Wreck Beach was the first sign that the Great Ocean Road would live up to my most feverish visions. I had been worried that this once fatal shore had been tamed by tourism: In recent years, word had leaked out that it's the antipodean answer to California's Highway 1 or the Riviera's Grande Corniche, except that it's filled with cuddly marsupials, national parks, and idyllic beaches. And to be honest, scenes of haunting solitude had been a little hard to imagine when I'd first left Melbourne in my rental car a couple of days earlier. The official start of the Great Ocean Road happens to be Australia's beach-party central—the surfing boomtown of Torquay, which lures hordes of young Aussies on a sort of perpetual spring break.

When I arrived, sun-bronzed kids packed every hotel balcony, pub, and bar. Not a soul in town appeared to be older than twenty-two. In Surf City Plaza, armies of surfers tattooed like Polynesian whalers were scouring the factory outlets of famous local brands like Rip Curl, Billabong, and Quicksilver with the same frenzied concentration of New Yorkers at a Barneys sale. Getting into the swing of things, I dove into the bargain mosh pit and snapped up an iridescent blue rashie, one of the sun-protective swim shirts that has become de rigueur in the ozone-depleted Southern Hemisphere. Then I paid my respects at the world's grooviest cultural institution, the Surf World Museum, where I strolled through a forest of graffiti-painted surfboards to a panoramic cinema showing highlights from The Endless Summer. Nostalgic exhibits harked back to the 1960s, when the southern waves were the sole domain of "a few surfer mates on a lonely beach"—Aussie heroes with names like Rabbit, Lynchy, and Sparrow, who lived for months in their VW vans. None of these macho men wore rash guards back then, you could tell.

This was inspiring stuff, but the open highway beckoned. And no sooner had I left Torquay's town limits than I entered my own private Surf World—a series of crescent beaches unfurling, one after the other, over sixty-five miles as wild and undeveloped as when Rabbit and Sparrow were on the loose. As I meandered between the glassy rollers and the verdant mountains, the decades seemed to peel away: The seaside villages became more antique, the shop fronts less polished, the coast more haunted. Until the Great Ocean Road was completed in 1932 (it was blasted through by veteran soldiers returning from the First World War), this was one of the most isolated corners on an isolated continent, with a few lost fishing settlements that could be reached only by boat. I threw myself into the waves, then wolfed some fish-and-chips in the village of Lorne and realized I had to hand it to those old soldiers: They'd opened up the Aussie dream.

By the time I arrived at Cape Otway, I felt as if I'd shaved off another century or so. This jagged outcrop defeated the Ocean Road engineers, so it hasn't changed since the early 1800s, when toothless smugglers would congregate in the sea caves and escaped convicts would hide out for years with Aboriginal people in the sinuous rain forests. Not surprisingly, it's also among the most fertile wildlife habitats in Australia. At dusk, there were so many kangaroos hopping across the road that I had to drive at half speed to avoid hitting them. The marsupial presence grew even thicker when I drove up to a solar-powered homestead. "Good timing!" said Shayne Neal, the ginger-haired zoologist who runs the Great Ocean Eco-Lodge. "Wanna come and check out the koalas?"