Great Ocean Road Sunset Tours

Two problems, one solution

A standard Great Ocean Road day tour leaves Melbourne between 7 and 8 AM and reaches the Twelve Apostles somewhere in the early afternoon. That creates two problems that have nothing to do with the quality of the tour.

The first is company. Every operator running the same schedule arrives in the same window, so between roughly 11 AM and 3 PM the clifftop platforms hold several hundred people and you are waiting your turn at the rail.

The second is light. The stacks face south-west. In the middle of the day the sun is overhead and the limestone goes flat and grey; by mid-afternoon it has moved around in front of you, and you are shooting into it. The photograph that made you want to come here — gold stone, long shadows, the sea gone copper — is an evening photograph.

A sunset tour fixes both at once. Pickup is between 9 and 11 AM, so you also get a lie-in.

What you give up

Daylight in the Otways, mostly. An early departure has more of it to spend at Maits Rest and Kennett River, and a sunset itinerary moves through the first half of the route at a slightly brisker clip to make sure it reaches Port Campbell at the right hour.

You also get home late. These are still 12 to 14-hour days; they just end after dark rather than starting before dawn. Do not book a sunset tour on a night you have dinner reservations or an early flight the following morning.

And there is the thing nobody can sell you: the sunset itself. This is the Southern Ocean, and some evenings a front comes through and the sky does nothing at all. The tour runs regardless. The coastline in heavy weather is genuinely worth seeing — you are watching the swell that carved the stacks still doing it — but it will not be the photograph on the booking page.

Pickup times move with the season

Both sunset tours here quote a pickup window of 9:00 to 11:00 AM, adjusted seasonally. That is not vagueness; it is the operators tracking sunset, which in Victoria swings from about 5:10 PM in June to about 8:40 PM in January. Your exact time is emailed after booking, so check that email the night before rather than assuming.

In midwinter the whole day compresses and you are back in Melbourne earlier than you would expect. In midsummer a sunset tour is a genuinely long evening.

What to bring that a morning tour does not need

A proper layer. The clifftops at Port Campbell are exposed and the temperature drops hard once the sun is off them — it is routinely ten degrees colder there at 8 PM than it was in Melbourne when you were picked up, and the wind does not stop.

Neither sunset tour includes food, and both span lunch and dinner. Bring more than you think, or buy at Apollo Bay.

If the crowds rather than the light are what you are trying to escape, a reverse-route tour achieves something similar by a different method, and usually costs less.