Australia’s wild and unforgiving coast makes this ‘great walk’ sublime

Time and tide wait for no person, and this afternoon, it’s the tide we’re timing. Lunch is at the Blanket Bay campground, such a sublime spot on Victoria’s southern coast we could just as well while away the hours here, exploring its clear rock pools and empty beaches. But we have our walking shoes on and it’s the Great Ocean Walk we’re about to taste on the first day of our Great Ocean Road long weekend.

This coast-hugging walk has sea views in abundance, but among its highlights are sections with long beach walks and many of those rely on a low tide to allow passage around the many capes. Pick the wrong tide and you might be trapped until the right one comes along.

Following the track in the Great Otway National Park.

We start out above the beach, moving along easily for a few kilometres and then head down towards the sea, over a beautiful inlet where the Parker River trickles over the sand and into the sea – easy enough for us to hop over.

Our guides are James Barclay and Mckenzie Morris, both young, fit, eager and full of local knowledge and working so well together. That’s not entirely surprising – “We’re a couple,” Morris says with a smile, “so don’t worry if you see James getting a bit close.”

We continue along, and beneath us are the remains of the timber cargo ship, Eric the Red, wrecked here in September 1880. Barclay explains that its cargo and wreckage were spread from Cape Otway to Apollo Bay, much of it scooped up by the locals. Houses in Apollo Bay were said to have been built from it. The sand above its remnants comes and goes – sometimes the beams of its hull show through, like a set of ghostly old ribs, but for us, they’re hidden.

On we go, over rocky shelves and beaches until we regain the track near Cape Otway – the waters of Bass Strait to its east and the Southern Ocean to the west. We have enough time to explore the cape and its lighthouse precinct – the keepers’ cottages and their hardy outbuildings. You can stay here, but our lodge is a little way down the road, tucked into the bush on the way to Joanna Beach.

The lodge and its sunken courtyard.

The minibus drops us at the lodge, where manager and chef Meredith Femino, greets us warmly, telling us the lodge “is basically yours, so make yourselves right at home”.

It has a central lounge and dining area that opens to an outdoor lounge with a fire pit. There’s a kitchen across the way and outside, a long bench seat with a line-up of a dozen or so foot baths – more about that later.

The rooms stretch off away from these common areas and come with huge sliding glass doors that open to the bush beyond. It’s a big space, big bed and bathroom behind that stretches across the width of the room. Not much in the way of hanging or storage space, but that’s OK for a two-night stay.

Back for a dinner of southern rock lobster from the nearby Apollo Bay Fisherman’s Co-Op. It’s fresh and delicious – Femino doesn’t unduly interfere with the catch, finishing it with a lemon and garlic crumb. Ingredients are local wherever possible – including cheese, milk and yoghurt from Schulz Organic Dairy, over the hills in the dairy country of south-west Victoria.

Inside a guest room, with its sliding doors opening to the bush.

Breakfast comes with that Schulz bounty, as well as fresh fruit, then scrambled eggs and mushrooms – fuel for the day ahead. In total, the Great Ocean Walk covers 110 kilometres, from Apollo Bay to that Great Ocean Road landmark, the Twelve Apostles. As much as anything, our long weekend is a taster, covering about 30 kilometres on foot.

The downside of staying in a lodge removed from the track is that you can’t simply gear-up and walk off from the door. The upside is that, safari-style, you can choose sections that might best suit the group, the tides and the weather.

The minibus takes us on a 30-minute drive to Moonlight Head Road. Today’s walk is a loop, with guide Barclay managing our movements according to the tides. First up, with the tide low, we’re down to Wreck Beach and there’s no mistaking how it got its name.

There’s one huge rusty anchor sticking out of the sand like a sculpture and the hint of another one nearby. These are the remnants of the wrecked Marie Gabrielle (1869) and the Fiji (1891). It’s a wild and unforgiving coast.

An anchor at Wreck Beach.

On we go, a few shorebirds regarding us curiously and the waves breaking over rocky shelves, flushing the rock pools clean with every roll, seaweed swinging this way and that.

Then we head up to the clifftops, walking through the bush, sometimes coastal scrub, low and dense and sculpted by the winds, sometimes forests of eucalypts and casuarina, catching and filtering the autumn light.

Lunch – fresh salad and felafel – is at a lookout called The Gables with views of the vast Southern Ocean. There are no whales yet, but they won’t be long – they’ve been spotted off Tasmania on their long journey north along the humpback highway that passes here.

Hiking through the forest.

We follow the trail back towards Moonlight Head and spend the last hour on a solo walk – dispatched individually to get into some contemplation in the bush and of the bush. Forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku as the Japanese would have it.

I’m a complete failure for the first 10 minutes, thinking about work and other trivial dramas and complications, but then I say, “Come on, clear your mind” aloud because no one can hear. That actually works. I focus on the forest, the way the trees make a canopy, the way the track winds along the spurs and over the gullies, at the koala grunting in the gums above – where is he, though?

Maybe the separation made us all fonder, but the group is getting along pretty well, chatting easily to whoever you might end up walking alongside, or playing trivia in the bus.

Those soothing foot baths.

It gets better. Back at the lodge, we take a seat on the long bench, cool drink in hand and our foot baths are filled with salts and minerals and hot water to soothe the day away. That, I suspect, is only part of their purpose – they actually lock you into position to once again enjoy the buzz and hum of the group.

Our final day is one of contrasts – from a sublime bush walk with just us and the coast, to something of a culture shock as we share one of the Great Ocean Road’s best known sights – the Twelve Apostles – with a crowd of visitors.

First, the walk. We pull up at Princetown, where the Gellibrand River is making its way to the ocean, lush green banks either side. The track takes us back into the national park for a rolling clifftop walk, easy climbs and descents.

The scrub is either shoulder-high or sometimes forms a canopy, but there are plenty of ocean views and the wild surf in the distance. It’s easy to see how an off-course ship might be wrecked on this coast. But then, one person’s peril is another’s passion.

My walking companion for parts of this stretch is Tom Bodycomb, a surfer, and he points out some of the surf breaks hereabouts, how far you might paddle out to get to them and how once he paddled out to find himself sharing the surf, by chance, with 11-time world champion surfer Kelly Slater – with no audience, no entourage. Never know who you’ll meet in these remote parts.

Remote it may be, but when we leave the track to explore those Great Ocean Road landmarks – Loch Ard Gorge and the Twelve Apostles – all of a sudden we’re sharing them with the multitudes. This section of coast is still wild and undeniably spectacular, but having been spoilt with our stretches of the Great Ocean Walk virtually to ourselves, it’s difficult to contemplate the crowds.

But then, maybe that’s a good way of returning to reality, with the memories captured of coast, forest, lodge and new friends to help along the way.

The details

Walk
The three-day Great Ocean Road long weekend includes two nights’ lodge-based accommodation and guiding, from $1995 a person. There’s also a lodge-based four-day, three-night Twelve Apostles signature walk, one of the 13 “Great Walks of Australia”, from $2395 a person. Walks include transfers to and from Melbourne, meals and drinks. Only a light day pack and a moderate level of fitness is required. See taswalkingco.com.au

The writer was a guest of the Tasmanian Walking Company.