Last week I summarised my short getaway in Victoria’s Otway Ranges for you. Today I want to unpack the ‘Otway Fly’ experience for you. This was really the only experience that we paid for when we were in the Otways, and to get there you have to take the C155 or the C159 to get there from Apollo Bay. It’s a bit of a loop road through a bunch of small towns. There is an unsealed road we used to get back to Apollo Bay and the M1, but it’s hard to find and poorly signposted.

The Otway Fly has two principal ‘attractions’, for want of a better word. One is the zipline, which I imagine in this amazing forest of very tall trees would be pretty awesome. The other main attraction is the ‘tree top walk’, which is an elevated metal walkway of around 600 metres and at places is 30 metres high. That is probably at the top of the tower there which is at least another 5 metres above the actual walkway. Prices are $26 for adults for the tree top walk and $120 for the zipline. The third attraction is the ‘Enchanted Forest’ which is a ‘whimsical garden of fairies’. I think you can get into that with either ticket. Concession prices are a little less. Also there is a discount for booking online.

I hadn’t really considered the zipline but I thought it might be fun. Sadly it and the Enchanted Forest were closed when we got there, and so they took 10% off the price of the Tree Top Walk. It was quite a surprised when we got there because there were actual people there, and we hadn’t seen that many people on the road and around in the morning.

There’s a nice visitor centre there with a café and, even in November, a fire on the burn! Also toilets as well although there are other toilets in the area. The forest is magnificent there and the trees just go up and up. The walk to the Treetop walk, AFTER the visitor centre, is over a kilometre which is a bit of a surprise. You pass the Zipline start and the Enchanted Forest on that walk down to the walk.

The metal walkway starts and just moves out over a very steep hill so pretty quickly it falls away beneath you. There were quite a few people there including families with kids – kids with no fear running up and down the walkway. The walkway swayed a little under my feet, my wife didn’t really enjoy the height. I usually am not too okay with heights but I was feeling okay about it.

Then I climbed the tower. I started off pretty gungho about it, I basically worked my way up the spiral steps to the top with enthusiasm. But once I had passed a few people coming down, I began to feel somewhat uneasy I must be honest. By the time I was right at the top, where the views were spectacular, I was more than a bit uneasy. Still, I had made it to the top and that was something and I don’t think I passed anyone on the way down which was certainly harder. I remained a little uneasy whilst I was on the walkway.

I walked out to a lookout point not too far from the tower. This was almost a ledge and it REALLY moved, and looking down I could see that, even though it didn’t seem possible, I was a really long way up there. A lady came with two kids and told them ‘don’t worry this part doesn’t move’ and I said ‘actually it does, it moves more than any other part’. She told me she was just trying to keep them calm so they would go on it so I felt bad. Although perhaps the truth is the right thing to do in that situation.

I went back to the tower and took the walkway to its end and back onto stable ground. The walk back was over 1.2 kilometres and virtually all uphill, but it wasn’t too bad I guess. It was cold and there was a nice fire at the entrance centre.

All in all it was a cool place, triggered a little vertigo but in the end nothing I couldn’t handle and the views were great and just being so high up, well, that’s special in its own way too. At the end of the day I would recommend it but I guess, it seems like a bit of money for the experience. Then again, it probably is what you expect to pay all said.

Thanks for popping by! Take care wherever you are in the world and… May the Journey Never End!