian ranges, and the historic gold-mining towns of Allarat and Ballarat. This circuit, I later discovered, is known by the Victorian tourist industry as the Great Southern Touring Route.

I flew into Melbourne into a 35-degree heat wave and got the train out to Geelong. The Great Ocean Road follows along the south coast of Victoria from Geelong to Warrnambool. This is an incredibly varied and scenic stretch of coastline, with rocky shores, coastal cliffs, surf beaches, dry scrublands, dairy farming plains, and wooded ranges descending to the sea. Generally the road follows the coast, at times being cut into the cliffs, but for a number of stretches it detours inland. Along the route are scattered a string of small coastal settlements and resort towns. I spent 5 days cycling this route, mainly staying in motor camps along the way. Sometimes it reminded me vaguely of the East Cape, at other times of the Kaikoura or Paparoa coastlines. But some places, particularly the stretch between Princetown and Port Campbell, are completely unique.

One of the nicest places campgrounds I stayed at was at the Cumberland River, a magical setting beside a river flowing out the bush-covered ranges through a canyon with towering rock walls and a deserted beach just across the other side of the road out in front. Next morning I spent a couple of hours going for a walk up the river to the Cumberland Falls. The undergrowth could have been in New Zealand, with bracken and ferns, but when you looked up at the canopy you knew you were in another country - towering eucalypts rose towards the sky with their distinctive-coloured bark. I went for a refreshing dip in the pool at the base of the falls before returning.

Most of the way it was reasonably flat but there was one day where I must have done over twelve hundred metres of climbing. This was the day between Apollo Bay and Lavers Hill. From Apollo Bay the road climbed hundred of metres into the ranges of the Otway National Park. I then took a side trip out to the Cape Otway lighthouse, which involved a long descent followed by a long climb back up to the main road. The road then dropped down into a farming valley and out to the coast before doing a long sweep inland followed by another 500-metre climb up to the top of Lavers Hill. The road climbed steeply and I found myself stopping for lots of exhausted rests before I reached the top. I thought Australia was supposed to be flat! Towards the top I gave up and began Tramping & Mountaineering 2004 walking. At the very crest, located incongruously over 500 metres above sea level and 10 kilometres inland, I came across a large tourist sign proclaiming "Welcome to the Shipwreck Coast"!

But to make up for all the climbing, this day also had some of the most impressive vegetation on the trip. The road through the Otway National Park was lined with huge mountain ashes, a kind of giant eucalypt, while parts of the road down to the lighthouse had a more open, park-like feel. But perhaps the most amazing feature of the flora in this area is the small patches of strange, alien "rain forest" which occur in amongst the eucalypt forest, surviving tucked away down is small, damp gullies. I first came upon this mysterious "rain forest" at a place called Mait's Rest. Lots of Aussie tourists had stopped there to look at this rare phenomenon. What was this strange, intriguing, ancient rain forest like, I wondered? I set off on the fifteen-minute tourist walk, and what did I find myself in but good old New Zealand beech forest! Technically the beech trees are a different species from the New Zealand ones but you would have to be a botanical expert to tell the difference. With the beech trees and mosses and ferny undergrowth, I could have been back home in New Zealand! The Aussie tourists were looking around in wonder at this alien landscape but I felt right at home! Back where I live, I almost felt like saying, we have a hundred thousand hectares of this stuff. It's called the Tararuas - and you're welcome to come and take it away!

At Lavers Hill I free-camped in amongst another remnant of this mysterious, ancient rain forest at the Melba Gully State Park. This also had another mysterious wonder: glow worms! Again, these were just like their New Zealand namesakes, but they occurred here in a profusion which I have never encountered in the New Zealand bush. They were a magical sight as they lined the bush walk in their thousands at twilight.

The most amazing and unique coastal scenery on the Great Ocean Road occurred the following day between Princetown and Port Campbell. Here a flat-topped plain ends abruptly at the coast, and the pounding power of the waves has created a unique landscape of dramatic cliffs, indented sea canyons, and isolated off-shore rock stacks. Almost before I realised it I came upon the most famous feature of them all: the Twelve Apostles. Photos of this array of twelve large rock stacks rising out of the surf at the foot of a dramatic coastal cliff appear in innumerable books and brochures and calendars.

I was prepared for the dramatic scenery at the Twelve Apostles, but what I wasn't quite prepared for were all the tourists. Most of the Great Ocean Road was more or less deserted, but not here. The stunning photographs always show just the Apostles themselves and the shoreline, perhaps with a visitor or two arranged artistically in the corner for scale; what they don't show are the boardwalks and viewing platforms, the car park for all the cars and buses, and the crowds. The viewing platforms are actually accessed by a pedestrian underpass beneath the highway from the Visitors Centre on the other side! Still, this is a spectacular spot, and I used up a fair amount of film here.

A couple of kilometres up the road is another spectacular coastal formation - Loch Ard Gorge. The coastline here has been dissected into a maze of evil-looking inlets and canyons, where the waves thunder against the vertical cliffs. The Loch Ard, a sailing ship carrying colonists to Australia, was wrecked against the cliffs here in 1878 and all but two of the people aboard perished. The lucky two, a sailor and a woman passenger, were swept into the long sea canyon or gorge which now bears the ship's name and which providentially ends in a sandy beach rather than in wave-pounded cliffs. A display in the visitors centre told the story of how the sailor, having been washed ashore on the beach, spotted the woman clinging helplessly to a piece of floating wreckage and plunged back out into the waves to rescue her, then scaled the vertical cliffs to go and seek help. It was dramatic, romantic stuff; however I have to say the walls of the gorge above the beach didn't look quite as high in real life as they did in the dramatic Victorian newspaper illustrations showing the sailor hanging on by his finger nails for dear life, and there were one or two spots where I thought they didn't really look too difficult to scale. And alas for the newspaper gossip columnists of the time, the woman went back to Britain soon after and she and the sailor never met again!

Tramping & Mountaineering 2004

That evening I had the only really bad weather on the whole trip. I had just finished visiting the Loch Ard Gorge when the sky began to blacken alarmingly and within minutes it was raining. I leapt back on my bike and sprinted the 10 kilometres up the road to the town of Port Campbell, arriving at the campground just before the full onset of one of the most amazing thunder and lightning storms I have ever witnessed. The rain bucketed down and huge flashes of lightning lit up the sky out to sea. I spent that evening sitting in the camp TV room with a group of Aussies watching the live final of Australian Idol! My tent was only a hundred metres away but the rain was so heavy that there was no way I was going to step outside until it stopped. In fact, it was so heavy that we could hardly hear anything above the noise of the rain on the corrugated iron roof - which, depending on your musical tastes, might not be considered a bad The Twelve Apostles (Harry Smith)

The Twelve Apostles (Harry Smith)

thing!

The next day brought more amazing coastal formations, including the Arch, the Grotto, and London Bridge. The latter is an offshore island that used to be connected to a headland by a long, spindly natural arch. Visitors could walk out over the bridge to the island beyond. But, alas, London Bridge has fallen down! One day a few years ago it suddenly collapsed, apparently leaving a couple of hapless tourists trapped on the newly formed island for several hours before they were rescued by helicopter!

From Peterborough to Warrnambool the road heads inland through dairying country, but at just one point, by taking a back road, it is possible to reach the coast again. This is Childers Cove, and it is a stunning spot. It has some of the spectacular cliffs and sea-stacks of the Twelve Apostles area but none of the swarming hordes of tourists. I had it totally to myself as I stopped for lunch, then stripped off and went for a play in the surf.

From Warrnambool I caught a bus northwards for phase two of the trip: the Grampians. This is an extensive area of folded sandstone ranges arising from the plains, with spectacular cliffs, escarpments, and rock formations. Although not very high by New Zealand standards (the highest point is only 1167 metres) they have a rugged grandeur which belies their height. The whole area is a large national park and is criss-crossed by a network of roads and tracks. As I approached from Tramping & Mountaineering 2004 the south the peaks of Mt Sturgeon and Mt Abrupt rose slowly above the horizon until they came to dominate the landscape.

From Dunkeld at the southern end of the Grampians I cycled up through the ranges at far as Halls Gap, the main tourist centre and headquarters of the national park. I started off going up the beautiful Victoria Valley, a farming area extending northwards between the ranges where ancient eucalypts lined the roads and the ragged spine of the ranges rose in the distance beyond the farmland, then crossed over the Mirrantatwa Gap and continued through the middle of the ranges themselves.

I was able to free-camp in the Grampians, and also enjoy a campfire in the evenings. I also saw more wildlife here than anywhere else. On several occasions I saw wallabies bouncing away into the bush, and once I saw a pair of emus. In the Victoria Valley I was followed for several kilometres by a flock of squawking white galahs. On one walk I saw a large lizard and was assured by a passing Aussie that it wasn't poisonous – which startled me because I had never considered the possibility that it might be poisonous and had been virtually jamming my camera down its throat. On another walk I saw a large snake curled up on the track, which another passing Aussie assured me was deadly poisonous, and we gave it a wide berth.

At one campground I was watched at close range by a large black crow as I was having lunch. I put the biscuit I was nibbling down on the picnic table beside me in order to pick up my camera and take a photo, and before I knew it the crow flew in with all the speed and manoeuvrability of a jet fighter, grabbed my biscuit off the table in full flight, took off backwards, and flew away into the bush with a distinct smirk of triumph on its face! I was disappointed to lose my biscuit, but the whole performance had been executed with such grace and speed and style and cunning that I almost felt like applauding. There was clearly an intelligence behind its beady yellow eye!

I did several walks in the Grampians. I was going to climb one of the two largest peaks at the southern end, Mt Sturgeon or Mt Abrupt, but the weather in the morning was clagged in so I climbed a little bump in between called the Piccaninny instead. But from the top I noticed that the cloud had cleared from Mt Sturgeon so I detoured back down the road and climbed it as well. Here I first came across an Australian icon: the grass tree. This weird plant is to Australia what the cabbage tree is New Zealand, featuring a squat, stalk-like trunk topped by a radiating mane of grass-like leaf blades.

Up behind Halls Gap is an area known as the Wonderland Range, a name which couldn't be more apt. I spent an afternoon up there and discovered an amazing landscape of rocky crags, sculptured outcrops, and gnarled vegetation. The track wandered up through a rocky ravine known as the Grand Canyon, followed along a strange natural slot in the sandstone christened Silent Street, and emerged out on top of the range at an outcrop View from The Pinnacle above Halls Gap (Harry Smith)

Tramping & Mountaineering 2004 called the Pinnacle, which jutted out over the abyss and gave superb views of Halls Gap several hundred vertical metres down in the valley below.

Next morning I climbed Mt Rosea, one of the most spectacular lookout points in the region. The track wound through more weathered, ancient-looking, rocky landscapes sprinkled with beautiful wild flowers before emerging out onto the crest of a dramatic escarpment, with awesome views out over the surrounding valleys and ranges. At one point the track crossed a split in the crest of the escarpment over a bridge known as the Gate of the East Wind, before reaching the high point of Mt Rosea itself. That afternoon I took a bike ride out to another lookout point know as the Balconies, which gave more superb views. The ranges seemed to go on forever, spread out beneath my feet, shimmering in the heat haze under the blue sky, with several large lakes or reservoirs occupying the valley floors.

From the Balconies I continued down to McKenzie Falls, the largest waterfall in the Grampians. This cascades over an escarpment down into the canyon below. A track winds down beside the falls to the floor of the valley but it was closed off with tape and large signs proclaiming Danger, Track Closed. I blithely ignored them and carried on down. The only possible reason for the closure I could see was one slightly broken step towards the bottom, but you would have had to deliberately throw yourself over the edge to be in any danger, and even then I think you would have been struggling to do yourself any harm. It seems the Australian park staff are just as paranoid as their

McKenzie Falls (Harry Smith)

New Zealand equivalents when it comes to perceived visitor risks - but the track closure did mean I had the bottom of falls all to myself!

Just before leaving the Grampians I took a short walk up a stream behind Halls Gap to some pools known as the Venus Baths, where I encountered two Aussies behaving very eccentrically. They were equipped with lots of camera gear and one was lying flat on the ground, peering intently into the water. “Quick, over here”, he suddenly called out to his companion, who rushed over and joined him in peering into the water. What was going on?, I wondered. All was revealed when they stood up and I saw that they were both wearing tee-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Australian Mayfly Society”!

From Halls Gap I set out on stage three of the trip: back to Melbourne via the historic gold-mining towns of Allarat and Ballarat. The day began with a superb ride south-east down the outside of the Grampians, but approaching Allarat I had the worst moment of the trip when I heard a loud "ping" and my back wheel suddenly started wobbling. I had broken a spoke. To replace it required a hubremoval tool. Fortunately I had a hub-removal tool in my tool kit. Unfortunately I had bought it for my other bike, and when I now attempted to use it I discovered that it didn't fit my current bike! I spent a frustrating hour beside the road in the blazing sun, loosening and tightening adjacent spokes in an attempt to get the wheel straight enough to continue on, all the while being pestered by a dozen or so large Aussie blowflies buzzing about my face and eyes – no doubt attracted by the smell Tramping & Mountaineering 2004 of several days' worth of accumulated sweat! Eventually I was able to straighten the wheel enough to limp on into town where I cooled off my frustrations with a dip in the swimming pool at the motor camp.

But in some ways this was a blessing in disguise because I was running short of days if I wanted to have a few days left to look around Melbourne at the end of the trip, and it gave me an excuse to do what I was thinking of doing anyway - get the bus! So the next day I travelled in air-conditioned comfort through to Ballarat with a clear conscience, covering in an hour and a half what it would have taken me a whole day to do on the bike! I spent a day there wandering around Sovereign Hill, a reconstruction of the 19th century goldfields and frontier town, and the associated gold museum, and got the commuter train back into Melbourne the following morning.

And so ended a brilliant trip. The great Southern Touring Route is a superb circuit with some amazing scenery, and one which I would recommend without hesitation to anybody looking for somewhere to go cycle-touring for two or three weeks. The Great Ocean Road south of Lorne, clinging to the cliffs between the forest-covered hillside and the azure blue of the sea, the giant mountain ashes of the Otways, the sea stacks of the Twelve Apostles, the rock formations of Wonderland, the hazy expanse of the Grampian ranges spread out beneath my feet from the summit of Mt Rosea - these will remain in my memory for a long time to come.