Great Coast Road - and rain

Raining all day and after a great coffee downtown pondered my options - it is legal. It had been suggested that the Great Coast Road would be a good tour but being crammed into a mini bus with 11 other tourists was not a turn on.
Then I found the bus to Apollo Bay. Run by the Government at a tremendous loss, it is a 3 hour + journey to a surfers paradise (£17 return!). 2 hours between buses then same journey back - but the views especially from high up in a coach of surf crashing onto both sandy and rocky beaches were superb. My photos cannot do them justice due to the movement of the coach and the rain.
You don't seem to see 1 cockatoo at a time - they come in mobs. In one field several hundred had gathered to feed and there were never less than 10 or so.
The road is cut from the cliff like a goat track- it started as jobs for returning soldiers from WWI - and thus dips and dives and has tight corners and is none too wide - well motorway standard by Wensleydale comparisons.

 However those with a good memory will remember that not too long along the Wye River community was hit by bush fires. And so was the road. Whilst most houses I could see from from the coach were OK despite the blackened stumps right to the edge of the beach, I could see the odd wreck higher up where homes had been lost.

The surprise was the regreening with ground plants starting well, many apparently dead trees covered with thin but vigorous green and the tree ferns with a 6 foot blackened stump and a bright green display of fresh fronds on top almost as high again.

There's not much in Apollo Bay, umpteen restaurants, several surf shacks and tat shops. But lunch and wine passed the time.

Then back via Anglesea and Torquay - never realised they were so close - with a bag of 2 bottles of local red for home and  4 bottles of the local breweries best, only the empty bottles of which will be taken back to the Fox and Hounds.

And I my visit to Bairnsdale is now "celebrated" on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/RightTrackToursAustralia/

Hate to think what that will do for Janet's business.