...while we upgrade your highway.

The final push to Sydney!

The road gets better on the final stretch - just a couple of hours' drive and much more scenic. Views of the huge lakes and the beautiful hills you go through north of the city.

In many cases, you literally do go through them...




... there are long stretches of road where a cutting has been blasted through solid rock, leaving another wall of solid rock as the central reservation. A further cutting takes northbound traffic. It all makes for quite scary driving and is part of the upgrade work they are doing on the highway generally. Bypasses and dualling, new bridges and junctions. If I come back in five years it might be an easier drive...

But look! We made it...



...and did the iconic drive across the Harbour Bridge. Had no time to appreciate it really due to stressing about what lane we should be in, avoiding going the through the tunnel instead by accident, fumbling for the tolls and preparing for which exit to take at the other side.

(Don't worry - I was a passenger when I took the photo!)



So well done, little car! And fortunately they did take the car off our hands at Sydney, despite all the paperwork implying that we would have to take it back to Brisbane.

Past the banana.

Not long now, then.

(Fortunately, it's over three days...)

When we were all in New Zealand, we travelled round in a hire car and, although most of the accommodation was sorted in advance, on a few occasions we just arrived in a town and asked the people at the information centre where was good to stay. It all worked out well and most times, we ended up with high-end, luxury apartments for peanuts as it was winter and they weren't going to get filled otherwise.

While this was all very fine and wonderful, it's the closest I'm likely to come to an adventure holiday. I like to have it all organised in advance. I like to know where I am going when, how, when I am likely to get there, all in the knowledge that there will be walls and a roof (to keep the birds out), a comfortable bed and something to make some coffee with when I get there. I like to have pieces of paper to consult, phone numbers to phone.

Every last day of this holiday has its travel and accommodation documented in this way and I had expected the problem to be with JetStar out of Melbourne on the way to Brisbane. JetStar is FlyBe. It's the budget wing of QANTAS. This is worrying on several counts:

1. Last time I flew on anything similar, EasyJet stranded me in Berlin Airport for nine hours with no chair and a voucher for Bratwurst.

2. JetStar fly from Avalon airport which, continuing the Arthurian theme, is about as difficult to find as The Holy Grail. When you get there, it's like the "Let's Play Airports" Airport. For example, it has one security scanner for all passengers, which looks like someone made it out of a DIY electronics kit you get free with a magazine. "AUSTRALIAN BUDGET AIRPORT MAGAZINE: Week by week, each part gives you all the basic services and facilities you'll need for your OWN international travel gateway. 96 parts with a FREE BINDER which you won't use. First part $1.99. Subsequent parts $9.99. Next week - REAL Duty Free shop with Baileys miniatures, travel socket adaptors and a kangaroo keyring..."

3. QANTAS seem to be having difficulty keeping their full-priced wings attached to their planes, never mind the budget ones....

As it happened, that bit all went off without a hitch and so it was that the first travel problem turned out to be waiting in Harvey Bay for Dave-O and his Bus of Danger and Intolerence back to Brisbane.

Well, he didn't turn up and four of us were left sitting on our suitcases.

The Kingfisher woman explained that they didn't use that firm anymore. There had been some complaints, and what Dave-O had said about them going out of business was true, although not because the boss was terminally ill. Because the boss had been pulled over by the police and the whole firm was in some kind of financial, organisational and, possibly, criminal mess. Our journey up to Hervey Bay had been their last.

How were we supposed to get back to Brisbane, we asked. Admittedly, my suitcase had wheels and made a good emergency seat but, when I gave it a cursory once-over while packing it earlier that morning, no engine.

"No worries," said desk-woman and she sauntered off in search of an email about just this matter which she seemed to remember seeing. She returned clutching Greyhound tickets for the luxury coach leaving Hervey Bay coach station, fifteen minutes drive away, in ten minutes. Pointing out the glaringly obvious problem this posed led to our suitcases being quickly loaded onto a bright Kingfisher-blue tourist shuttle bus and a driver as mad as Dave-O, but safer, hurtling us towards the town centre, tuning his short wave radio into the frequency used by the STOP-GO lollipop turners at the roadworks, while desk-woman got on the phone to Greyhound to ask them to hold the bus.

Did we make it?



Of course! Like I would be relating this in such an easy-going, light-hearted manner if we hadn't...

The coach was only half full, and bliss compared with the theme-park ride which had been the journey north. We pulled into Brisbane right on time...

If you are undertaking a long journey such as this one, north of Brisbane on the Bruce Highway, quite a large number of kilometres along roads with those "This is a High Incident Area" signs up the sides, I suggest strongly that you don't do it driven by "Dave-O" of Suntours.

"Dave-O" is the only driver on the road who is any good at driving. Certainly no-one female or Aboriginal is better than he is and he demonstrates as much by pretending to shoot them with gun-fingers if they overtake him or sometimes even if they are just travelling in the same direction as him.

"Dave-O" is unhappy because he might be out of a job. Apparently, the boss of the firm is terminally ill and needs to spend time with her family. Thus all the drivers are being made redundant. He is hopeful that he might get a driving job somewhere else, but if he doesn't I imagine he could find a niche in the more heavy-handed, under-the-radar branches of the private security/protection racket industry.

Travelling about 3 metres behind the traffic in front at 120kph, he delivered us safely, but slightly shaken, to Hervey (pronounced "Harvey") Bay marina for the catamaran to Fraser Island.

More about Fraser Island tomorrow, and more about "Dave-O" the day after...

It was now about 4pm and I may have given up listening to the iPod by now, but I imagine it had reached something along the lines of "The Wreck of the Sloop John B".

For this was Shipwreck Coast (®) and there are three major things to see here. For now, anyway. This is because the coastline is as it is because of massive erosion of the sandstone by the relentless Southern Ocean on a big exposed bit that doesn't have the luck to be protected by Tasmania.

And so you get these massive stack formations where bit of land have been left as the cliff had tumbled into the sea around them.

The most famous is The Twelve Apostles...



...and you can guess what's coming - there are now only eleven because one of them had the temerity to fall into the sea. But hey, they only changed the name from "The Sow and her Piglets" a few years ago so that they didn't have a tourist attraction named after farm animals and now they've had the sings done, the maps printed, the helicopters painted...

It can only be a matter of time before another huge chunk of cliff disappears, probably taking a few hundred tourists with it, and they can have twelve again...

Next westward is Loch Ard Gorge...



...two inlets, one of which is protected by this (near to collapse, I should guess) lump of red rock. Apparently it looks like a question mark from the air. There are two ways to check this. One is to pay $$$ and make Jeff another small percentage by going on the ludicrously short helicopter flight. And the other is Google Maps...



Handily, the Google Maps high resolution photography extends just shy of the question mark in question, so it's either the helicopter of take Jeff's word for it... It's the bit where the shipwreck was anyway. The most famous one anyway - there were 85 over something like 60 years. (It was definitely that way round 'cos he said "that's more than one a year...") This one had a Titanic style rich boy/poor girl/other way round possibly love story attached to it where one saved the other and wanted to get married but the other one went back to Ireland and they never saw each other again. I'm inclined not to believe some of the stories told by tour guides.

Finally, and the most south and west I'm going in Australia, is London Bridge - another rock formation which looks like this:



However, prior to 1990, it looked like this...



A couple had just walked over onto the right hand bit when the first arch collapsed. Someone telephoned the police to say that "London Bridge had fallen down" and understandably, the police thought they were hoaxers and took ages getting there. In the meantime, the TV network helicopters had picked up the information on short wave radio and there was a big race to get out there. Several arrived to get the first interview, but none of them could rescue them because they wouldn't have been covered for insurance purposes - the married couple had to wait for the official rescue helicopter.

Unfortunately, it transpired that the married couple weren't actually married to each other. They were away on a little illicit getaway - and they had also pulled sickies from work. Not good when you have the helicopters from several TV networks hovering above you...

This was Jeff's story, so it could have had embellishment, although he did say that several weeks earlier, BMW had hired the land and their new range was lined up along London Bridge and shot from the air for a new advertising campaign. Trucks and cars and support vehicles had been driven over, parked, driven back again. Three weeks later, the arch collapsed...

As you head up into the trees, it's a quick stop to see where the koala (not bears) are causing environmental havoc by killing all of them. Apparently there are 537 types of Eucalyptus tree but koalas only eat three of them. (Or something like that, Jeff and Norm argued the point earlier...)

We saw plenty of koalas, but most of them had the good sense to keep just far enough back from the track so that tourists had to use the dodgy zoom feature of their digital cameras. Which is why what you see below might actually be a koala and might actually be a cuddly toy which someone put on a branch to fool Americans...



No, it seriously is a real life living koala and you can see more of my portfolio collection for the BBC HD Natural History Unit on flickr.

They had kookaburras and parrots too, but nobody was much bothered by them...



Back in the bus, we learned that for tourism and branding purposes, the Great Ocean Road is divided into three parts:

• Surf Coast
  
• Green Coast and
  
• Shipwreck Coast

By the time the iPod had reached "Weather with You", the rain had started on cue to remind us that we were high up in the rainforest. It was at this point that Jeff turned into one of those enthusiastic people off "Lost Land of the Jaguar" - sort of a cross between Steve Irwin (in fleece'n'shorts appearance...) and Scrappy Doo (in relentless enthusiasm...)

So, down the track at Mait's Rest...



Lots of ferns and unidentified noises, sunlight peering through high trees and things dripping on you. A babbling stream threaded its way downhill, unseen under the undergrowth. Many of the trees are 700 years old and the rainforest in this gully has only survived because a major forest fire jumped the gully many years ago.

It's like The Eden Project...



...but real.

If ever you're in Melbourne and you have a day spare, you should Go West and tour the Great Ocean Road...



The road is long... 243km and so is the tour. We were picked up at 7.25am and dropped off 14 hours later, so it's very good value. The first stop is the aforementioned Aboriginal Cultural Centre, then straight onto the Surf Coast...



At this point you begin to realise that the iPod linked up to the coach PA system is going to do more than play light background music. "Let's have some surfing songs!!!" enthuses Jeff, our driver. I will leave you guess what came next...

Anyway, onto the memorial for the men who built the road. It's apparently the world's largest war memorial, built in memory of the Australians who died in WWI.



In the photo below, you can see exactly how the road clings to the cliffside on this part of the road. Jeff seemed not to worry about operating the playlist on his iPod at the same time as (not) keeping his eyes on the road in order to play us...



...well, you would think "The Long and Winding Road", but Jeff is not that obvious... Any guesses?