Another trip Rico probably won't make, alas

Ethan Todras-Whitehill (definitely a name to conjure with) has an article in The New York Times about a magnificent journey in Australia:

Along the shores of the Indian Ocean, as the coastline east of Adelaide, Australia, wends its rocky way toward Melbourne, lies one of the world’s classic drives: the Great Ocean Road. Here, brutal, slicing surf and weather pound malleable limestone and sandstone, eating away at the Australian continent, and leaving mile after mile of sweeping vistas of sculptured cliffs, towers, and arches framed against the roiling turquoise sea (photo).
Having first traveled the Great Ocean Road in 2002, I still remember beams of sunlight cutting through the clouds to illuminate 150-foot stone pillars jutting out of the sea, the last stalwarts of land in its eternal losing battle with the ocean. As my wedding approached last fall, that indelible image was enough to convince me that the drive would be the perfect way to begin a two-month honeymoon through Australia and New Zealand; we’d camp on the beach, take surfing lessons, hike alongside kangaroos and koalas, and luxuriate in a landscape so blissful and majestic that we’d be in full honeymoon mode by the time we reached Melbourne.
Unfortunately, the weather had other ideas. The rains began as soon as we touched down in Adelaide: heavy, gray, and unyielding. Clearly, my wife and I wouldn’t be able to coast through these four days on seashells, sunshine, and warm ocean breezes; we’d have to dig deeper to answer a question that has plagued countless travelers before us: how do you enjoy a road trip when it won’t stop raining?
No matter what the weather, in a country as vast as Australia, an epic road trip is a traveler’s rite of passage, if only to get a sense of the scope of the place. The Great Ocean Road can be done as part of a four=hundred-mile loop out of Melbourne, but we had opted for the six-hundred-mile coastal route from Adelaide to Melbourne, Australia’s two closest major cities, despite being as far apart as Boston and Washington. It would take longer, crossing from the province of South Australia to Victoria, but at least we wouldn’t be backtracking.
We flew into Adelaide, grabbed our rental car, and headed out of town, wipers running full tilt. The first day we had planned to see the Coorong, a national park that is a vast estuary and home to cormorants, spoonbills, black swans, and other water birds. The weather, however, made bird-watching seem like a little slice of insanity for which we just didn’t have the appetite. We did get a hint of what we might have seen had the skies been more in our favor, though: at one point, as the road veered close to the beach, we spooked a squadron of pelicans that took off and flew parallel to us at a pace that perfectly matched our own, undulating in a sine wave at a fixed point in our vision, as the sea and sand fell away.
That night we stayed in the charming seaside town if Robe, where houses spilled down the hillside right up to the ocean. Our inn, the Caledonian, dated to 1859 and was partly made of timbers and doors from ships that had been wrecked along the coast. The cold and wet had penetrated Jen’s spirit, and she wanted to pass the night reading in our small antique bed. I went for a look downstairs and saw the bartender light a fire in the pub’s stone fireplace as locals began streaming in; it was Friday night, after all. I dragged Jen downstairs, and we were soon passed around from group to group, old and young, everyone seeming to know everyone else.
Jen told and retold the story of our wedding, while I spent nearly an hour with a local contractor discussing the finer points of barbecuing, our shared national obsession. Every few minutes the bartender would come around calling out numbers for a raffle, with prizes like bottles of wine and, absurdly, a plate of raw meat. Later I realized that if we had spent a full day spotting birds, we might have never bothered with the pub at all and missed out on a night that was, unexpectedly, one of the highlights of our trip.
The contest between the pockmarked limestone coast and the surf wouldn’t pick up until we crossed into Victoria, when we’d start to see the stacks and gorges that are the casualties of that battle, so we decided to detour inland to visit the famous Coonawarra wine region. The defining feature of the Coonawarra, we soon learned, is its terra rossa, soil that forms as the soluble limestone weathers, leaving mineral-rich red clay with excellent drainage. But this soil extends less than eight miles along a ridge barely more than a mile wide, leaving a scant nine square miles of prime vine-growing land. If your typical wine country is a sprawling suburb of vineyards and lazy roads, then the Coonawarra, with its grid of tightly packed vines and cellar doors, feels like Vineyard City.
Whatever charm was lost in the rain and the layout, however, was more than made up for in the wines themselves. Australian wine has blown up internationally in the last several years, mainly because of its big, fruity shirazes that develop in the warm, sunny climate. The Coonawarra, on the other hand, one of Australia’s southernmost winemaking regions, has a cooler, more protracted growing season, and is renowned for its complex, drier cabernet sauvignon. Rymill is a welcoming estate with bronze statues of rearing horses out front, and mixing labs and fermentation tanks inside. After a crowd of Europeans filtered out, Jen got into a bubbly conversation with the Aussie working behind the counter who suggested we try a wine made from grapes affected by mold: Botrytis cinerea, to be exact, the “noble rot” that concentrates the grapes’ sugars to create delicious dessert wines. This one smelled and tasted like an apricot-almond danish.
Normally when someone gives tasting notes on a wine, I try not to roll my eyes. But in the Coonawarra, the smells of the cabernets were so distinct and shocking I couldn’t help but blurt out my own pronouncements. Violet, I proclaimed after one. Coconut and tobacco, after another. Eucalyptus! “I can’t tell if each winery is better than the last,” Jen enthused, “or if I’m just getting more tipsy!”
That evening, on our way to our hotel in Port Fairy, we stopped in the nearby town of Portland for the tail end of the Upwelling Festival. While a young indie rock band played, I chatted with a balding, friendly ambulance technician assigned to the event who explained that the festival, with events like the blessing of the fleet, was in honor of the annual bloom of plankton that attracts whales, which in turn attract tourists. The idea, he intimated, was to extend the tourist season on the front side and therefore bolster the local economy. Looking around at the pockets of local kids scattered about the lawn and no real outsiders to speak of besides ourselves, it didn’t appear to be working.
The next day, the day we were to drive the Great Ocean Road itself, dawned stormier than the last, but here I applied a lesson I had learned from previous travels: nothing compensates for bad weather like a sense of history. After all, a landscape is like a work of art: it is so much more compelling when you understand the stories it shaped and those that shaped it.
The Great Ocean Road itself is merely a small portion of the coast, the 151 miles between Torquay and Warrnambool, built between 1919 and 1932 by soldiers who had returned from World War One and dedicated to those who did not make it back. But it has an older name, too: the Shipwreck Coast.
It makes sense that a dramatic ocean landscape would be a killing ground for ships. Sailors are understandably wary of belligerent seas that rip pieces off the headland the way a lion rips flesh off its prey, not to mention the changeable weather, the fog, and the rock outcrops that can gut a ship like a fish. And yet, it was precisely this route that most ships from Europe took, carrying convicts, colonists, and gold prospectors to Melbourne in its mid-1800s heyday. We learned all about it at Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village in Warrnambool, at the western end of the Road.
Flagstaff Hill has a replica village from the 1870s that, during the summer tourist season, includes volunteers in period costumes à la Colonial Williamsburg. Jen sat down for a cuppa in the period tearoom, while I wandered around the ship chandlery and customs house, and listened to a group of local men sing standbys like The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald under the awning of the clockmaker’s shop. In the museum, a dim, downward-spiraling corridor took us past plaques explaining nineteenth-century seagoing life, focusing on the experience of immigrants. (It should be noted that, although Australians are popularly depicted as the descendants of convicts, south Australia never accepted prisoners; Victoria’s growth was largely a result of immigrants from countries like Ireland and China, lured to the region by the promise of gold.)
In a central circular room was an exhibit devoted to the Loch Ard, the best-known of the region’s wrecks, and to its only two survivors, Eva and Tom. The Loch Ard was a clipper that left England in March of 1878 carrying 37 passengers, including eighteen-year-old Eva Carmichael, a well-born Irishwoman, and Tom Pearce, the cabin boy, also eighteen. In dense fog, the ship hit a reef and sank in just fifteen minutes. Eva clung to a spar for several hours and was ready to give up when her cries were heard by Tom, who had just come ashore himself, but went back out to rescue her. The two sought refuge in a cave overnight before Tom climbed the cliffs and brought help.
But the real story, as the plaques made clear, was the attention that followed. Tom and Eva became the darlings of the Victorian newspapers and public, who desperately wanted Eva to fall in love with the now heroic and adulated Tom, perhaps reflecting the aspirations of a populace that had escaped the class-bound confines of England for a less rigid new world. But Eva, who had just lost her entire family, was in no mood to gratify them, instead sailing back to Ireland three months later to live with her remaining family. She and Tom never spoke again.
Tourists in the twenty-first century tend to fall in love with harsh and unyielding landscapes like the Shipwreck Coast but, in ages past, when technology had yet to tame the elements, those same stark rocks and surf connoted not romance, but hardship, suffering, and, in the case of Eva Carmichael, tragedy.
It was time to see that landscape for ourselves. From the western terminus the Great Ocean Road, a windy, two-lane highway, began as what appeared to be a flat, grassy plain. Soon, the water came into view, and we realized that we were not on a plain but a headland, separated from the beach by steep cliffs with walls grooved like wet sand after you’ve run your fingers through it. The most noteworthy features of the drive are spaced out along this end, a few hundred feet to a few miles apart. Unfortunately, because of the instability of the cliffs, visitor exploration is mostly restricted to the paths, giving the sites a zoolike atmosphere as travelers gawk and snap photos from behind railings.
The wind and rain, we discovered, only enhanced the scene. In the sunnier weather of my previous visit, the landscape was merely pretty; now, it demanded respect. At the Grotto, an ocean-carved hole in the cliffs, we stood in our rain jackets and watched from above as waves sent plumes of water forty feet high, making the saltwater-faded plaque’s explanation of the cave’s formation rather fatuous. At London Arch, formerly London Bridge, visitors used to be able to walk to the end of the headland across two sea-sculptured arches that somewhat resembled England’s famous span over the Thames. Then, one day in 1990, the first arch suddenly collapsed, leaving two befuddled tourists stranded, but unharmed, on what was now an island.
At the Twelve Apostles, the iconic limestone towers that had so burned themselves into my memory, I felt that something was missing. The stacks seemed farther away than I remembered, a perception that I initially chalked up to the different light, until I learned that in 2005 the Apostle nearest the overlook had collapsed. Standing out there alone on the viewing platform, Jen already back in the car, the earth-shaping forces of wind, rain and sea spray whipping against me, I felt a visceral awareness of geological time; rarely does one experience a landscape so alive, so fluid.
And yet, because of our earlier visit to the museum, the highlight of the drive was Loch Ard Gorge (photo),where Tom and Eva washed up. At Muttonbird Island, we saw the reef where Tom and Eva’s ship foundered. With the mammoth press of water and the rocky spikes and blades alternately revealed and submerged with each heaving breath of the ocean, it’s a wonder that even the two of them survived.
The gorge itself is perhaps the least spectacular marked spot along the road, but it was one of the few places where we could get onto the beach and explore the cave that sheltered the never-would-be lovers. It was also where we got a sudden glimpse of sunshine, golden rays sneaking out to give the gorge a touch of contrast and color. Staring up at the bulbous stalactites, black and red and white from mineral deposits and lichen, everywhere around me illuminated by the late afternoon light, I could almost imagine what it felt like to be shipwrecked on the other end of the world.
After checking into our small Greek-themed guesthouse in Apollo Bay— the hub for visitors headed to nearby Otway National Park or surf spots like Bell’s Beach— we high-tailed it into town, afraid that, although it was only 8 p.m., we had missed our chance at dinner. The night before in Port Fairy, arriving at a similar time, we had had to walk around for an hour before we could find a restaurant. In Apollo Bay, however, we soon found a table at the Great Ocean Road Deli which, despite its name, is actually an upscale restaurant, and feasted on tiger prawns in garlic cream sauce and scotch fillet, or rib-eye, rare, and discussed our plans for the following day. We had a score to settle with the local marsupials, as we’d failed to see even one until we drove into Apollo Bay the night before and spotted a black wallaby. Our plan was to go back for more.
What we ended up finding, however, was a veritable parade of the normally solitary koalas. In a respite from the rain, we discovered that the treetops along the road to the Cape Otway Lighthouse were filled with them; they almost outnumbered the tourists who had pulled off beside the gum trees to marvel at them. The koalas were yawning. They were eating. They were carrying their babies around and calling out to one another. It was like a koala block party.
Earlier that morning, which had dawned as gray as the last three, Jen, getting twitchy, started looking through activities in the Apollo Bay tourist office: horseback riding, sailing, and mountain biking. Yes, it was wet out there, she said, but it was drizzling, not pouring. Weather like this wouldn’t keep us inside on a multiday hike, so why now? I felt beaten down by the rain, but Jen wouldn’t be denied, and so, after our encounter with the koalas, we joined a guide and another couple on the beach, donned wet suits and headed out in kayaks into the gentle water of the Bay and the rough breakers beyond.
The guide made repeated passes by the hundred or so seals lounging on the rocks, smacking the water with his paddle and inviting them to play. Eventually they flowed in as a wave of whiskers and blubber, ducking under our boats to surf the breakers, for no apparent reason other than their own enjoyment. But if this trip had taught me anything, it’s that landscapes are better engaged than observed. So we angled our own boat toward shore, paddled through the steely water and pitched ourselves, too, into the unrelenting wave.

Three of the best towns to stay in along the drive from Adelaide to Melbourne are Robe, Port Fairy, and Apollo Bay.
In Robe, the Caledonian Inn (61-8-8768-2029; caledonian.net.au) may not be the most comfortable hotel around but, with its history, it’s probably the most interesting. Doubles are from 85 to 110 Australian dollars (almost the same in U.S. dollars).
In Port Fairy, Daisies by the Sea (61-3-5568-2355; port-fairy.com/daisiesbythesea) is a bed-and-breakfast on the beach that, if the weather is nice, is worth its higher cost. Doubles are 160 dollars.
And in Apollo Bay, Angela’s Guest House (61-3-5237-7085; angelasguesthouse.com.au) is clean, well run and reasonably priced. Doubles start at 100 dollars.
In Warrnambool on the western edge of the road, the Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village ( (61-3-5559-4600; flagstaffhill.com) provides a good overview of the region’s history that can give the landscape context. It is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; admission is 16 dollars.
Apollo Bay is a great base for exploring the forests of Otway National Park. Apollo Bay Surf and Kayak (61-405-495-909; apollobaysurfkayak.com.au) gives surfing lessons and also runs sea kayaking trips out to the local seal colony for 65 dollars a person.

Rico says that Port Fairy is missing a bet by not advertising in the right magazines for gay tourists...