Getting out of Melbourne and onto the beach

This is part II of my trip to Melbourne. Read part I.

After breakfast with my Couchsurfing host, I hopped on a tram and rode to Federation Square. This was the meeting point for a tour: a 2-day tour of the Great Ocean Road, with a surfing lesson. It was organised by Teepee Tours. Accommodation would be camping in a teepee.

Turned out that Teepee Tours was two guys, Andrew and Adam, who wanted to go to the beach and have some beers with friends, and Adam's dog Riley. They’d set up Teepee Tours after some of their foreign friends said they’d driven around the Great Ocean Road but didn’t really know where to go or what to do. They’ve been running tours for about a year now, twice a week, with two vans. 

There were a bunch of Americans, a few Canadians, two Swedes, some Germans, a French woman, a Kiwi, an Aussie, a Brit, a Norwegian, a Finn and possibly a few other nationalities on the tour. We compiled a multinational Spotify playlist for the drive. 

Our first stop was surfing. Despite having booked a whole surf weekend for next weekend, I was a bit skeptical. I don’t like sand and I don’t like the saltiness of the sea. I also find the power of the sea - that is, big waves - intimidating. That day the waves were a good size, “if a bit messy,” as Andrew put it. They were not huge, but big enough to surf, although it turned out that they generally ran out of power a bit too soon. 

We wriggled into our swimmers and wetsuits, grabbed some surf boards and headed to the beach. Our surf instructors had us run along the beach and swing our arms as warm up. One of us expressed her doubt that the instructors were simply having a laugh at our expense. Then we got on our surf boards. On the sand. We were assigned into groups of six, with a surf instructor for each group. Our instructor, a young guy called Jack, had each of us individually go through the motions of paddling and getting up on our boards under his watchful eye. I was sure I would forget everything he’d said as soon as I got in the water. 

We headed for the waves. Jack looked at me and said, “You’re first” (or something to that effect), and I was pretty sure I would be the first to capsize my board. To be honest, I have no idea if I was, because as soon as I was on my board, I forgot about the others, about making a fool of myself and about the sea being salty. I lay on my board, waiting for a good wave, Jack gave my board a push, I paddled, drew myself up on my knees, got up and fell off my board. Then I did it again, while Jack gave someone else a sendoff. And again. I capsized my board just lying on it, as I wasn’t in the middle of it. I capsized it by being caught sideways in a wave. I capsized it by falling off. I fell of backwards, I fell off sideways. I discovered I make the same mistake in surfing as I do in my aikido: I don’t bend my knees enough. But I also rode a wave pretty much all the way to the beach a few times. And Andrew, back on the beach, was true to his promise and captured photos of people standing on their boards. (Also sitting on their boards and lying on their boards. He took something like 100 photos.)

It was such good fun. A great workout, too: you didn’t know you’d been working out until you got back to the beach and realised how tired your muscles were. 

Lunch was Subway on the beach. Adam and Andrew were good at almost everything, except counting. They never got their heads around how many vegetarians there were. While disaster failed to materialise during this tour (i.e. I didn’t go hungry), one part of my mind was constantly calculating my own snack reserves and their adequacy in case we ran out of veggie food. 

On that first day, we saw koalas, hand-fed birds, played football (soccer) on the beach, jumped in the middle of the road under a ‘Great Ocean Road’ sign, saw the effects of the bush fire that had raged two months earlier (also the rapid regeneration that was already taking place), had a barbecue dinner and shared stories of all manner of adventures in a teepee around a fire. I was the only one to go to bed (in another teepee) around midnight. Everyone else headed to the beach, where - I heard in the morning - the breeze was rather chilly and nothing much happened. 

A koala at a camping and caravan park.

Feeding a bird at said camping and caravan park.

The effect of a recent bushfire. It 'jumped' over the road and burnt the shoreline vegetation too.

Breakfast the next morning was rather subdued and we set course for the Twelve Apostles rather later than the 10 am planned. The Apostles were rock formations on the coast. It was a beautiful place, and despite the hundreds of tourists, I wished we’d had more time there. But time was running fast and we still had a beach to visit, lunch to eat and a two-hour drive back to Melbourne to endure. 

Breakfast.

After said beach, we headed inland for a quicker route back towards Melbourne. The countryside was green and idyllic. After seeing beaches and towns for so long, I’d forgotten what a farmed landscape was like. It put me in mind of my three-month stint at a dairy farm in New Zealand. The happy memories. 

Lunch was fish and chips or, in the case of vegetarians, potato cakes and chips. Potato and potato, that is. We had also been offered pizza, however. Although this time, Adam had really miscounted and one vegetarian ate around the fish. 

The rest was a longish drive back to Federation Square. The others were heading to a local pub later, but I had an overnight coach to catch. I would arrive in Sydney at 7 am on Monday morning and my first lecture would be that afternoon...