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Why the Great Ocean Road is great for wildlife

Let me start this post in an unusual way: by talking about Tasmania. I’d initially tacked on the Great Ocean Road to my Tasmania trip as a bit of an add-on: this being my first time in Australia and wanting to see as much of its wildlife as possible in the two weeks I had off from work, I focused most of my time on that island since I’d heard it was wildlife heaven, and indeed no lies were told. I then added the Great Ocean Road since it was right there and has koalas (Tasmania does not). 

Given how much Tasmania had blown me away and the fact that Victoria was ground zero for Australia’s fox and rabbit infestations, I was keeping my expectations low. In the end, the Great Ocean Road’s nature astounded me: not only was the scenery as good as I’d hoped, from waves battering rust-red cliffs to waterfalls crashing through verdurous rainforests, but there was also wildlife everywhere. For animals, not only did it feel on near-equal footing with Tasmania, but also other wildlife-rich places I’ve visited such as Borneo or the Galapagos.

Part of what makes it good is the variety of habitats: lush grassy fields and rainforests in the east, dense eucalyptus forests on Cape Otway, and steep cliffs and arid outback scrub in the west.

Top animals to spot along the Great Ocean Road

• Kangaroos are one of the area’s top draws, and present pretty much anywhere with green grass. Anglesea Golf Course is the best-known spot for them, offering educational tours for non-golfers, although this is primarily because of its location just a short distance from the Great Ocean Road’s eastern entrance. However, you can also spot them in plenty of other locations, including the fields along the road itself and those just outside Kennett River and Apollo Bay.
• Koalas, an infamously lazy animal, take a bit more effort to find, but are pretty common in eucalyptus forests and trees near Kennett River and Cape Otway. One easy koala spotting trick is to just keep an eye out for any tourists pointing fingers or cameras up into the trees, but otherwise look out for cushion-sized lumps in the branches, particularly where they fork, and use binoculars or a zoom lens to tell if it’s a koala.
• Cockatoos and various other parrots can be seen throughout most of the Great Ocean Road wherever there are trees or bushes, but the town of Lorne is chock-full of cockatoos – even if you just pass through the town you’ll see them perched in their tens in the trees that line the town’s seafront road.
• Swamp wallabies, a beautiful black and brown species, hang about in open areas. One of the best places to see them is Cape Otway Lighthouse.
• Fur seals have several small colonies along the rocky coastline, with a small one near Machego which you can kayak out to.
• Southern right whales calve during the winter months off Warrnambool, and there’s a viewing platform built overlooking the bay from which you can spot them (or try to, anyway). Dolphins are also streaking through the sea throughout the year.
• Wander through the deepest darkest forests at night to see the ethereal blue lights created by glow worms. Using their lights to attract flying insects, they catch them with long strands of sticky spit rather like a spider’s web. Glow worms love moisture so be sure to visit if it’s been raining recently. Some of the best places to see them are Kennet River and Melba Gully.
• Many people don’t know that you can see little blue penguins at the Twelve Apostles. An absolutely tiny penguin the size of a football, and one that only emerges from the sea at dusk, it won’t be a clear view. In fact, when me and my sister saw them, the flock looked like a patch of darker sand – yet, the fact that it moved up the beach over time gave them away.
• There’s a lake about an hour inland where you can go canoeing to spot platypus. Although we didn’t bother since we’d seen platypus in Tasmania, this is a great place to try your luck if you’re in the area. 

Day one: depart Melbourne, head for Apollo Bay and revisit Kennett River at night.

We started off with a bit of a delay at Melbourne Airport since Uber drivers were protesting and as a result only got going at midday. Still, we managed to make good time since the highway traffic was flowing like a river.

If you’re here for wildlife and nature then I’d recommend making a beeline for Lorne. There are quite a few lovely viewpoints to stop at and admire the scenery en route, but just remember that there are a lot of them! You could also stop at Geelong, Victoria’s second-largest city, though don’t bother if you’re eager to get to the quintessential Australia. 

Torquay is worth a bit of a stop for the sign marking the official start of the Great Ocean Road. Anglesea, the next town along, gets a fair few wildlife-loving visitors for the golf course’s resident mob of kangaroos. Don’t worry too much about detouring here if you’re only looking to see kangaroos, since they’re quite abundant on the east side of the Great Ocean Road. If you’re looking to learn about them, however, their short tours are a great use of 25 minutes and you’ll get up close and personal – kangaroos elsewhere along the road are a bit more skittish.

Drive on to Lorne where you’ll find colourful rosellas in the bushes and masses of sulphur-crested cockatoos in the trees along the roads. Whilst they delight visitors, the mischievous birds regularly manage to ruffle the feathers of the town’s residents, raiding bins to the point that people have had to get elaborate with keeping the birds out.

Keep an eye out for kangaroos and koalas wherever you are along the road – the first you should be able to see in the fields, the second you may need to rely on groups of tourists pointing binoculars or cameras into the treetops. If you’re not having much luck though, stop at Kennett River. If I were to pinpoint one spot on the entire road where you must stop if you’re into wildlife, it would be this small hamlet. A peaceful place snuggled between the hills and the coast, where the eponymous river is more a babbling brook, in a quick walk here we’d seen tens of kangaroos in the fields and gardens, a distant swamp wallaby, lots of birds including fairy-wrens, ducks and herons, and our first koala in the trees, pointed out to us by a pair of backpackers. 

Depending on how you’re doing for time, head inland from the Great Ocean Road and north towards Lake Elizabeth for a platypus-spotting tour – it takes roughly an hour to drive from here to Kennett River. As day turns to dusk, you’ll be paddled out in a canoe by your guide/ boatman in search of this bizarre creature. Sightings are never guaranteed, and these duck-billed mammals don’t always linger about at the surface for long, but that makes it all the better when you manage to spot one skimming through the water’s surface. Even if you’re unsuccessful, it’s a magical experience drifting through the flooded forest.

Whether you double back to Kennett River after Lake Elizabeth or stick around, be sure to also visit the hills around here after dark. It’s at this time that glow worms illuminate the gullies along the roads, their faint blue lights glowing in the pitch blackness. Drive up to Grey River Picnic Ground and be prepared to wait about 15 minutes, since the worms don’t like bright light or noise and will be hiding away for about that long after you’ve switched off your engine. For the same reason, don’t use flash photography and keep your torch dimmed and pointed at the ground. Once the glow worms begin to light up, it’s quite the sight as these sapphire constellations make the gullies look like a scene from Avatar.

Where to stay in Apollo Bay/ Kennett River

Kennett River is a small hamlet with a few places to stay, including a caravan park, but they tend to be booked out quite early on especially in the summer. You’re likely to find cheaper options in Apollo Bay, a twenty-five-minute drive away, and if you search for Kennett River accommodation on Expedia or Booking you’re likely to get shown options here anyway. 

Many have written Apollo Bay off as a bit of a tacky place, but if you have a car you’ll be able to avoid the busy town centre and enjoy some of the finer digs on the outskirts. Such as, Apollo Bay Panoramic Guesthouse – if you arrive after dark like we did, you’ll be in for a treat the next morning in the communal lounge and dining area. A whole wall of floor-to-ceiling windows means the bay area vista will hit you as soon as you set foot in the room. There’s no more Australian start to your day than a morning coffee while kangaroos graze in the meadows just outside.

Day two: kayaking with fur seals, koalas in Cape Otway and the Twelve Apostles

Refuel in Apollo Bay if your car is getting thirsty, then drive ten minutes south to the town of Marengo for a bit of kayaking to a fur seal colony. Jostling for space, most of the seals on the rock just offshore are bachelor males, though occasionally they’re joined by a few free-spirited females. Sometimes they’ll get quite close to the kayaks, though our guide assured us that they’d never tried to hitch a ride.

Press on westwards for the Great Ocean Road’s quintessential highlight: the Twelve Apostles. A series of eight stacks in the sea that used to be called the Sow and Piglets, it’s never actually been clear if there were ever twelve of them. In any case, they make for quite the dramatic sight, especially as the sun sets. The viewing platform, jutting out above the cliff-face, is understandably popular with tourists, but once the sun sets the crowds disperse. As the light fades, keep your eyes on the beach below for flocks of little penguins.

Where to stay in Port Campbell

For our second night we called into the Sow and Piglets Guesthouse at Port Campbell, primarily because of their onsite brewery. While we were just in the mood for some pizza (the perfect accompaniment to a top-notch hoppy ale), their kitchen was one of the best-equipped I’d seen of any hostel in Australia. Port Campbell itself is a pleasant enough place to stay, with rabbits bounding about the streets and so little light pollution that we could see the Milky Way at night. 

Day three: more rock formations, whale watching, then returning to Melbourne

Once you’re up and about, it’s time to keep heading west along the coastline until the end of the Great Ocean Road.

The Twelve Apostles may be the most well-known of the Great Ocean Road’s geological marvels but they’re far from the only one. In fact, the west side of Cape Otway is a series of hops between different viewpoints overlooking formations with names like the Bay of Islands and London Bridge. On this side of the cape, rainforests and meadows give way to scrub and sandstone, and there isn’t as much wildlife to spot. Keep your eyes for echidna though, especially if you set off at the crack of dawn. Many of the islets also host shearwater colonies, known locally as muttonbirds for the mutton-like texture of their meat.

A little further north is the town of Warrnambool, considered by many to be the end point of the Great Ocean Road. While the end is only marked by a rather anticlimactic sign, it’s still worth stopping here for the special whale-watching platform on its outskirts. For a couple of months in the winter southern right whales come to the bay to mate and calve before returning to Antarctica, and this platform offers the best chance of spotting them, situated ten metres above the sand. Check the local Facebook page and/ or Google reviews to see if any whales have been spotted recently. We visited in early September and weren’t lucky.

If you’ve got the time, pay a visit to Tower Hill Reserve a bit further west to spot emus. We unfortunately needed to shoot back to Melbourne since we had our flight home that evening, but since emus can be seen all over Australia we weren’t too gutted – we’ll be coming back to this continent one day!

Either way, blast your way through the Victorian interior back to Melbourne. I won’t beat about the bush here: this stretch of road isn’t the most exciting part of Australia, with straight roads through featureless farmland, but it’s at least over nice and quick. Aside from a small flock of galahs, we didn’t see any wildlife. Then again we weren’t looking too hard.

If you have some time to spend in Melbourne itself, there’s plenty to see and do from sampling the creme de la creme of Australia’s coffee culture to museums showcasing the country’s history. In terms of wildlife, you can head down to Phillipp Island for their nightly penguin parade as little penguins return to their nests, or pay a visit to Yarra Bend’s fruit bat colony to watch these magnificent leviathans swoop around.

Where to hire a car in Melbourne

We personally hired a car with Bargain Car Rentals, an outfit just outside Melbourne Airport, and found them pretty good. The usual rules of renting a car apply: check for scratches and marks, and take photos as evidence, plus expect to receive an excess-waiver pitch at the start (you can get one cheaper beforehand yourself). While they’ve received some negative reviews on Google in the past, we found them absolutely fine, plus the Tasmanian guy behind the desk lit up when I told him we’d just been to his homeland.

How much our Great Ocean Road trip cost us

Given that we were travelling together, this helped us split a lot of costs.

Collectively, we paid:

$88 (£45) for car hire for three days, and another £36 for 12 days of excess waiver (which also covered our earlier driving around Tasmania).

$36 (£18) for half a tank of fuel in Apollo Bay.

$90 (£45) for a double room in Apollo Bay.

$125 (£64) for a twin room at Port Campbell.

$20 (£10) for entry to the Cape Otway Lighthouse.

$0 (£0) for entry to the Twelve Apostles and parking there.

$180 (£92) for our kayaking trip to the seal colony.

Plus some stuff that was individual:

$17 for a burger n chips lunch at Warrnambool.

$3.50 for coffee in most places, be it in some trendy Melbourne neighbourhood or in one of the beach towns.