It's been a pretty busy week on my second last week in Melbourne, so I'll break it down with separate chapters. This is going to be a series of long, scattered, nonsensical post.
Pictures will be coming once I get to Brisbane on February 17th since I don't have my camera charger, and the internet I'm using is too slow to post anyways.
PART ONE.
Great Ocean Road
Monday, January 24th
As I had previously stated in my last few posts, I had decided that even though I had no one to go with, I was dead set on seeing the one thing I wanted to see most while in Australia. That happened this past Monday when I set off at 630am on a 15 seater eco-friendly VW van/bus hybrid thing en route to the Great Ocean Road. The tour guide/driver was a pretty stereotypical hippy with a long grey ponytail and to start the trip off provided us with far too many details about the West Gate Bridge. For 45 minutes. Anyways, we passed through the small town of Torquay (or Turkey as I like to call it - The Surf Coast) which just south of Geelong where the surf brands Quicksilver and Ripcurl were started up, and is home to Bells Beach. I really wish we had spent more time in Torquay, and not just stopped off for a quick half hour walk about on Bells Beach, since the town itself looked really, really nice. I would like to go back there (and Apollo Bay), but none of my Melbourne friends drive, hahaha. We then stopped off at Eastern View Beach to take a look at where the Great Ocean Road actually begins, with a giant sign for it hanging overhead as well. We then stopped off at another beach - the name of which I cannot remember - in the town of Anglesea at about 11am or so for some coffee and tea, which was also really gorgeous. The beach itself was made of really flat rocks that looked so awesome and held little pools of water in them. It wasn't long enough to really go exploring or take everything in though, and it's also a shame that the weather looked as though it was going to pour down and that it was "too windy" for the first half of the day. When we went back to the van, the next stop was Apollo Bay for lunch. Needless to say, I was pretty stoked to see the spot that Kristin and Deryn got engaged at. It was around this time that I had made friends with two women in their 60's who were from Brisbane and come down to Melbourne for the Aussie Open (tennis) three years running. And although they were extremely nice with their offering me of water and food, they were definitely not the demographic I was hoping to meet on the tour, hahaha. I also managed to meet a girl named Bobo from South Korea, Katrina Jones (I believe...?) from Vancouver, and a guy named Demitri from Greece, who was on the tour with his aunt Kiki. Katrina was kind of like an annoying, dumb California valley girl, but both Bobo and Demitri were actually really nice, and spoke very great English (and Demitri spoke better Spanish than me, fucker). At Apollo Bay we had an hour for lunch, which was pretty awesome because I figured I'd be able to grab some lunch, take a look around and snap some pictures, and then make my way to the area Deru and Kristin got engaged. Wrong. After getting my food and eating, I only had about 15 minutes to look around, and at the strip we stopped at, the beach was at least a 20 minute walk away. I was so bummed that I had managed to get so close but so far from bringing home something special for those two fuckers. Sorry guys...
The Twelve Apostles were am-az-ing though. They were so gorgeous to see in person, and I feel like I can just come home now having experienced and seen what I really wanted to see while in Australia. I won't come home - yet. We were there for just over an hour or so, experiencing the misnamed Twelve Apostles (there are only actually 8 of them), and then went over to the Loch Ard Gorge, and then finally to London Arch (or London Bridge).
I'm stealing this from Wikipedia because I'm too lazy to explain the Loch Ard Gorge, but the story behind it is pretty interesting and sad:
The gorge is named after the clipper ship Loch Ard, which ran aground on nearby Muttonbird Island on 1 June 1878 approaching the end of a three-month journey from England to Melbourne. Of the fifty-one passengers and crew, only two survived: Tom Pearce, a ship's apprentice, and Eva Carmichael, an Irishwoman immigrating with her family, both of whom were 18 years of age. According to memorials at the site, Pearce was washed ashore, and rescued Carmichael from the water after hearing her cries for help. Carmichael was badly injured, and so Pearce fed her brandy to revive her. Having revived her enough, Pearce then proceeded to climb out of the gorge using piece of the shipwreck to raise the alarm to local pastoralists who immediately set into plan a rescue attempt. When they returned, there was no sign of Eva Carmichael and it was initially feared that she had drowned. What actually happened was that she too managed to climb out of the gorge in search of help after Tom Pearce did not immediately return. When she heard voices (that of Tom Pearce and others), she hid in the bush for days fearing the voices to be that of cannibalistic Aboriginals.
Tom Pearce eventually finds her, and she's nursed back to health. But because they spent the night alone shipwrecked with alcohol on the beach, a single male and a single female in the 1870's, the locals think that's naughty and bad, so he devises a plan. Having saved her life, he asks her to marry him, but she says "No". What a cold hearted bitch. He flees back to England, and she stays in Australia. Pearce was involved in 3 (I think?) more shipwrecks. He said that the day she denied his marriage proposal was the worst day of his life, apparently. Poor guy.
The Twelve Apostles were am-az-ing though. They were so gorgeous to see in person, and I feel like I can just come home now having experienced and seen what I really wanted to see while in Australia. I won't come home - yet. We were there for just over an hour or so, experiencing the misnamed Twelve Apostles (there are only actually 8 of them), and then went over to the Loch Ard Gorge, and then finally to London Arch (or London Bridge).
I'm stealing this from Wikipedia because I'm too lazy to explain the Loch Ard Gorge, but the story behind it is pretty interesting and sad:
The gorge is named after the clipper ship Loch Ard, which ran aground on nearby Muttonbird Island on 1 June 1878 approaching the end of a three-month journey from England to Melbourne. Of the fifty-one passengers and crew, only two survived: Tom Pearce, a ship's apprentice, and Eva Carmichael, an Irishwoman immigrating with her family, both of whom were 18 years of age. According to memorials at the site, Pearce was washed ashore, and rescued Carmichael from the water after hearing her cries for help. Carmichael was badly injured, and so Pearce fed her brandy to revive her. Having revived her enough, Pearce then proceeded to climb out of the gorge using piece of the shipwreck to raise the alarm to local pastoralists who immediately set into plan a rescue attempt. When they returned, there was no sign of Eva Carmichael and it was initially feared that she had drowned. What actually happened was that she too managed to climb out of the gorge in search of help after Tom Pearce did not immediately return. When she heard voices (that of Tom Pearce and others), she hid in the bush for days fearing the voices to be that of cannibalistic Aboriginals.
Tom Pearce eventually finds her, and she's nursed back to health. But because they spent the night alone shipwrecked with alcohol on the beach, a single male and a single female in the 1870's, the locals think that's naughty and bad, so he devises a plan. Having saved her life, he asks her to marry him, but she says "No". What a cold hearted bitch. He flees back to England, and she stays in Australia. Pearce was involved in 3 (I think?) more shipwrecks. He said that the day she denied his marriage proposal was the worst day of his life, apparently. Poor guy.
London Bridge also has a story to it, told by our tour guide (like the one above). This one's actually pretty funny. I'll first post BEFORE and AFTER pictures, and then refer you to Wikipedia once again for the backstory:
BEFORE:
AFTER:
The arch closest to the shoreline collapsed unexpectedly on 15 January 1990, leaving two tourists stranded on the outer part until they were rescued by a helicopter. No one was injured in the event.
Before the 15th of January, 1990, people used to drive their cars over the arch to the end of the "bridge" and have picnics and all that sort of stuff out there. But like the italicized portion says, two people (a man and woman) had been stranded on the outer portion on that day. According to the tour guide, a school bus of children was also about to cross over as it started crumbling, but they decided instead to park and walk over the arch until it disintegrated. That bus driver ran into town yelling "LONDON BRIDGE FELL DOWN!", haha. Anyways, after the bus driver got help, the two people that were left on the island were stuck there for something like 19 hours because there was a well policed boat race out in Melbourne hours away, and they couldn't get a helicopter there in time. The first helicopter that was able to get to them was a news copter, and said "We'll get you off here if you give us a story", but they both denied wanting their faces shown on TV. The reason being because the guy had called into work saying that he was sick and wouldn't be coming in. Not only that, but the woman he was with wasn't his wife. As soon as they got off the island, they vanished into thin air and no one knows to this day who they are. That's a pretty good story and all, but fuck, I want to know the important shit! Was he fired?! Did he get divorced from his wife?!
Damn.
Aussie Word of the Day:
A chaddy is a person who just continuously bullshits you to the point where you don't believe anything they're saying. They're just essentially a bullshitter.
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