In Australia, Driving the Great Ocean Road

I first traveled the Great Ocean Road in 2002, and I still remember beams of sunlight cutting through the clouds to illuminate 150-foot stone pillars jutting out of the sea, the last stalwarts of land in its eternal losing battle with the ocean. As my wedding approached last fall, that indelible image was enough to convince me that the drive would be the perfect way to begin a two-month honeymoon through Australia and New Zealand; we’d camp on the beach, take surfing lessons, hike alongside kangaroos and koalas and luxuriate in a landscape so blissful and majestic that we’d be in full honeymoon mode by the time we reached Melbourne.

Unfortunately, the weather had other ideas. The rains began as soon as we touched down in Adelaide — heavy, gray, unyielding. Clearly, my wife, Jen, and I wouldn’t be able to coast through these four days on seashells, sunshine and warm ocean breezes; we’d have to dig deeper to answer a question that has plagued countless travelers before us: How do you enjoy a road trip when it won’t stop raining?

No matter what the weather, in a country as vast as Australia, an epic road trip is a traveler’s rite of passage, if only to get a sense of the scope of the place. The Great Ocean Road can be done as part of a 400-mile loop out of Melbourne, but we had opted for the 600-mile coastal route from Adelaide to Melbourne — Australia’s two closest major cities, despite being as far apart as Boston and Washington. It would take longer, crossing from the province of South Australia to Victoria, but at least we wouldn’t be backtracking.

We flew into Adelaide, grabbed our rental car and headed out of town, wipers running full tilt. The first day we had planned to see the Coorong, a national park that is a vast estuary and home to cormorants, spoonbills, black swans and other water birds. The weather, however, made bird-watching seem like a little slice of insanity for which we just didn’t have the appetite. We did get a hint of what we might have seen had the skies been more in our favor, though: at one point as the road veered close to the beach, we spooked a squadron of pelicans that took off and flew parallel to us at a pace that perfectly matched our own, undulating in a sine wave at a fixed point in our vision, as the sea and sand fell away.

That night we stayed in the charming seaside town Robe, where houses spilled down the hillside right up to the ocean. Our inn, the Caledonian, dated to 1859 and was partly made of timbers and doors from ships that had been wrecked along the coast. The cold and wet had penetrated Jen’s spirit, and she wanted to pass the night reading in our small antique bed. I went for a look downstairs and saw the bartender light a fire in the pub’s stone fireplace as locals began streaming in — it was Friday night, after all. I dragged Jen downstairs, and we were soon passed around from group to group, old and young, everyone seeming to know everyone else.

Jen told and retold the story of our wedding, while I spent nearly an hour with a local contractor discussing the finer points of barbecuing, our shared national obsession. Every few minutes the bartender would come around calling out numbers for a raffle, with prizes like bottles of wine and, absurdly, a plate of raw meat. Later I realized that if we had spent a full day spotting birds, we might have never bothered with the pub at all and missed out on a night that was, unexpectedly, one of the highlights of our trip.

The contest between the pockmarked limestone coast and the surf wouldn’t pick up until we crossed into Victoria — when we’d start to see the stacks and gorges that are the casualties of that battle — so we decided to detour inland to visit the famous Coonawarra wine region. The defining feature of the Coonawarra, we soon learned, is its terra rossa, soil that forms as the soluble limestone weathers, leaving mineral-rich red clay with excellent drainage. But this soil extends less than eight miles along a ridge barely more than a mile wide, leaving a scant nine square miles of prime vine-growing land. If your typical wine country is a sprawling suburb of vineyards and lazy roads, then the Coonawarra, with its grid of tightly packed vines and cellar doors, feels like Vineyard City.

Whatever charm was lost in the rain and the layout, however, was more than made up for in the wines themselves. Australian wine has blown up internationally in the last several years, mainly because of its big, fruity shirazes that develop in the warm, sunny climate. The Coonawarra, on the other hand, one of Australia’s southernmost winemaking regions, has a cooler, more protracted growing season and is renowned for its complex, drier cabernet sauvignon.