Great Ocean Walk Day 4: Cape Otway to Castle Cove

Another very nice day of walking and eating!

Our host prepared a fantastic breakfast wrap for us this morning — everything they make is delicious and healthy.

Just look at that green onion belt!

We had an 11-mile day that was mostly on the cliffs overlooking the shore. Our outfitter provided tide charts, and today we definitely needed them. Our path could follow the cliffs or, if the tide was favorable, we could walk the beach. After consulting the charts and heading down for a look, we opted for the high road.

It’s good we did take the high road, as we were able to see from above how the waves washed out what would have been our trail.

It was supposedly prime echidna habitat, but we didn’t see any. In fact, wildlife was generally quiet today — though judging by the tracks covering our sandy trail, we were clearly on a wallaby and kangaroo speedway! Wallaby tracks shown here.

We did spot some lovely birds, including immature crimson rosellas (which are ironically a vibrant green), beautiful firetail finches, and the very tame fairy wrens.

One little fairy wren even tried to share our lunch.

During our one stretch on the beach, we came across a massive piece of petrified wood — or “mineralized wood,” as they call it here.

We saw some fun things today…Spiderweb that looks like little hammocks.

Vibrant succulents like this weedy sand fig

The clouds rolled in as we wrapped up our day. Tomorrow’s high will be in the 50’s. Winter is coming!

Today was unique in that we weren’t picked up by our driver — we actually walked directly to our farm stay, which sits just a short distance from the trail. Tomorrow we’ll simply walk back and pick up where we left off.

Our farm stay

Tonight’s dinner was a delicious rigatoni and chickpea main, accompanied by a lovely salad and chocolate chia pudding for dessert. Very, very good!

That’s all for now! Good night from the Southern Ocean!