Great Ocean Walk, part I

The Great Ocean Walk is a hike that goes parallel with the great ocean road. It's a fairly young trek, only six years of age, and F. heard about it by chance from a hiker that we met in the Grampians. It is a 100km walk, but we only had time to do about 50km of it. We started at Johanna Beach, and made our way to Ryan's Den and then Devil's Kitchen, followed by a quick finish at the Twelve Apostles.

I left on this trek thinking that it's going to be a desert, dry trek. I almost did not take my rain jacket and my thermal merinos. It was really a close call because it rained profusely for the first day. It rained so bad that our sleeping bags, our tents, even my clothes got soaked. Fucking joy! We even had a minor river crossing, which sort of brought back memories from New Zealand Dusky Track (Part I, Part II).

And so, it rained. Heavily.

We first started to trek through some hilly, very kangaroo populated region.

After that, we moved into forests populated (supposedly) by echidnas. We didn't see any.

Beautiful (wet) flowers.

I was surprised to see that people gave free water for all.

I was surprised to see that we managed to see the flowers and any signs considering that we could barely see the forest!

After the rolling hills and the wet forest we finally reached the coast. As we reached milanesia beach, we had to cross a little water flow to get to the other side ...

Much to the dismay of various spectators..

The occasional cormoran braced itself before going in again.

And then finally, at Ryan's Den, there was a sheltered dining area that we took for ourselves because well, there weren't any people on the trek what with the rain and all. We immediately put up the sleeping bags for drying but lo and behold, they didn't dry.

After a fretful sleep during the night things did not look fantastic in the morning.

But the rain stopped and we continued walking through an amazing forest.

The views of the coast were really breathtaking, and I had to stop many many times to take photos. I am really considering looking up a waterproof camera casing to prevent tommy from fogging up!

Behold, the first clear picture!

The track is really well maintained, with places to clean up your shoes to prevent diseased plants from spreading from one part of the forest to another.

With little miracles all along the way.

As usual, more photos here.