This is a cycling guide to the Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia. As a cycling guidebook, it’s not a traditional tourist guidebook. It covers the pertinent and essential information that a cyclist, whether a touring cyclist, or a cyclist planning to ride only a portion of the Great Ocean Road, would like to know when planning his or her own itinerary.
The guide focuses on cycling information — the route and the ideal stages one can structure to ride the Great Ocean Road. To help plan one’s own itinerary, the guide presents stage-related distances and elevation profile, and what one will experience and encounter along the way of each stage.
The guidebook focuses on cycling stages from Geelong to Port Fairy, and how to tailor the itinerary into starting and finishing in Melbourne, thus serving as a standalone cycling guide of the Great Ocean Road only.
Alternatively, one can use the Great Ocean Road guide with the author’s related guidebook, “Cycling Australia: Tour of Victoria”, and fit cycling the Great Ocean Road into one’s bicycle touring itinerary of the state of Victoria.
Following are the key stages covered:
Stage 1: Geelong to Lorne
Stage 2: Lorne to Apollo Bay
Stage 3: Apollo Bay to Princetown
Stage 4: Princetown to Port Campbell
Stage 5: Port Campbell to Warrnambool
Stage 6: Warrnambool to Port Fairy
Stage 7: Port Fairy to Warrnambool
Aside the main stage, the guide includes optional rides from some stops along the itinerary.
While the guide focuses on cycling information along the Great Ocean Road, it notes where one can overnight, including campgrounds or needing to wild camp, but it does not provide a list of hotels at any location or discusses the details of each, unless there is one worth a mention.
People that have traveled little over plan! Fact is, to prepare one’s cycle touring itinerary of the Great Ocean Road, one only needs the most essential info to design one’s own trip!
Aside the essence of distances and elevation profile of each stage, the guide includes vivid pictorial of each stage for a complete insight into each stage and the route. Ponder the photographic documentation. These pictures and captions should give you all the rest of what you might like to know about cycling the Great Ocean Road.
Written by an avid cyclist and a photographer, with many cycling guides to his name, an adventure and cultural travel professional with four decades of travel throughout the world, Cyclist’s Guide to Great Ocean Road provides an insightful background for a richer and more rewarding cycling experience of this extraordinary coast.
At 72 pages, containing 136 photographs with informative narrative, details of routes and stages, the guidebook offers not only relevant and useful information but also provides the related GPX files you can download and follow as if a guide is showing you the way. In short, the guidebook promises to entice not only an intrepid cyclist but also an armchair traveler.
The downloadable format of the book on this page is a PDF.
To purchase the paperback version, go to: Amazon paperback May 2025 edition.