K deftly negotiated the final kilometres of The Great Ocean Road on Saturday morning. We stopped to look at the waterfall at Carrisbrook and while we were there we got to see some koalas in the wild.

Koalas are fascinating creatures: cute as little teddy bears but with far sharper claws! I’m eternally amazed by the way that they choose the most precarious positions to sleep, at the farthest ends of eucalyptus branches, being intoxicated on the eucalyptus leaves and bark that they have fed on.

Sheoak Falls, some fifteen minutes’ walk from the car park at Angahook Lorne National Park was somewhat of a disappointment as there was no water to be seen. K saw something sizable slither into the undergrowth, so we beat a hasty retreat back to our vehicle.

The town of Lorne was very busy as we drove through and so we had to stop and have a nosey. The activities on the beach were part of the Rescue 2006 International Surf Lifesaving Competition. We spent a while watching the beach flag races. A British guy won his final that involved lying face-down in the sand and jumping up at the sound of the starter’s whistle and running in the direction his feet were pointing before diving for a stick protruding from the sand. And I thought we had to do some odd things in my lifesaving exams!

Some of the more windy stretches of The Great Ocean Road, the ones with rockfaces to one side and drops down to the crashing waves to the other reminded me of the old A5 route through North Wales. This would be the route that we would take to the ferry terminal at Holyhead for childhood trips to Ireland. It seemed appropriate, then, that toward the end of the Tourist Route we entered the Town of Anglesea!

It wasn’t long before we’d reached the peaceful town of Queenscliff (no ‘e’) in the borough of Queenscliffe (with an ‘e’), where we spent the weekend. It was a nice, quiet, relaxed weekend. I caught up on my reading and did very little else to be honest. It was great way to spend our last weekend on the road.

Two months to the day after we left Birmingham, we have arrived in Melbourne. We’ve settled in nicely at the Oasis YHA, where we’re booked in for two whole weeks. According to the odometer, The Beast has covered 16,302km (let’s call it a round 10,000 miles!) since we picked it up two days before Christmas. It’s nice to park the car up now since in essentially six weeks we have covered the mileage that an average driver in the UK would cover in a year!