Apollo Bay (27th - 29th Oct 2018)

For departure, we had to get up very early at 5 o'clock in the morning to catch our plane in Brisbane, which is 120 km away, and it safely took us to Melbourne in 2.5 hours.

At the airport, we picked up the same type of car again - Mitsubishi Outlander. We had 173 km ahead of us to get to our next destination, the fishing village and surfer's paradise, Apollo Bay.

We arrived at our accommodation, Beacon Point Ocean View Villas, on a hill around 5:30 pm. From here, we had a wonderful view of the ocean and the adjacent rainforest national park, the Great Otway Ranges.

In the Great Ocean Brewhouse, a restaurant in the charming coastal town of Apollo Bay, we had dinner in the evening and tried the various house-made beers. It had been a long day, and we were excited about what awaited us the next day.

After a good night's sleep, we planned our activities for the next day:

We had a small breakfast in town and then drove to the 'Maits Rest Rainforest Trail' - a 2 km circular walk in the rainforest. It was completely different in terms of vegetation: oversized ferns, giant trees, and many different species of birds, with the temperature dropping to just 12 degrees (yes - we experienced a drastic drop in temperature of 20 degrees from Noosa's 32 degrees).

See for yourself in the photo gallery, we tried to capture it visually.

After that, we continued to the 'Cape Otway Lighthouse', a historic lighthouse. We were lucky: there were hardly any visitors, so we could leisurely explore all the viewpoints and climb the lighthouse. The lighthouse keeper welcomed us with a fantastic view from up there.

Since it was early afternoon, we considered driving another 70 km to Princetown to see the rugged coast with the '12 Apostles' (up to 60-meter-high limestone rocks standing in the sea). And that's exactly what we did, and it was worth it.

On the way there, we drove through a beautiful and diverse landscape - sheep and cattle grazing on the meadows and slopes as far as the eye could see.

After the 1.5-hour drive back, we ended the day in a steakhouse and enjoyed a proper piece of meat (eye fillet and T-bone).

On the forest path to our lodge, we saw our first koala bear at dusk and captured it on camera. Yeah!

It was a very beautiful and varied day with breathtaking views of the rugged coast.

The next morning, we will continue inland to the Grampians National Park. We are looking forward to it.