Great Ocean Walk

An Interesting Coastal Walk

GOW.swf

The Great Ocean Walk is designed to traverse the coast around Cape Otway from Apollo Bay to Port Campbell. The total trip will take about seven days. In April 2005, we walked a part of this track over two days from Johanna beach to Cape Otway.

The track was still being constructed at this time and facilities were not completed. There was no fresh water available at the Aire River camp site and we had some drop some off during the first part of our car shuffle to leave one car at the end of each track. The tack is promoted in a way that encourages travel in the opposite direction in whi8ch we walked and at times we had some difficulty choosing the right track as their were no track signs facing our way.

We began our walk along Johanna Beach which was very pleasant and then climbed up to an escarpment where the track followed along the top of the sand dunes and cliffs. This area had had very little rain during the previous six months and we only crossed one creek that had barely a trickle of water in it. We were glad that we carried a full day’s supply of water. We reached Castle Cove in time for lunch and were glad to be able to have our water bottle refilled by a kind camper van driver. We continued for another three hours and reached our camp site by the Aire River at 4.30 pm. At the time that we walked, the bridge had been destroyed in a fire but true to our pioneering spirit, we made the crossing using a small, inflatable boat that we had carried for the purpose.

To our delight, our water container was just as we had left it and we saw a koala in the tree above our tents.

On our second day, we followed the escarpment around to the Cape Otway Lighthouse. It was an interesting track and rather than walking along 4 kilometers of soft sand and an incoming tide along Station Beach, we opted for the higher track. The views on this section of the track were not as spectacular as those on the previous day.

We concluded our walk at the lighthouse at 2.00 pm.

Bruce

Bruce is a keen traveller and photographer. This web site describes his travel and family interests

2 thoughts on “Great Ocean Walk

  1. Beautiful photos Bruce
    – and I enjoyed looking at the 2 pairs of lovely legs too!

  2. i would love to see more of refuge cove,as i’m sure its paradise, where is it exactly !!! cheers loi

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.