VICTORIA

Torquay is the Aussie surf capital, 60 miles to the south west of Melbourne, Victoria and beyond the channel that connects Port Phillip Bay with the Bass Strait. Some 300 miles across the Bass Strait lies Tasmania and beyond “Taz” is just the vast Southern Ocean, for more than 3,000 miles of open, rolling and increasingly freezing water until Antarctica looms. Back in the relative warmth, whether you are surfing or just eating sandwiches, Torquay is a beautiful spot and it is the gateway to one of the truly unforgettable journeys on which modern man can embark, on the Great Ocean Road.

From Torquay the Great Ocean Road sticks tight to the jagged, rocky shoreline of southern Australia for more than 400 miles, until it reaches the old fishing village of Port Fairy. They say you should take three days over the journey to fully absorb and appreciate the ocean-scape.

Along the way you’ll come to Port Campbell and its iconic 12 Apostles [pictured]. These are a series of limestone pillars that rise out of the Southern Ocean surf, and show where the cliffs once stood 20 million years ago. As the cliffs gradually retreated the Apostles would have first taken the form of caves, then worn away into arches, before eventually being batterd into lone columns, rising up to 150 feet above the sea.

The stubborn Apostles have bravely withstood all that the Southern Ocean has thrown at them over the millennia, although nothing lasts forever, and the 12 are now down to a hard core of eight, with the ninth pillar crashing into the ocean in 2005.