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With four days to reach Adelaide, from where the Indian-Pacific train will take us to West Australia, we opt to drive via one of the Worlds most famous (and probably award winning) scenic roads - the Great Ocean Road. Our decision to drive forced of course by the airing cupboard incident.

Starting some seventy kilometres out of Melbourne, and terribly sign posted considering, the road winds along the coast for a couple of hundred kilometres. Its a road that, despite the short distance, warrants a couple of days exploration.  The reason for this is that at regular intervals brown road-signs invite you to pull into a parking bay and take a stroll to a limestone outcrop, or more spectacularly, an inlet where the sea is white foams as it crashes in on well worn cliffs.

The best known of the sights are the Twelve Apostles - limestone pillars that have become stranded as the sea eat away at softer stone that previously encased them.  Despite our attempts to count in small rocks near the shore to make up the number, we later learned that there are now only seven - the rest having buggered off some time ago.

The next in line in terms of fame is London Bridge - which before 1990 comprised two arches. Now only one survives - the other having fallen into the sea, stranding a few tourists in the process who had to be rescued by helicopter. Perhaps they should have thought about the nursery rhyme "London Bridge is falling down" before venturing out there...

For us, the highlight of the trip was the Thunder Cave - a sideline from Lord Ards Arch (scene of a tragic shipwreck which left the sea filled with bodies  and several inlets crimson).  Thunder cave lives up to its name - the water within the channel leading to the cave froths white with turbulence and, as the waves build and run into a cave at the end, the air forced out passes with a marked boom. A truly awesome sight to see and hear.

The Grotto follows, an arch with a seawater pool in front which resembles a lake in a cave. Here we stopped a night in the port town of Port Campbell.

The road then left the coast and headed more directly to Adelaide via a national park. We decided that a few detours were in order here. First Chinamans well, an ancient (say 130 year old) pile of rocks nearby an altogether more impressive salt flat. An all together more bizarre sight awaited us a few clicks up the road - the Granites. 

These are huge granite 'marbles' thrown up during a pre-historic eruption which sit on the edge of the Ocean - the amazing thing being just how perfectly round they looked and how close they'd fallen together. Sea birds gathered on the down wind side to shelter from the fresh breezes.

At this point, we changed States - entering South Australia far too quickly as the sunset - we had a new mission, getting to Adelaide and a day of wine tasting in the Barossa Valley.

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