[Scott] This morning we caught our late morning flight from Sydney to Melbourne. Melbourne is Australia’s second largest city, and is located on the southern coast in the state of Victoria. We picked up our little Hyundai Getz – a small two door with a manual transmission. Rental cars were really expensive online for Melbourne. Turns out the Australian Grand Prix is here this coming weekend, so maybe that’s why. This rental pickup was a bit of a pain. First, the Expedia printout just said pickup the rental in the Airport Terminal at Advantage RentACar. We discovered there isn’t an Advantage RentACar service available from this airport! After making some calls, I discovered that Advantage has set us up with Red Spot Rentals, and we need to walk over to the Hilton and meet some guy who will drive us to the rental lot. There isn’t a shuttle – that would be too professional for this company. We pile into this small car and this bizarre man drives just the two of us over to this building marked “AIRPORT PARKING”. Inside there is a big desk – half the desk for the parking company and the other half for Red Spot Rentals. Have you been to a place like Hertz where they have five agents at a long desk waiting to help you? Not here – half a desk – and no sign ANYWHERE saying Red Spot Rentals. So they set us up with our little car, which had something like 50,000km on it. Oh, and the rental liability is $3000AUD, and it was costly to lower the liability. A shady operation and Expedia should really here about this, but the car runs fine and I figure it’s going to take half a day to get out of this and find another option, so we head out on our way.
We did a few circles around the airport area, and narrowly avoid taking a $10 toll road in the wrong direction before we got on the road toward Geelong, where the Great Ocean Road begins. This is probably the most famous coastal drive in Australia. It’s a winding drive along the coast east of Melbourne, with the most famous site being the limestone formations called “The Twelve Apostles”. We drove through the surfing town of Torquay, and stopped in at the information center and a man gave us a sheet with all the “Places to see on the Great Ocean Road”. The first recommendation was to head over to the legendary Bells Beach in Torquay where they often hold world class surfing competitions. We got there and it wasn’t exactly what we were hoping to see – the water was virtually flat and there wasn’t a single soul in the water – maybe on our way back through later we’ll see some surfers. Next we stopped at Point Addis, where it was really windy and cold so we didn’t stay long.
The sheet also recommended stopping at this golf course in Anglesea, which has one thousand resident kangaroos. One thousand ‘roos – gotta see that! We’ve been in Australia four days now, and we’re ready to see these creatures. There weren’t any ‘roos hopping around in the streets of Sydney, much to our disappointment. We pulled in to the golf course parking lot, and sure enough they are everywhere often in groups of 25 or so. The course didn’t have many golfers on it, so I wandered out to get a closer look and found a group of roos not far away. They were really calm, and I was able to get some pretty good close-up pictures, which probably wasn’t the smartest thing. Fortunately, they didn’t start boxing me or give me any trouble and it was cool watching them hop around up close. They didn’t seem fazed by my presence at all. Next, we stopped at the Aireys Inlet Lighthouse and saw some good views. We got to the town of Lorne and drove up to see Erskine Falls, which was a major disappointment after all of the incredible waterfalls that we saw in NZ!
It was probably an hour until sunset, so we decided to stop for the night right there in Lorne. We pulled into this Best Western. A gentleman showed us a room and we couldn’t believe how nice it was – by far the nicest Best Western either of us had ever seen. This place definitely looked like it had been appointed by a professional interior decorator, certainly not what we expected. Turns out this hotel got one of BW’s top ratings, and since it was late he quoted us the room for $100 - half of the normal $200 rate. This hotel owner was so kind, and he gave us all kinds of tips on the things to see including Koalas in the wild just up the road. This man and his wife just moved from Tasmania a few years back and purchased this hotel, and completely remodeled it. We were happy with our find – especially after our not so good find with the sketchy rental car company. This was in really nice surroundings too – super tall trees surrounded the three story hotel and there were many interesting birds. There was a bird on our railing outside our room, and I found out later that it was a Laughing Kookabura. It’s hard to describe the interesting calls this bird makes, but it is definitely unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. We enjoyed a great sunset over the ocean, and we walked downtown and got a bite to eat at a small café. We really enjoyed Lorne, a nice small coastal town.
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