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Great Ocean Road
Australia is the largest island on Earth and the oldest continent . It is a place isolated for 100 of thousands of yr . It is a kingdom apart biologically , full of egg laying mammals , biped marsupials and dazzlingly beautiful bird . At the end of this land " down under , " the ocean does battle with the land . nothingness and waves travel uninterrupted for G of nautical mile before slamming into the coastline . sculpt by the elements , this user interface between land and sea offer narcotic seascape , dramatic geology and primeval forests where koalas lounge and colorful parrot screeching . The ably name Great Ocean Road hugs the southeasterly edge of Australia for over 151 mi ( 243 kilometers ) . This Australian National Heritage Road offers an ideal way to explore the curiosity of this beguiling coastline and serves as a gateway to its natural attractions .
Surf Birds
The Great Ocean Road is not only one of the human beings ’s most iconic seashore roads but also the world ’s largest warfare memorial , built by returned soldiers between 1919 and 1932 and dedicated in turn to soldier killed during World War I.The towns of Lorne and Torquay lie near the start of the Great Ocean Road and are democratic stopover for tourist , beach bums and surfers . The breaker and beach culture along this so - called " Surf Coast " have had a immense character in regulate Australian surf culture and many of the populace ’s most notable breakers companies have their origins here , including Quicksilver and Ripcurl . In the leafy hills over the bay tree of Lorne , Sulphur - crested cockatoo ( Cacatua galerita ) shriek through the tall boughs ofeucalyptus treeslike winged dinosaur . These large white parrots are beautiful and inquisitive , often letting visitors get very stuffy ( just please do n’t feed them ! ) .
Fern Gullies and waterfalls
tower eucalyptus tree forests reach towards the sky . Giant tree ferns sag ponderously . hurry current and numerous waterfall twig down to the ocean . The low ranges just inland of the Great Ocean Road are called the Otway Ranges . These rolling immature hill trap cool , wet - oppressed air from the Southern Ocean . maltreat aside from the stentorian sound of the seashore to hazard inland , the lavish forests here are still and silent . More than 40 straightforward miles ( 103 square kilometers ) of this forest hinterland are protect as Great Otway National Park . Within the parkland a various range of landscape and botany types support a rich variety of plants and animals , include the rare and elusiveSpotted Quoll , mainland Australia ’s largest pouched mammal carnivore .
Koalas
trashy bellows echo through the nighttime air very tight . You pop out up in your tent win over there is an wild bear outdoors , before realizing , " This is Australia . There are no bears here . " At least not veridical ones . What your hearing is a native bear , sometimes affectionately called a " kangaroo bear bear . “Koalas(Phascolarctos cinereus ) have no relation to bear at all . Rather , they are tree - dwelling pouched mammal and their close relatives are wombat . Along with kangaroo they are amongst the most iconic of Australianmarsupials , mammals whose unseasoned germinate in a sack . Koalas prey exclusively on the leaves of eucalyptus tree species found throughout eastern Australia . They may sleep up to 19 hr , only fertilize a few hours a 24-hour interval . During the mating season males become very outspoken , bellowing from the treetopslike grunt pig . Scientists think males have such a loud bellow for an animal their sizing so that they can " sport " in the hopes of attract female person . A love serenade , if you will , koala - style .
Forest primeval
profuse greens — include mosses , liverworts and ferns — bloom from every aerofoil . Raindrops pucker on the forest floor while fowl calls reverberate through great silences . Though it is rain I can just experience a drop under this high duomo of forest giant . The nerveless mountains and valleys of the Otway Ranges are dominated by smashed forest ecosystem parent by abundant rainfall . These forests have some of Victoria state ’s , and the world ’s , tallest Tree , including the Mountain Ash , which can get hold of more than 330 feet ( 100 meter ) in height , making it the world ’s big flowering plant life . After about 150 years Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in wet woodland start to develop hollows that support a divers regalia of animals . Possums , gliders , owls , bats and many birds need these tree hollows for nesting or roosting . If you wait patiently , it is possible to see some of these baffling timber dwellers . With fortune you may even blemish the modest and elusive duckbill along still river and wood pools just like this one .
Stranger than fiction
Picture a jumbo hedgehog with a long nose . A waddling pin shock with an appetite for ants . An nut - laying mammal with a pouch . The bizarre looking echidna ( of the familyTachyglossidae ) is a survive evolutionary relic . Echidnas are found only in Australia and New Guinea and are some of the strangest and most enthralling creatures in the animate being kingdom . Linking reptile to mammalian , echidnas — along with duck-billed platypus — belong to the mammalian order , Monotremata , theegg - laying mammal . Their unfamiliarity does n’t terminate there though : spiny anteater possess long , toothless mouths , have multiple Seth of sex activity chromosomes , posses a cloaca like birds instead of multiple sex organs and nurse their young without breasts ( Milk River seepage from pore ) . True evolutionary oddities quite unlike anything else , echidnas seem to occur straight out of the pages of a mediaeval bestiary .
Brilliant design
Shipwreck coast
The bellow of the ocean is almost deafening . Huge waves curl and recrudesce on the Rand below and the wind moans like a restless sprightliness . Descending more than 350 steps to reach distant and ravage Wreck Beach is to come face to face with the terrifying power and sweetheart of the ocean . Much of the mediate plane section of the Great Ocean Road is known as the " Shipwreck Coast . " Hundreds of wrecks dot this ragged coastline . They are a testament both to Victoria ’s other trans - ocean in-migration and the dangers of Bass Straight , one of the most treacherous bodies of weewee in the world . At low lunar time period it is possible to wander onto the let out reef to visit the remains of the badly - fated Marie Gabrielle and the Fiji , passenger ship that run aground near Wreck Beach in 1878 . All that persist today are their linchpin , turn over in tightly to the reef like memorial to the navigation past . pockmark by innumerable rocky indention , Wreck Beach is also a terrific position to search tide pools .
Micro worlds
Colorful sea star and anemomes seem to bloom like flowers from silent rock-and-roll pools . Moon snails and small hermit crabs inch along rocks silently feed on alga . Small , beautifully pattern fish dart in and out of crevasse and sparkling shells glitter like a thousand baseball field in the Lord’s Day . Tide consortium are micro - mankind full of life . In the intertidal zona , innumerable pocket-sized creatures make their habitation at this port between land and sea . To live in the intertidal zone creature must be hardy and adaptable . The constant change of condition from high water supply to full photo to the sun and predators offers unique obstacles for marine life sentence , but also the reinforcement of fresh food with each new lunar time period surge . grave by the power of the Southern Ocean , unbounded opportunities to discover the wonders of these micro - world subsist along the Great Ocean Road . Ephemeral and fleeting , exploring what the lunar time period brings in is to dabble in the conjuration of the mysterious sea .
Cape Otway
Big seas thrash into ragged drop-off and howling wind from across the reeking dissipation of the Southern Ocean hit me — hard . I ’m on Cape Otway , the most southwards full stop of the coastline for hundred of naut mi at roughly the midway compass point of the Great Ocean Road . The lone pillar of Cape Otway lighthouse tolerate sentinel over the jolty seas where the Southern Ocean get together with Bass Straight . erect in 1848 , Cape Otway lighthouse is the oldest and most significant lighthouse in the whole of Australia . Today , the passenger ship of older no longer navigate past the cape but it is not rare to see the tiny white shapes of local crayfish and ear-shell boats dwarfed by the endless sky and roiling seas below . Australia is so huge , it would take a life to see it all . The better way to wrap your principal around this unbelievable country and let it go down into your bones is to step yourself . One winding route , one beckoning shadow , one epical sundown at a time .
