After a wonderfully long night sleep last night I was feeling much more energised this morning and ready to smash out another big day before this adventure draws to a close. And smash it out we did. I have been indulged by Bob and today was all about photos with the camera and tripod. It takes so much longer than with a phone but the enjoyment factor (for me) is so much higher. I’ve had just the best day to round out our major sightseeing for the 4 months we’ve spent travelling this incredible country. So very grateful to have this opportunity. Bob was such a trooper and did more than his share of carrying camera gear up big climbs today (camera photos only in the blog today – saves me going through all the phone photos as well 🙂 ).

We headed out this morning to the Otway Forest – somewhere we’ve never been in all our previous trips along the Great Ocean Road. First stop was the Californian Redwood Forest. These trees were planted in 1936 and are very mature specimens now. Loved it here.

We then moved on to Hopetoun Falls. There was a short, sharp descent to the base of the falls. We haven’t had the luxury of picking the best time to visit lightwise, so just had to make do with partial cloud cover when possible for the photos. It’s cloudy when you need sun and sunny when you need clouds seems to be how it goes 🙁 .

Next stop was Beauchamp Falls. This was over 3km of descent to the base of the falls and back up. The light was just terrible here, but it is what it is. I still enjoyed balancing on a rock in the middle of a stream with the tripod perched to try and get the shot. And the falls were so good! Best I’ve seen for a long time (I guess it’s not always about the shot 😉 ).

I took a turn at the wheel for the drive back to camp and managed to survive a near miss when a foreign tourist pulled over (sort of) while there was a line of traffic behind on the windy hills (think they saw a koala). 10 vehicles all managed to avoid each other as they came around the bend at 80km/hr on each other’s tail. We all ended up stopped on the road just sitting there and I was sure there had been a crash or an animal incident….but no, a carload of people were all standing at the base of a tree taking photos. Just wow!!!!

We came back to the van for a brief stop before heading back out for sunset photos on ‘the road’. We headed to the 12 Apostles at around 6pm and were gobsmacked at the number of people there. I reckon over 100 so I can’t even imagine what it’s like during the day when busloads of tourists from Melbourne are around. I took my shots and there was still an hour until sunset at 8pm so we packed up and moved 20km down the road to London Bridge. So glad we did that. Only a handful of people, and I set up next to another photographer and just snapped my way through to half an hour after sunset. Such a great way to round out the big ticket items on this trip.

We arrived back to the van by 9pm ready to think about dinner!. Tomorrow we start heading north towards home via a path we haven’t taken previously. No idea where we’ll end up but I’m sure there will be things to see when we do.