Lorne is where the Great Ocean Road stops being a seaside drive and starts behaving like a mountain road. The town sits on Louttit Bay with the Otway Ranges standing right behind it, steep and thick with eucalypt, tree ferns and the odd waterfall. About twelve hundred people live here, a number that swells enormously in the Australian summer holidays, when Melbourne decamps to the beach and the main street fills with surfboards and ice cream.
For a rider, Lorne is the natural place to eat. The strip along Mountjoy Parade has bakeries, cafes and fish and chips, and the pier is a good place for a coffee with a view of the bay. There is a fuel station in town, which matters because the road beyond is long, and the nearest other sizeable town back along the coast is Anglesea. Weekends and school holidays are busy, and parking a bike is easier than parking a car, though a sand-covered bay can be tricky underfoot.
The Great Ocean Road itself was built between 1919 and 1932 by returned soldiers from the First World War, as a memorial to those who did not come home. They worked with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows on a cliff face that drops straight into Bass Strait, and you can feel the difficulty in how the road clings to the rock. West of Lorne the bends tighten around Cape Patton, and the sea shows up and vanishes with every corner. Speed limits here are enforced seriously, and tour coaches are slow, so patience is part of the deal.
Inland from the town the Otway rainforest has real depth. Erskine Falls is a short drive away, and the forest holds mountain ash, myrtle beech and ferns that look like they belong in the Jurassic. Koalas sleep in the trees, kookaburras laugh at dawn, and the air smells of wet bark and salt. Early morning is the best time to see the coast before the traffic builds, and autumn is a lovely season when the summer crowds have gone but the weather often stays mild.