The Great Ocean Road: Where to Stop, and How Far West to Go
There's a version of the Great Ocean Road that people try to do in a single day from Melbourne — bolt down to the Twelve Apostles, snap the photo, bolt back in the dark. I understand the impulse and I'd still tell you not to do it. The road is too good to treat as a checklist, and the further west you go, the more true that becomes.
We've driven it in pieces over years — day trips, weekends, the whole thing out to Portland and back more than once. What follows is how I'd actually carve it up: where to stop, where to turn around if you're short on time, and the point past which you really need to stop trying to do it in a day.
Torquay and the surf coast
The road proper starts at Torquay, the gateway and the surf capital, and it's a town we keep coming back to for reasons that have nothing to do with the road — it's our base whenever there's a show on at Mt Duneed Estate, the winery just inland that puts on the big outdoor concerts — Robbie Williams, The Killers, Fatboy Slim have all been great nights. Stay the night in Torquay, catch the music, wake up on the coast.
West of there the surf-coast towns come one after another — Anglesea, Aireys Inlet, Fairhaven — each with its own beach and its own crowd. I've got history at Fairhaven in particular: I did surf lifesaving there, and it's a wild, beautiful, properly powerful surf beach with a community around it that's as good a reason to go as the sand itself. (We've camped along this stretch plenty, but I've written about that elsewhere, so I'll leave it.)
Lorne: the natural turnaround
Lorne is where a sensible day trip turns around. You can get to Lorne and back from Melbourne in a day — a long day, but a good one — and the town gives you plenty of reasons to linger before you do: an excellent pub, a clutch of genuinely good restaurants, and a cellar door right in the middle of it all.
That last one was a small, happy surprise for me. St Anne's has a cellar door on Mountjoy Parade, more or less opposite Lorne Beach — and St Anne's is a name I already knew well, from the outlet you pass on the Western Highway on the way up to Daylesford, and from Echuca, where I once walked out with a ten-litre barrel of their port. Finding them again on the Great Ocean Road, ocean across the road, felt like running into an old friend a long way from home.
If your time's tight, make Lorne your turnaround and don't feel you've missed the point. You haven't. But if you can keep going — and the road's about to get spectacular — keep going.
Apollo Bay, and where the road really begins
Past Lorne, the road changes character. This is the stretch most people are picturing when they picture the Great Ocean Road: the bitumen climbing and curving around the headlands, the ocean dropping away on one side, every bend opening onto another view that makes you want to pull over. The curves get epic and the views get legendary, and it earns both words.
Tucked into that stretch is Wye River, a tiny town folded into the hills where the forest runs right down to the sea. I stayed there once in a little cubby treehouse up in the woods — and it's still one of the more magical nights I've had anywhere on this coast. It's the kind of place the road hides in plain sight: you'd drive straight through if you didn't know to stop.
Apollo Bay sits at the end of that run, and it is one of our old favourites — somewhere we'd go to swim and have a serious crack at learning to surf. My clearest memory of it is the simplest: a pint of beer at the end of an afternoon swimming, looking out over the beach, the sort of ordinary perfect moment you don't plan and never forget.
The far west: the Apostles, Warrnambool, Portland
Keep west and you reach the headline act — the Twelve Apostles, just before Port Campbell, where the coastline does its most dramatic work. Be warned: the car park is genuinely chaotic, especially in season. Go early or late if you can.
From there the road runs on through to Warrnambool, which has come a long way and is well worth the time these days — have a look at the reclaimed land down near the port, it's a real transformation. And beyond that, if you've got the appetite, all the way to Portland. I've covered this end of the coast on wheels of a different kind, too: I rode from Koroit through to Camperdown along here with my brother on the Great Victorian Bike Ride, and the whole route was a joy at twenty kilometres an hour, which is the best argument I can give you for slowing the car down as well.
Here's the one firm rule for the western end: if you're going this far, stay. Don't try to round-trip the Apostles and Warrnambool from Melbourne in a day. Book a night — Port Campbell or thereabouts — and give the far coast the time it's asking for. The road rewards an overnight far more than it rewards an early alarm.
The Honest Version
The Great Ocean Road is two roads, really. The first is the surf-coast run to Lorne — easy, lovely, very doable in a day, and plenty for a lot of people. The second is everything past Lorne, which is the one the postcards are selling, and which deserves an overnight rather than a death-march day trip.
Summer is glorious and the weather is made for it, but the crowds are wild and the Apostles car park can test a saint. Go in the shoulder seasons if you can. And whatever you do, leave time for the small stuff — the pint at Apollo Bay, the cellar door at Lorne — because that's the part you'll actually remember.
What's next
I'm heading back down this winter to fill in a few gaps of my own. The plan: finally call into Winespeake's seaside outpost in Anglesea (the sister shop to the Daylesford original, right on the river), then base ourselves at Airey's Inlet for a couple of nights and explore the country around Port Campbell and Timboon — the distillery, the ice creamery, and the cheese and whey makers dotted through there. I'll write that one up properly once it's done. For now, this is the road I already know — and it's plenty.
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