Great Ocean Road attractions

Narana Creations Aboriginal Cultural Centre

Located on the Surfcoast Highway just outside Geelong on the way to the Great Ocean Road, this multi-award winning centre offers an insight into Australia's great aboriginal history and culture. The centre contains a café and native garden and a well-stocked retail gallery that supplies a wide range of aboriginal artefacts and souvenirs. Presentations are made by prior arrangement to tour and school groups.

Bells Beach

One of Australia's premier surf beaches, Bells Beach is located near Torquay, right near the beginning of Victoria's fabulous surf coast and the Great Ocean Road. Every Easter, it is the venue for the Rip Curl Pro, the world's longest running surfing event and part of the world championship of surfing, and was featured in "Point Break", one of Hollywood's classic surfing movies. It is a Mecca for surfing, and easily accessible on any day tour from Melbourne.

The Split Point Lighthouse

Built in 1891 to guide ships around the coastline as they head towards Melbourne, this lighthouse is one of the icons along the Great Ocean Road. Affectionately known as "The White Lady", it towers above the idyllic township of Aireys Inlet, which was almost completely rebuilt following the Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983. It is open for inspection by arrangement, and was the setting for a recent children's television show called "Around the Twist".

The Great Ocean Road Memorial Arch

Built as a tribute to the soldiers from the First World War who were engaged in the construction of the Great Ocean Road, the arch provides a useful photographic opportunity for travellers along the road. Located at Eastern View, it marks the commencing point of the first stage of the Great Ocean Road built by those soldiers, which stage ran to Lorne and was opened to traffic in 1922. An earlier arch was built in 1939, but fell into disrepair and was accidentally knocked over by a truck in 1979. It was rebuilt, but the replacement was also destroyed in the Ash Wednesday bushfires before the current one was built.

Lorne

Nestled between beautiful bushland and several kilometres of golden sandy beaches, Lorne is the most favoured holiday spot along the Great Ocean Road, and easily accessible on any day trip from Melbourne. It is built along the shores of Louttit Bay, a very sheltered bay popular for swimming, surfing and fishing, as well as on the banks of the Erskine River, and is featured in a poem by Rudyard Kipling, who visited the town in the late 1800's. Lorne also comes alive in summer for the Pier-to-Pub swimming race, the largest ocean water swimming race in the world, as well as a popular rock festival over the New Year at Erskine Falls, which make a great backdrop to the town.

Apollo Bay

Although much of its history revolves around the timber and fishing industries, Apollo Bay is another booming tourist town, with many forms of accommodation, cafes and other eateries. Located at the bottom of the foothills of the Otway Ranges, it has a number of premier surf and swimming beaches, and many bushwalks and waterfalls are also nearby. Fresh crayfish and other seafood are freely available at the fishing harbour. The town also comes alive late in April with the Apollo Bay Music Festival.

The Otway's Cool Temperate Rainforest

As the Great Ocean Road winds it way on through the magnificent Otway Ranges, a number of very ancient but beautiful rain forests can be found alongside the road. These forests are interspersed amongst towering columns of mountain ash, one of the tallest trees in the world, and consist of very tranquil but thickly vegetated fern gullies with their own eco-systems. The most popular of these rainforests are Mait's Rest, near Apollo Bay, named after the area's first forestry officer who often rested there in the 1920's, and Melba Gully, near Lavers Hill.

The Port Campbell National Park

The Port Campbell National Park is home to some of the most spectacular coastal scenery in the world, located towards the western end of the Great Ocean Road. Stretching some 32 kilometres long, and adjacent to some of the richest dairying country in the world, it contains a wide range of towering rock formations, including the Twelve Apostles, the Bay of Islands and Loch Ard Gorge, as well as some spectacular limestone cliffs, shipwrecks, coastal walks, and a number of very popular swimming and surf beaches.

The Twelve Apostles

Possibly one of Australia's most recognisable tourist icons, the Twelve Apostles are a series of towering limestone rock formations that stand in the sea, a bit like sentries on duty, after having been carved out of the landscape over millions of years, and usually forms the climax of any day tour from Melbourne along the Great Ocean Road. They are also probably the most miss-named, as only eight can be seen from the viewing platform, with one having fallen down as recently as July 2005, but they are part of a wider range of rock formations once known as the Sow and her Piglets. A great way to see them is by way of a helicopter ride, which can be boarded near the visitors centre car park.

Loch Ard Gorge

Although not as well known as the adjacent Twelve Apostles, it contains some equally breathtaking scenery, including the Island Arch, Muttonbird Island, the Razorback and the Dumpling Pots, all magnificent rock formations. Inside the gorge itself are some caves and stalactite formations. It is named after the three-masted clipper ship, the Loch Ard, that was wrecked there in 1878 with the loss of the lives of 52 people, on the last night of its voyage from Gravesend in England to Melbourne. Two 18-year-olds survived, and their amazing ordeal can be followed along the numerous walking trails around the gorge.

London Bridge

London Bridge is another example of this ever changing coastline. Just like the Twelve Apostles, it was carved out of the landscape by millions of years of erosion, and had formed into the shape of a dual-spanned archway-shaped bridge formation that connected with the mainland. In accordance with the nursery rhyme, the span that connected with the mainland collapsed into the sea very suddenly in 1990. No-one was hurt, but 2 people were stranded and had to be rescued by helicopter. The bridge is now in the form of a very imposing single arch, and is located just west of Port Campbell towards the end of the Great Ocean Road, and often marks the end of a day tour from Melbourne.