The Great Ocean Walk - Aire River to Johanna Beach - Day 5

We were once again treated a glorious start to the day with sunshine and warm temperatures. We had a 14km day ahead of us which was graded as medium. We had an early start to the day again heading off by 9am (that is early for us).

Along the track we saw evidence of roos and wallabies by their foot prints in the sand.

We had the opportunity to drop off the track down to the beach. A great beach with fantastic rock pools. We found abalone, crabs, rock cod - if we wanted a feed then it was there for us. It was really interesting looking around in the rock pools. There were large sort sand stone boulders with many ancient sheets embedded in the rocks. We had a pleasant morning tea on the beach.

Rejoining the track we were treated by finding a large tiger snake sunning itself just on the side of the track. It let us take a couple of photos of it before moving off into the scrub. They do move fast when they want to. It was not too fussed by our presence.

We made our way to Castle lookout - we knew we were approaching a tourist lookout by all of the "borries and bog role paper littering the walking track. It was pretty disgusting. There should really be toilets for tourists us use at some of these sites. We encountered similar situations as we approached the Twelve Apostles.

Leaving the lookout we eventually found ourselves pushing through some more temperate rainforest with great stands of grass trees and several cinnamon fungus control points. The cinnamon fungus decimates grass trees. We eventually made our way to Johanna beach where we had lunch.

The walk along the beach was a bit of a slog as the beach angled up steeply from where the waves were washing in and out and the sand was quite soft requiring a modified walking style. Along the beach the highlight was seeing two hooded plovers of which there are only about 600 left in Victoria.

The final 400 meters to the campsite seemed to take forever, however, once reaching our campsite for the night the views that we had were second to none. We pretty much had the camp site to ourselves with some people arriving much later to setup camp amongst the trees.

We decided to take a walk back down to the beach for a quick swim, been very wary of the undertows and rips. The rips were super evident when watching a couple of surfers catching the rip out to get back into the waves. The sunset views that we had were truely wonderful that night. We had Chiili Con Carne for dinner as well as our usual dessert and pre of soup.