The morning after we landed in Melbourne, we caught the first bus of the day out of Geelong, to take us to the start of the Great Ocean Walk in Apollo Bay. The bus travels through a few towns until it gets to the coast and becomes the Great Ocean Road. From Lorne to Apollo Bay it is a windy curvy road that follows the coast. It runs along the surf for a bit, before climbing up hundreds of feet with steep drops offs and then diving back down again. Our bus driver obviously knew the route very well, as he did not waste a single kilometer per hour of the speed limit entitled to him.
Every couple of miles the bus stopped to pickup or discharge passengers at a wide spot in the road with a couple of houses and a track climbing up into the hills. At one of these stops the driver came back to ask "Is everybody traveling alright?". After everyone, including us, answered in the affirmative, he resumed his duties of transporting us with efficiency to Apollo Bay. We had been chatting with a retired couple behind us, and I confessed that I was little confused by the use of that phrase. The wife replied "He was just asking if anyone was getting motion sickness."
Later that day I was hiking through a tall Eucalyptus forest, with my eyes pointed towards the canopy, with a quick glimpse at the ground every three or four steps. After a minute or two of this, Sarah asked "What are you doing?" to which I replied "This is where they live". After a half hour of this awkward parade through the forest with the occasional stumble and irritated mumble from Sarah, I froze. "Look!" I said as I pointed to a spot on a branch a hundred above us that contained a dark bulge against a cloudy sky. Sarah said "That's just a bunch of leaves". I took a zoomed in picture and as I showed it to her said, "Leaves don't have fur." Then a sleepy paw stretched out confirming our first koala sighting. A minute later we would find another koala fifty feet down the trail awake, and returning our stares.
The next couple of days we would continue along the coast, marveling at the dramatic coastline and all the wildlife that inhabited it.
We would round corners in the forest to surprise wallabies.
On the grassy farmland mobs of kangaroos would reluctantly hop off the trail a dozen meters or so to let us pass.
Brightly colored birds of all kinds would alert all their neighbors as we approached with songs, squawks and screams we had never heard before.
As we reached the campgrounds each night and chatted with the local Aussies about our wild encounters, they would smile kindly like hearing a child telling about a squirrel they had seen in the park for the first time. With one exception.
On our second day we were on twisty section of the walk where the trees were older and the forest darker. I was a dozen meters ahead of Sarah, when I came around a bend in the trail to find the path ahead blocked by a gleaming white buck quietly grazing. As it raised it's head, I saw it had a rack almost a meter wide. It was as surprised to see me, as I was to see him because I could see his eyes open wide, as I am sure mine were. For a second neither of us moved, until Sarah started to catch up with me, which broke the spell and he bounded off into the depths of the forest. A thought of a picture only then entered my head. At each camp I asked if anyone else had seen a white deer before, and no one had. I wonder if somewhere in that forest there is a lamp post in a stand of evergreen trees.
On our fourth day we stopped for lunch at Melanesia beach. One of the fellow hikers named Brett that we had met the prior night at camp, passed us by as were finishing up. About a kilometer up the beach he took the trail as it headed back up the bluff into the coastal forest. A few minutes later he reappeared, and milled around at the trailhead. We loaded up our packs and headed on down the beach to meet him. There we learned the trail was blocked by a tiger snake with a coiled up "None Shall Pass!" attitude. Sarah headed up the trail to see, with Brett and I following. Brett had to point the snake out to us from about ten meters away, as only his head rose above the grass. I took out my phone for a picture. As I took another step forward for a better shot Brett exclaimed "Mate, what are you doing?". After I took a couple more shots, I retreated back down the path to the beach to Brett's relief. The tiger snake bite will deliver between 30 to 60 mg of venom. 3mg can kill a human. I knew this before taking that extra step for a better shot, but I was in the moment.
On the beach we considered our options, and decided that discretion was the better part of hiking. We would instead race the tide and head down the beach to an alternate path, that was steep and overgrown, but snake free we hoped. We would end up hiking the next two days with Brett, stamping our feet through snake-y bits of trail with tall grass to warn off other snakes that we meant business, or at least pretended to.
There is an intimacy that you develop with a place and it's people when you walk it, that you can not easily replicate by any other means of travel. We would would walk in silence for half an hour, but the shared experience provides the substance for relating to each other when exiting a tunnel of green to a new vista of the coast. By the end of the two days we had shared stories of our families, travels and dreams.
We had traveled alright.
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