Explore Australia’s Great Ocean Road

Australia’s Great Ocean Road aims to pull you back again and again.

- Jonathan B. Tourtellot

A mob of kangaroos grazes in a chilly pasture, then flees in front of an approaching pickup truck. The herd looks like a bunch of deer on pogo sticks.

The scene is unfolding outside the ecolodge window I’m peering from on this early winter morning in August. It’s my second day on Australia’s Great Ocean Road, a scenic highway that follows the coastline west of Melbourne for about 240 km through Victoria.

Admittedly, I harbour some skepticism of this legendary road, wondering how the GOR could possibly rival my favourite US coastal drive: the long, winding, two-lane sections of California State Route 1.

These two drives are probably the only ones in the world that can claim the same mix: rugged scenery, some of Earth’s tallest trees, sea stacks of towering rock, and surfers.

But marsupial wildlife as comic relief? Well played, Australia.

Of course, I expected to encounter native flora and fauna on this road. What I hadn’t anticipated was how much I would also learn about local history and the refreshingly easy-going Aussies themselves, exemplified by my guide, Geoff Reynolds.

We begin our Great Ocean Road explorations as most do, leaving the town of Geelong, about an hour outside of Melbourne, and heading westward through a commercial strip.

But beyond the generic line-up of Mc Donald’s, Domino’s a n d KFC, something more intriguing appears: Narana Aboriginal Cultural Centre, a craft shop and Aboriginal community project. It’s a fitting first stop, dedicated to the people whose ancestors predated European arrivals by millennia.

Cultural interpreter Ian Kirby of the Wathaurong tribe pulls me away from an engrossing map showing the continent’s former tribal territories to demonstrate a didgeridoo [a musical instrument]. Then he takes us out back for boomerang practice.