Day 23 - 29/12/13 - Barwon Heads - Hammonds Track Vic

I jumped out of my bed determined not to be fined by the council workers. The wind was still blowing like no tomorrow as I crept out to wind down the legs on the van and put the solar panel away. I was back in the van 2 minutes later and De had assembled the troops for a quick departure. Three minutes down the road we past a police van heading, I am guessing, out to see us! Us 1 – Them 0! We pulled into a beach parking lot and went back to bed for an hour!

We headed of excited that we were starting the Great Ocean Road. As we were driving towards Torquay a ute pulled up alongside of us and gave us a wave. They then pulled away only to slow down to take a photo of us. I smiled happily wondering “What The!” but the passenger wound down the window to tell us that he was following us on Face Book. If you are reading this let us know who you are!!!

 

We drove through Torquay which reminded me of mixture of a windswept Southport Spit and Harbour town with surf shops everywhere! As we left Torquay we started what is considered one of the world’s best ocean drives.

 

About 15 minutes later we got Bells Beach. Now I am not sure what you envisage Bells Beach to look like. De thought there would be some shops and cafe, I thought maybe a corner shop with a few houses. Well, other than a few McMansions in the hills owned by uber rich surfers there was a whole lot a car parks, yep that’s about it! The coastline is a cliff lined wasteland, inhospitable to all but the most determined surfers of which there was only one silly enough to be out there in 30 knot freezing cold winds trying to surf something that resembled a washing machine than a point break. We scrambled down to the beach and were amazed at the power and ferocity of the swell that was breaking onto the beach. The waves were about 2 – 3 meters and were breaking only 10 meters from us but because of the amazing angle of the beach they petered almost immediately. Not even I was tempted to go in!

 

Because it is the Christmas holidays every van park is overflowing with people who are willing to pay $60, $80 or $100 per night for a piece of grass, electricity and maybe running water, all the while being squeezed into a space that I am positive the UN Commisioner for Refugees would deem inhumane. I had discovered a pretty cool app “Wikicamps” that has heaps and heaps of free camps all over Australia and it had a couple in the hinterland behind Aireys Inlet, which was the next town we came to. Aireys Inlet and the next village after it, Fairhaven, are the summer playground for Melbourne’s super rich and some of the houses are beyond belief. We came around one corner and I instantly recognised one of them from a cooking show last Christmas.

 

After being gouged for a couple of supplies we headed up a dirt road (I was certain where this one was going so we weren’t breaking our rule) towards our Cape Otway National Park (free) camp ground.

We were pleasantly surprised to find space for us in well maintained campsite with long drop dunnies. Soon after we arrived a young lad, Gabe, wondered past our campsite with a yabby pot in hand heading towards a small dam nearby. Sam was onto it like a flash and we soon had ours out filled with carrots as we had learnt from Henry in St James. I think they were in there for all of half an hour when the boys, who were now best mates with Gabe, decided they should be checked. Against their fathers guidance they pulled them and low and behold both pots had yabbies in them!

This continued throughout the afternoon and amazingly enough they got about 15 by the time I put the hot water on. In between all of this the boys had dodged a copper head snake and collected a pile of fire wood. De had cooked up a treat doing some cookies in the webber as well as a damper, that was bloody delicious, that we cooked on the coals.

As we had been up at the redicolous hour of 6am we were all pretty stuffed so we hit the hay early, not really sure what we were going to do tomorrow.