Un petit peu of the Great Ocean Walk – Cape Otway to Blanket Bay

We get out onto the Great Ocean Road & into the Great Otway National Park more than regularly but haven’t made our way deep down to Cape Otway in a long time, so we headed there on the weekend to do a bit of exploring by foot and make sure that it all still looked the same.

Cape Otway is about half way along the Great Ocean Road, right into the Otway forest, not too far from Apollo Bay on the way to the 12 Apostles.

It’s a bit more than a two hour drive from where we live, Geelong and it’s tough to complete the whole drive without exploring some places on the way. The road goes through the stunning forest then kisses the coast at Apollo Bay before heading back into the dense forest again, there were dozens of places begging for us to stop-in at as we drove past, but we had to ignore the urge and get ourselves to Cape Otway – we had a long walk ahead of us.

Once we had made it to the lighthouse, we parked the car and walked east (back towards Geelong/Melbourne) along part of the Great Ocean Walk.

We thought it’d be nice to see the lighthouse from up-close, but it costs about $25 per person to get anywhere near the place and as we really didn’t care too much, we set off by foot to get a free view from the distance.

We hiked past Crayfish Bay, down to Parker Inlet and Iluka Falls then onto Blanket Bay, which was just over 11 kms. From the Blanket Bay Campground, we looped back to the Cape Otway Lighthouse along a road for about 8.5 kms.

It was a decent a hike and we went past a lot of nice coastal scenery. There wasn’t one particular highlight or climax on the trail, just a top coastal walk with that’s pretty quiet, very relaxing and full of incredible colours – that’s for the GOW part of it, anyway, the first 4-5 kms from Blanket Bay back towards our car was along a gravel road which wasn’t stunning nor overly dull, but could be quite dangerous on a busy day with cars speeding along it.

In the end, we covered about 19.5-20 kms, it took us 5 hours (including breaks). The full Great Ocean Walk is a 90 km (or so) hiking trail from Apollo Bay to the 12 Apostles.

If you’ve got any suggestions on how we could have made the final stretch of this loop any better (maybe there’s a track that we don’t know about), then please comment below and let us know – we’d love to hear from you!

We’re heading to the Brisbane Rangers in a couple of days, come back week to see another video and blog post.