Sunday 21/01
We wake up at 8:30am. I didn’t sleep too bad in this confined bed “upstairs”.
It takes us 2 hours to be ready to leave (showers, unfold the tent, undo the beds, breakfast…).
We go back to the Gibson Steps, located 1 km before the Twelve Apostles (when coming from Princetown). We can make our way down the beach via the steps that were carved into the face of the 70-metre high vertical cliff by local settler Mr. Gibson. We can view, from beach level, two offshore giant limestone stacks rising up out of the sea.
The weather is not great.
We continue our way along the coast.
We haven’t booked any place to sleep for tonight. It will depend on the weather. It also has advantages not to book. We can decide wherever we stop.
The Great Ocean Road officially ends in Allansford, a bit before Warrnambool.
We stop in Warrnambool for more than one hour. First to do a Woolies, second to eat at Hungry Jack’s (the name of Burger King in Australia) – for the first time – and third to fill up the gas tank of our camper.
We stop a bit further, in Port Fairy, a fishing village, for a quick walk.
From Portland we drive 20 km to Bridgewater, from where we start the Cape Bridgewater Seal Walk. This walk climbs along the coastal cliffs for 2.5 kms. The reward is a viewing platform directly above the largest seal colony on the Australian mainland. It takes us 2 hours for the return trip. It’s 8pm when we come back to the camper.
We decide to spend the night in Portland. There’s a free camping.
After filling up the water tank of the camper, we go to this free camping, which is very nice indeed. There should have more such camping sites. It’s in the town, in a green plot of land, with very clean toilets (and a dump area). We have plenty of space (in many paying camping sites, we are between 2 other campers). We wonder what we pay for in the other “paying” camping sites (95$ per night in the camping of the last 2 nights, e.g). Mainly for power supply and the hot shower (the Wi-Fi was not working well), and also for the permission to stay there (it is not always easy to find places where we are allowed to spend the night). And it is not totally true for the hot shower since we can take one in our camper; I did it tonight and it’s ok.
We prepare a salad tonight, which we eat outside. Kids are in bed by 10:30pm.
Isabelle and I work in the camper (midnight for her; 1am for me). Everybody sleeps in the camper tonight; it’s only the second time that it happens since the beginning (in 7 nights).
