The Great Ocean Road - Part 2
I Hope everyone enjoyed the first part of our Great Ocean Road tour and that you are all ready to take off on the next and most spectacular leg of our journey.
Our next port of call is beautiful Apollo Bay. My parents honeymooned here in February 1945. Cyprus Pines line the Great Ocean Road as you drive into town. Here picnic grounds sweep down to the water and the bay is broken at its western end by a breakwater which encloses the jetties and provides shelter for the permanent crayfish fishing fleet. In 1840 the Henty Brothers, who founded the towns of Portland and Mt Gambier, started a small whaling station here, which operated irregularly until 1847. Then in 1850 timber lured the first inhabitants to the town which was then known as Krambuk. In 1892 the township was renamed Apollo Bay. Timber was a huge industry in this area due to the need for sleepers for the railway line that serviced the gold fields and piles for the wharfs at both Melbourne and Geelong. In 1860 timber production was at its peak in this area with as many as 1,000 cutters operating. From Apollo Bay the Great Ocean Road winds inland through the magnificent forests of the Otway Ranges.
This area is the Otway National Park. It embraces several types of terrain, from exposed sand dunes to sheltered mountain gullies and supports a variety of plant and animal life. Some rarely seen birds are found in this park including the King Parrot, Powerful Owl and the Satin Bower Bird. Whilst there are many varieties of trees in the park, two of the main ones are worth finding out more about: the mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) is the world's largest flowering plant and one of the world's tallest trees second only to the mighty redwoods of California. The average height of a mature stand of mountain ash is between 165 to 265 feet, while some specimens can reach 380 feet. Another dominant tree found in the Rainforest gully is the Myrtle Beech. Here in the Otways, the rainforest gully has been protected from wind and bushfires and remained undisturbed for hundreds of years. The Myrtle Beech can live for centuries and their interlaced leaves have formed a protective canopy sheltering the ferns, mosses and lichens below.
The costal area bordering the Otway National Park has been the sight of some 80 shipwrecks and many hundreds of lives have been lost here. This area has become known as the Shipwreck Coast. The Cape Otway Lighthouse is built on the tip of Cape Otway. For ships leaving Europe and America it was the first dry land sighted since rounding the Cape of Good Hope. It is built of sandstone and is 69 feet tall. It stands on a cliff that is 330 feet above sea level. It was finished in August 1848. Until 1937 the light house keepers received all their supplies by sea because of its inaccesibilty. In fact, it was only just over 50 years ago that the Cape Otway Lighthouse Road was finally made.
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