In his latest report from his coastal ride around Australia GEOFF HILLencounters legions of attractive people, Tolkein-esque sights, and American tourists trailing a Jeep and boat behind
THE GREAT OCEAN Road is one of the wonders of the world, along with Magnum ice-cream – and beer.
Stretching for 285km, it was built between 1919 and 1932 to commemorate Australian soldiers who died in the first World War, to give employment to those who returned and to rival Pacific Coast Highway in California as one of the planet’s great scenic drives.
We stopped at London Bridge, a double-arched rock formation whose outer span collapsed in 1990 and stranded a couple on the other side, who had to be rescued by helicopter. As it transpired, they were having an affair – and so they got a bit of a shock when they found TV crews waiting to hear of their thrilling rescue.
However, since the chances of Colin and I having an affair were approximately the same as either of us winning the Euromillions, we were free to enjoy the view, which in both directions as far as the eye could see consisted of sandstone cliffs worn by wind and wave into fantastical shapes which in places resembled mythical beings sleeping by the sea.
I was obviously hallucinating due to a shortage of beer, so we rode the short distance down the coast to Port Campbell and parked in front of the only hotel just as the rain started again.
The next morning, I wandered down the main street to get breakfast, passing stores and cafes filled with people who were, almost without exception, gorgeous.
But then, that is hardly surprising: in the the 18th and 19th centuries, when the poor in England were hanged for stealing a currant bun, judges often took pity on the young and beautiful and sent them to a thrilling new life in Botany Bay instead.
The same thing happened after the second World War, when immigration officials, all too aware of the dregs of racism left over from the official White Australia policy of the 1920s, only picked the best looking of the assorted Italian, Greek, Slav and Jewish applicants to make them more acceptable to the predominantly Anglo-Saxon population.
It was, ironically, an Aussie version of the Nazi Aryan policies those refugees were fleeing in the first place.
“Sorry, too swarthy. Next!”
There. Having sorted that out, I returned from the general store, got the toast and coffee organised for the chaps, and we set off for the Twelve Apostles, a row of 200ft high limestone stacks off the coast named after the disciples of an obscure Middle Eastern religious sect called Christianity which got as far as Northern Ireland then died out, not through lack of interest, but through too much.
Sadly, we’d spent so much time farting about in the morning that, by the time we got there, there were only half a dozen left.
Thankfully, it turned out not to have been our fault – simply the erosion that separated them from the coastline in the first place.
Having sorted that out, we packed up and drove on through the Otway hills, a modest name for a stunning landscape of Alpine woods and meadows dotted with quaint wooden farmhouses, so that you expected at any minute to see Julie Andrews skipping gaily down a grassy slope.
If the landscape was Swiss, the weather was pure Irish: gale force winds interspersed with horizontal downpours. We gritted our teeth and rode on, at one stage passing a row of side roads with Lithuanian names, at another, meeting a family touring, in American fashion, in a campervan the size of a bus and towing a double-decker trailer loaded with a Jeep, boat and two motorbikes. At another, still, we emerged from a long run of forest to see, on our left, a symphony of hills and dales straight out of Tolkein’s Middle Earth, with the ocean beyond.
As you can imagine, after such a Tolkeinesque Swiss-Lithuanian-American Irish experience, it was in a state of some cultural confusion that we descended at last to the beachfront village of Apollo Bay.
By that evening, we were safely ensconced down at the local Pan-Asian restaurant tucking into a feast, followed by a glass of port.
It’s a tough life, adventuring.
