Melbourne to Adelaide by Campervan: The Great Ocean Road Route, Days and Costs
Route at a glance
- Route length
- 1,010 kmMelbourne to Adelaide one way by the coast, of which the Great Ocean Road is only the first 242 km. The direct inland run on the Western and Dukes highways is 726 km; the coast costs about 285 km and four to five hours more, before any detours.
- Time needed
- 5–14 daysideal: 8
- Best time
- November–April
- Vehicle
- Any camper is fine
- Start
- Melbourne → Adelaide (one way)
- Typical camper rate
- A$151–A$287/day · live, a summer pickup
About the route
Two roads with one number between them. The Great Ocean Road is the B100, 242 km from Torquay to the Princes Highway junction east of Allansford, and it is a war memorial before it is a tourist route: more than 3,000 returned First World War servicemen built it by hand from 1919, it opened in full in November 1932, and it was a privately owned toll road until the Trust handed it to the state on 2 October 1936. Everything west of Allansford is ordinary two-lane Princes Highway, and that is three quarters of the drive.
The Twelve Apostles is not the halfway point, and the assumption behind that belief is what wrecks itineraries. Port Campbell sits about 290 km into 1,010 — under a third. What is left afterwards is roughly 720 km, which on its own is nearly as far as the entire direct inland run from Melbourne to Adelaide. Within the Great Ocean Road the Apostles genuinely are about three quarters along, and that is almost certainly where the folklore comes from.
It works as a campervan trip because the daily distances are small. Visit Victoria's own touring route asks for about 190 km a day on this coast, roughly half a normal Australian touring day, and an eight-day version of the full run averages around 140 km. Nothing needs four-wheel drive — the road is sealed from Melbourne to Adelaide — but two structural facts shape the booking. It is one-way, so a day lost early comes out of South Australia. And it crosses a state border, where the clock, the road rules and what you are allowed to have in the fridge all change at once.
Watch out: South Australia bans fresh fruit, fruiting vegetables — tomato, capsicum, chilli, eggplant — and avocado at every road entry, and a camper fridge is precisely what the rule exists to catch. There is no staffed quarantine station on this route: you get honesty bins just inside the border near Mount Gambier and random roadblocks set up after them, a zero-tolerance policy in which one apple is treated like twenty, and a receipt is no defence. The on-the-spot fine is a few hundred dollars and re-indexed every July. Cooking, canning, freezing, drying or pureeing clears the restriction. Slicing does not.
How many days do you need?
5 days
The compressed run
The shortest version worth calling a road trip, and about as short as anyone will let you book this pair one-way. It costs you Portland, Cape Bridgewater, Coonawarra and Robe, and it turns the Limestone Coast into a drive-through at roughly 200 km a day against the eight-day pace of 140.
8 days
The comfortable week
The pace this itinerary is built on. Short driving days everywhere except the final run through the Coorong, with a whole day given to the Port Campbell coast rather than an afternoon shared with the tour buses.
14 days
The unhurried fortnight
Enough to add either the Grampians inland from Dunkeld or Kangaroo Island off the Fleurieu, split the Coorong leg at Meningie, and still hold a day back for the weather rather than spending it in advance.
What a Melbourne to Adelaide trip costs
The one-way fee is the line the calculator below cannot carry, because it is a fixed surcharge on the booking rather than a daily rate — add it once on top of whatever the table returns. On this pair it runs from nothing at all to the better part of three hundred dollars depending on the company, and it is the same figure in either direction with every operator we checked, so reversing the trip saves nothing on this line. Spaceships inverts the structure entirely and it catches people: it publishes no one-way fee at all, but levies a flat remote-location fee whenever Adelaide is one end of the trip, which lands in much the same place here while leaving a Melbourne round trip genuinely cheaper.
Minimum hire is the constraint that actually changes plans. Several of the larger brands attach a seven-day minimum to a Melbourne–Adelaide one-way and at least one other sets five, so the floor on this trip is often the contract rather than the route — a five-day plan can be perfectly sensible and still unbookable. Not every company can do it at all, either: a couple of the operators we price have no South Australian drop-off in their booking systems, so the pair simply does not appear for them. That is handled for you rather than needing checking — the search only returns companies that will actually take the van back in Adelaide.
After that the levers are timing and campsites. December and January put both states' school holidays on the same coast, and the Otway coastal campgrounds move to seven-night minimums across the Christmas-to-January blocks, which a touring itinerary cannot use at all. February to April buys the same coast without either. The campsite mix moves the total as much as the season does: a national park site in the Otways costs a few dollars a person with no power and no drinking water, a powered site in a foreshore caravan park several times that, and Victoria is funding half-price camping at Parks Victoria campgrounds until July 2027. Fuel is a smaller share here than on the long east-coast routes, simply because the trip is a thousand kilometres rather than three.
Camper rental for this triplive
| Trip length | 2-person camper | 4x4 camper | Family camper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 days | A$901 | A$1,303 | A$1,414 |
| 8 days | A$1,441 | A$2,084 | A$2,263 |
| 14 days | A$2,522 | A$3,647 | A$3,960 |
Camper only, at the live median daily rate for a summer pickup — campsites, fuel and food are extra. Longer rentals often lower the daily rate, so treat these as an upper guide.
Estimate your own trip
Pick your travel month, trip length and group size — the camper line prices straight from our live database (rates swing with the season), and you get a budget and a comfort scenario side by side.
marks the best months for this route
Budget
A$2,004–A$3,152
A$1,002–A$1,576 per person · 2-person camper
Camper sized to your group, every meal self-cooked, base CDW insurance only.
For 2 travellers · flights and activities not included
Comfort
A$3,477–A$4,952
A$1,738–A$2,476 per person · family camper (3+ berths)
One berth size up, full insurance package, eating out roughly one meal in five.
For 2 travellers · flights and activities not included
Camper rates are live medians and quartiles from our daily price checks for a February pickup; campsites, fuel, food, insurance and fees are typical 2026 estimates. Run a live search for exact quotes on your dates.
Based on 124,667 price checks across 11 rental companies over the last 30 days (through September 17, 2026). Prices are in AUD and update as vendor availability changes.
Melbourne to Adelaide itinerary, day by day
Day 1
Out of Melbourne and onto the coast
Melbourne → Torquay → Lorne · ~150 km
The westbound exit is toll-free — the West Gate Bridge and West Gate Freeway carry no charge for cars and light vehicles — but a camper collected at Tullamarine will be tolled on CityLink unless it leaves the airport on the M80 ring road instead. The road proper starts at Torquay. Eastern View is where the toll gate stood from 1922 to 1936 and where the Memorial Arch stands now; the arch is not the original, having been rebuilt after it was burnt in the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires. Teddy's Lookout is a very steep climb up George Street to a small car park with restricted turning, so walk it if the van is long.
Bells Beach, TorquaySplit Point Lighthouse, Aireys InletThe Memorial Arch at Eastern ViewTeddy's Lookout, LorneOvernight: Lorne Foreshore Caravan Park, or Cumberland River Holiday Park seven kilometres on — Surf Coast Shire bans sleeping in a vehicle anywhere in the municipality, so there is no informal alternative
Day 2
The cliff section, slowly
Lorne → Apollo Bay · ~45 km
Forty-five kilometres and a full day, which is the correct ratio. This is the stretch the repatriation workers carved out of the rock between Lorne and Kennett River with hand tools, explosives and horse-and-bucket, and the tool marks are still on the cliff faces; in its original state it took one vehicle at a time. Kennett River is the reliable koala stop, but Grey River Road is gravel — park at the foreshore and walk, which is better for spotting them anyway. The café stopped selling birdseed and the signs now ask you not to feed anything.
Cape Patton lookoutMount Defiance and Artillery RocksKennett River koalasErskine FallsOvernight: Apollo Bay Recreation Reserve on the Barham River, or Marengo Family Caravan Park just south of town
Day 3
Over the Otways to the shipwreck coast
Apollo Bay → Cape Otway → Port Campbell · ~125 km
Fill up in Apollo Bay. It is the last full-service town before Port Campbell, the road climbs to 450 m at Lavers Hill, and the single roadhouse up there serves a village of 78 people and publishes no hours. Cape Otway is a sealed but circuitous 12 km dead end, so budget 24 km and a ticket; the 1848 tower is the oldest surviving on mainland Australia, though its light was decommissioned in 1994 and the working one is a small solar tower in front of it. The dead grey manna gums along Lighthouse Road are not storm damage — they were eaten out by a koala population that grew past 18 per hectare and then starved.
Maits Rest rainforest boardwalkCape Otway LightstationLavers HillPrincetown and the Gellibrand RiverOvernight: Port Campbell Recreation Reserve in the middle of town, or Princetown Recreation Reserve six kilometres from the Apostles
Day 4
The whole Port Campbell coast, and a dusk you were not told about
Port Campbell → Bay of Islands → Warrnambool → Port Fairy · ~95 km
Parks Victoria counts seven stacks standing at the Twelve Apostles; there were never twelve, the maximum was nine, and the collapse most people remember from 2009 was the Island Archway at Loch Ard Gorge, a different formation several kilometres west. London Bridge's inner span went on 15 January 1990 and left two people on the outer arch for three hours until a police helicopter reached them. Keep going past the crowds to the Bay of Islands Coastal Park, which is the same limestone with a fraction of the visitors, and come back at dusk if you can: little penguins come ashore below the platforms about a quarter of an hour after sunset, free and unbooked, once the buses have gone. Tower Hill on the way out of Warrnambool is a volcanic crater whose forest was replanted from 1961 using a Eugene von Guerard painting of 1855 as the plan, because that canvas was the only surviving record of what had been cleared.
The Twelve ApostlesLoch Ard GorgeLondon Arch and the Bay of IslandsTower Hill Wildlife ReserveOvernight: Gardens Caravan Park at Port Fairy on the Moyne River, or Surfside Holiday Park in Warrnambool if the penguins keep you late
Day 5
Port Fairy, Portland and the seals
Port Fairy → Portland → Cape Bridgewater · ~90 km
Port Fairy was a whaling station in 1835 and a privately owned town called Belfast by 1843, and more than fifty of its buildings are National Trust classified. Short-tailed shearwaters hold Griffiths Island from about late September to mid-April, streaming back to their burrows at dusk; outside those months you get the burrows and nothing in them. Cape Bridgewater is a real detour west of Portland, and worth it: the clifftop walk to the fur seal colony is free, the seals do not migrate, and it is described as the only place on the mainland where they breed. The Petrified Forest next door contains no petrified trees at all — the trunk shapes are hollow limestone solution pipes, and the forest story is a discredited Victorian-era guess.
Griffiths Island, Port FairyPortland Cable TramCape Bridgewater seal colony walkThe Petrified ForestOvernight: Henty Bay Beachfront Van & Cabin Park at Portland — Glenelg Shire's local law names motor homes and RVs specifically, on roads as well as in public places
Day 6
Across the border into the volcanic country
Portland → Mount Gambier · ~110 km
Deal with the border before you reach it — the fruit and vegetables have to go, and there are honesty bins on all three roads into Mount Gambier. Put the clock back half an hour, not a whole one, and remember it stays half an hour all year because both states run daylight saving on the same dates. Mount Gambier sits on four crater lakes in a state heritage area, and the Blue Lake is the town's drinking water, which is why you cannot swim in it. It only turns cobalt from about November to March; the rest of the year it is grey. Umpherston Sinkhole is a collapsed cave that a landowner terraced into a garden in 1886, and it is free, dawn to dusk.
The state borderBlue Lake (Warwar)Umpherston SinkholeCave GardenOvernight: BIG4 Blue Lake Holiday Park — Mount Gambier has been a declared RV-friendly city since 2020, with a dump point and potable water for travellers
Day 7
Terra rossa, a very long jetty and one man's cutting
Mount Gambier → Coonawarra → Beachport → Robe · ~180 km
Coonawarra's whole reputation sits on a cigar of red soil 27 km long and one to two kilometres wide over limestone — narrow enough that vineyard boundaries have been fought over in law, because being on or off the strip changes what the fruit does. Treat it as a one-night stop with a nominated driver rather than a touring day; the limit is 0.05 and the van is both the transport and the bed. Beachport's jetty runs 772 m, the second longest in South Australia, and the Woakwine Cutting between there and Robe was dug by two men from 1957 with a tractor and hand tools — a kilometre long, 28 m deep at its deepest, the original machinery still parked at the viewing platform. Robe was the back door to the Victorian goldfields: more than 16,000 Chinese diggers landed here between 1857 and 1863 to avoid Victoria's £10 landing tax on Chinese arrivals, then walked several hundred kilometres inland, in almost exactly the direction you have just come from.
The Coonawarra terra rossa stripBeachport jettyWoakwine CuttingThe Chinese memorial, RobeOvernight: Southern Ocean Tourist Park at Beachport, or a commercial park in Robe — the council bans camping across the town's beaches, parks, reserves and car parks and issues on-the-spot fines
Day 8
The Coorong, and the longest day last
Robe → Kingston SE → Meningie → Adelaide · ~335 km
The longest leg of the trip is the last one, which is the wrong way round, so either leave at first light or take a ninth day and sleep at Meningie. Fill up at Kingston SE: it is 145 km from there to Meningie and the roadhouse in the middle cannot be relied on. The Coorong is a 130 km lagoon system — Kurrangk, the long narrow neck — and Jack Point looks over the largest Australian pelican breeding colony in the country. The ocean side is 4WD-only beach and off-limits under your contract; the sealed highway along the lagoon edge is the way a hire camper sees it. Allow an hour for the handover on top of the drive.
Larry the Big Lobster, Kingston SEJack Point pelican observatoryThe Coorong lagoonsHahndorf and the Adelaide HillsOvernight: Lake Albert Caravan Park at Meningie if you split the leg, otherwise an Adelaide park the night before the drop-off
Highlights along the way
How many Apostles there are
Parks Victoria counts seven stacks standing. There were never twelve — the maximum was nine — and they were renamed from the Sow and Piglets in 1922, the same year the first stretch of road opened.
The 75 km of cliff from Eastern View to Apollo Bay
Hand-carved out of the rock by returned servicemen, with the tool marks still visible. On this stretch the road is the attraction rather than the way to one, which is the only reason 45 km can take a day.
Little penguins at London Arch
They come ashore about ten to fifteen minutes after sunset, free, unbooked and almost unadvertised — which means the tour buses have gone and you need a bed within night-driving distance.
Bay of Islands Coastal Park
Thirty-two kilometres of the same limestone stacks between Peterborough and Warrnambool, with lookouts and car parks and hardly anyone in them. Parks Victoria calls it equally beautiful and nobody listens.
The Cape Bridgewater seal colony
Around 650 fur seals on the largest mainland colony in the country, seen free from a clifftop at the end of a walk. They do not migrate, so it is the one wildlife stop on the route with no season attached.
Umpherston Sinkhole, Mount Gambier
A collapsed limestone cave that a local landowner terraced into a sunken garden in 1886. Free, open dawn to dusk, in the middle of a working town, and the possums come out at dusk — do not feed them.
When to go
November to April, and unlike the tropics this is a preference rather than a rule — the road is open and drivable all year. This coast is temperate maritime, so there is no dry season to aim for and no cyclone window to avoid. What there is instead is wind: Cape Otway averages a 3pm wind near 25 km/h in every month of the year, and its warmest month averages a maximum of just 21.5°C. A high-sided camper works against that all day.
The weather is not the same at both ends of one drive. Cape Otway takes 895 mm of rain a year across 131 wet days; Aireys Inlet, ninety minutes east in the Otways' rain shadow, takes 613 mm. Adelaide averages a January maximum of 29.6°C against Cape Otway's 21.5°C, an eight-degree spread on the same trip. Rainfall is winter-maximum from the Otways westward — Mount Gambier gets nearly four times as much rain in July as in January — but almost flat in Melbourne, where the wettest and driest months differ by 19 mm. A Melbourne forecast tells you very little about the coast you are driving to.
February to April is the pick, and the argument is crowds and fire rather than temperature. Both states' summer school holidays overlap from roughly mid-December to Australia Day, the Otway campgrounds release their peak summer sites in a single timed drop months ahead, and on a forecast Catastrophic fire day Parks Victoria closes parks and forests outright and cancels the camping bookings inside them — with the explicit warning that you may get no personal notice and see no sign. Coorong National Park closes on Catastrophic days too. Autumn keeps the settled weather and the warm sea and drops all of it.
Winter is a genuinely different trip rather than a worse one. Southern right whales calve in close at Logans Beach at Warrnambool from roughly June to September, from a free platform in the dunes — small numbers, no guarantee, and some seasons none at all — and again in Encounter Bay off the Fleurieu at the far end. Against that: fifteen or sixteen wet days a month, under nine and a half hours of daylight, a Mount Gambier sunset before five o'clock, and the Blue Lake grey from April. Nothing freezes. The coldest average night anywhere on the route is 5.2°C. Winter here is wet, windy and dark, not cold.
Driving & road conditions
Road surface
Sealed the entire way, and the Great Ocean Road is a general-access arterial with no length limit, no permit scheme and no motorhome ban — the constraint is geometry, not law. The B100 runs 242 km from Torquay to the Princes Highway east of Allansford as two-lane winding bitumen, and the 75 km of cliff-cut curves from Eastern View to Apollo Bay is the hard part: posted at 80 km/h through much of it, realistically 50 to 60 in a long vehicle, with named pinch points at Cape Patton, Mount Defiance, Artillery Rocks, Cumberland River, Wye River and Kennett River. Aireys Inlet and Fairhaven dropped to 50 km/h in December 2022. Everything west of Allansford is ordinary Princes Highway.
Fuel
Two gaps matter and they are at opposite ends. Apollo Bay is the last full-service town before Port Campbell, roughly 100 km away over a 450 m climb, and the only thing in between is a single roadhouse at Lavers Hill in a village of 78 people with no published hours — there is nothing at all between Lorne and Apollo Bay either, since Wye River and Kennett River have general stores rather than service stations. The longer gap is in South Australia: 145 km from Kingston SE to Meningie through the Coorong, where the one roadhouse in the middle cannot be relied on — plan that stretch as though there were nothing at all on it. Treat Apollo Bay and Kingston SE as mandatory top-ups.
In winter
In winter the hazard is water and slope. The Lorne–Skenes Creek corridor hugs steep forested hillsides and crosses a run of gullies, and it closes repeatedly to flooding and landslip — and there is no coastal alternative between Lorne and Apollo Bay, so a closure means going inland via Colac. That matters more on a one-way booking than a loop, because you cannot simply wait it out. But this coast is not a route where winter is the dangerous half. In summer it is fire: the 1983 Ash Wednesday fire ran from an inland ignition at Deans Marsh to the water in a few hours after a wind change, burning 41,000 hectares and 782 buildings with people sheltering in the sea at Lorne, and the Wye River fire of December 2015 destroyed 98 houses, shut the road on Christmas Day and kept it shut for about twelve days, with landslips on the burnt slopes restricting access for months afterwards. Check VicTraffic and VicEmergency on the morning you drive, in either season.
- Australia has no rule obliging a slow vehicle to pull into a turnout when a queue builds — there is no equivalent of New Zealand's five-vehicle rule, only a duty to keep as near as practicable to the far left. Use the turnouts anyway. A queue behind a seven-metre motorhome on the cliff section forms within minutes, and the overtaking that follows is the actual hazard.
- Driving west puts you in the landward lane for the whole cliff section, which is the easier side for a driver unused to a wide body on an unfamiliar road. The trade is that most lookouts are on the ocean side, so each stop is a right turn across oncoming traffic and a slow right turn back out. Decide the stops in advance rather than braking for them.
- The car parks are the real limit, not the road. Erskine Falls Road out of Lorne is steep and officially unsuitable for caravans and trucks with a small car park at the end; Teddy's Lookout has restricted turning; and there are physical barriers at Gibson Steps and the Loch Ard Gorge entrance specifically to stop oversized vehicles spilling onto the highway. Leave a long van in town and walk, or arrive early.
- The unsealed-road clause decides several stops for you. Grey River Road at Kennett River is gravel, the Otways waterfall access roads off Binns Road and Phillips Track are gravel, and the Aire River campgrounds are reached by narrow unsealed gravel and sand with a five-tonne bridge limit and a warning against vehicles over 2.5 m — which is most campers. Contracts allow roughly 10 to 12 km of well-maintained access road depending on the operator; read yours before booking a campsite.
- Coverage thins in the Otways and along the Coorong. Cape Otway is the weakest point on the coast, dense forest dropping signal in and out through the gullies, and Parks SA describes coverage in Coorong National Park as patchy and unreliable in low-lying areas — which is most of it. Download offline maps in Apollo Bay and again in Kingston SE.
- The border is a half-hour clock change, not an hour, and it holds all year because Victoria and South Australia start and end daylight saving on the same dates. That is exactly why it gets missed: a phone quietly moving 10:00 to 09:30 does not look like it has changed at all.
- South Australia's 25 km/h rules catch visitors more than its speed limits do. Twenty-five past a stationary emergency vehicle with flashing lights, past a tow truck or roadside-assistance van with amber lights, past a stopped school bus, and in a school zone whenever a child is present — outside school hours included. The state also bans a phone touching any part of your body while driving, lap included, however it is being used.
Where to camp
Lorne Foreshore Caravan Park
Lorne, Surf Coast
Run by the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority and booked online; in town on the sealed road, which matters because Surf Coast Shire bans sleeping in a vehicle anywhere else in the municipality.
Cumberland River Holiday Park
Seven kilometres southwest of Lorne
Private and booked ahead; river-front and garden sites directly on the Great Ocean Road where the Cumberland River meets the sea, in the middle of the twisty section.
Apollo Bay Recreation Reserve
Apollo Bay
Authority-run and booked online; powered, unpowered and riverside sites on the Barham River under a kilometre from town, dog friendly year-round, and the fallback when the seasonal Skenes Creek park is shut for winter.
Blanket Bay campground
Great Otway National Park, off Lighthouse Road
Twenty-two unpowered sites, booked before arrival; takes campervans and small RVs but explicitly not caravans, no drinking water and no generators — and several kilometres of gravel at the end of the approach, so check your unsealed-road clause first.
Johanna Beach campground
Great Otway National Park, near Glenaire
Twenty-five unpowered sites, booked before arrival; this one does take caravans, but the service road is gravel, there is no drinking water and solid-fuel fires are banned outright.
Princetown Recreation Reserve
Princetown, six kilometres from the Twelve Apostles
Authority-run, booking essential; powered and unpowered sites beside the Gellibrand River, and the nearest legal bed to the Apostles if you want them at dawn or the penguins at dusk.
Port Campbell Recreation Reserve
Port Campbell
Authority-run, booking essential; powered and unpowered sites in the middle of town with room for motorhomes, which not everything on this coast has, plus a camp kitchen and a communal fire pit.
Surfside Holiday Park
Warrnambool
Owned and run by Warrnambool City Council and booked online; on Pertobe Road inside the town, unpowered sites through to beach chalets, and walking distance from the foreshore.
Gardens Caravan Park
Port Fairy
A Moyne Shire park, booked online; on the Moyne River beside the Botanic Gardens and a short walk from the Griffiths Island causeway, with a second council park at Southcombe near South Beach.
Henty Bay Beachfront Van & Cabin Park
Portland
Commercial and booked ahead; powered, ensuite and unpowered sites on the beach, and the compliant option in a shire whose local law names motor homes and RVs on roads as well as in public places.
BIG4 Blue Lake Holiday Park
Mount Gambier
Commercial and booked ahead; the main park in a town that has been a declared RV-friendly city since 2020, with a public dump point and potable water elsewhere in the city.
Southern Ocean Tourist Park
Beachport, Limestone Coast
Commercial and booked ahead; large grassy powered and unpowered sites sized for vans and motorhomes, forty minutes short of Robe and far easier than finding a legal spot there.
42 Mile Crossing campground
Coorong National Park
Thirty unpowered sites, rated for 2WD and suitable for caravans, but fees must be paid before you enter the park; long-drop toilets, rainwater that is not drinkable, and the whole park closes on Catastrophic fire days.
Lake Albert Caravan Park
Meningie
Commercial and booked ahead; on the Lower Lakes 150 km from Adelaide, and the obvious place to split the long final leg rather than driving the Coorong and the handover in one day.
Australia has no national right to roam: where you may sleep in a campervan is set by state law and local council by-laws, and it varies street by street. Many coastal councils ban overnight parking outright and enforce it with fines, while inland and regional areas often provide free or low-cost rest areas and showground sites. National parks and state forests generally require a designated site, frequently booked in advance. Some councils give self-contained vehicles more latitude, but there is no national scheme equivalent to New Zealand's. Assume a booked campsite unless a specific council says otherwise, and check the rules for the specific council area you plan to stop in — they are published locally and change more often than state law does.
The Great Ocean Road, or the inland highway?
The numbers are stark and they are not the whole story. Melbourne to Adelaide by the coast is about 1,010 km and roughly 13 hours behind the wheel; the Western and Dukes highways through Ballarat, Horsham and Bordertown do it in 726 km and eight or nine. That is 285 km and four to five hours more for the coast, and the gap is pure driving time — the coast road is also slower per kilometre than any mapping estimate allows for, so on a multi-day trip the real difference is larger.
The inland road is not a consolation prize. The Grampians sit directly on it, 260 km west of Melbourne, with sandstone ranges, the Peaks Trail and significant rock art — a hiking trip rather than a driving one, and on the way rather than off it. The inland highway is also the right choice for a very long motorhome, in bad weather, and whenever the B100 is closed, which it periodically is. It is the standard diversion, not a compromise.
What does not work is trying to have both without paying for it. You can cut north from Warrnambool or Port Fairy through Hamilton to Dunkeld and take 65 km of sealed road up to Halls Gap — but from there the natural continuation is north to Horsham and west on the A8, which abandons Portland, Mount Gambier, Robe and the Coorong entirely. Keeping the Limestone Coast as well means retracing about 145 km back south from Dunkeld. On a week, pick one and give it the days.
Frequently asked questions
How many days do you need for Melbourne to Adelaide?
Eight days. That is around 140 km a day, which sounds slack until you drive the cliff section and discover that 45 km between Lorne and Apollo Bay takes an hour in a car and longer in a motorhome. Eight buys a day for the Port Campbell coast, a day around Portland, and the Limestone Coast at a pace that does not turn the Coorong into a transit leg. Check the minimum hire before settling on a shorter number — several companies attach a one-way minimum longer than the trip needs.
How much does a Melbourne to Adelaide campervan trip cost?
Based on our live price checks for a summer pickup, the camper alone typically runs A$135–A$243 per day — roughly A$1,080–A$1,944 for 8 days — before campsites (A$20–A$43 per person/night), fuel and food. The live cost section on this page breaks totals down by camper type.
Can you drive the Great Ocean Road in a campervan or motorhome?
Yes. It is sealed the whole way, it is a general-access road with no length or height restriction, and there is no permit scheme or motorhome ban. What bites is geometry and parking. The 75 km of cliff-cut curves between Eastern View and Apollo Bay realistically holds a long vehicle to 50 or 60 km/h against a posted 80, and the small car parks — Erskine Falls, Teddy's Lookout, Gibson Steps — are where a big rig actually gets stuck. Under about seven metres is comfortable. Above that, taking the inland Princes Highway for the Lorne–Apollo Bay section and rejoining the coast further west is the honest answer rather than the defeatist one.
Is the Twelve Apostles halfway to Adelaide?
No, and believing it is the single most common planning error on this route. Port Campbell is roughly 290 km into a 1,010 km drive, under a third of the way. What remains afterwards is about 720 km — on its own nearly as far as the entire direct inland run from Melbourne to Adelaide. The confusion comes from the Great Ocean Road itself, within which the Apostles do sit about three quarters along. People who budget half their days for the first quarter of the trip end up driving the Limestone Coast and the Coorong in one exhausted push.
Is there a fee to see the Twelve Apostles?
Not to see them, and not on the road. The Great Ocean Road has no entry fee, no congestion charge and no permit scheme, and press coverage that described a "tourist tax" on the road was wrong. What is real is narrower: the Coast and Parks Authority has said a booking and fee model will be introduced at the new Twelve Apostles visitor centre when it opens, with the booking securing a parking bay at a stated time. It has published no figure and no firm date, and it has answered the obvious follow-up itself — access to Gibson Steps and Loch Ard Gorge is unchanged. Check the Authority's site before you travel rather than trusting a guide written before it started.
Where can you legally sleep in a campervan on this route?
In a booked campground, essentially. Surf Coast Shire — Torquay through to Lorne — bans camping in a vehicle on any land in the municipality, not merely council land, and its own definition of camping names a self-propelled self-contained motorhome explicitly, so self-containment buys you nothing. Colac Otway, Corangamite, Moyne and Glenelg all carry equivalent bans, and Glenelg's names motor homes and RVs on a road as well as in a public place. Sleeping overnight anywhere in Port Campbell National Park including its car parks is prohibited and there is no camping in the park at all. South Australia is more varied rather than more permissive: Robe bans camping across its beaches, parks, reserves and car parks with on-the-spot fines, Wattle Range allows free stays only for vehicles with an on-board toilet and shower, and Kingston SE runs a paid beachfront RV park with a ticket machine and a six-day cap.
Should you drive Melbourne to Adelaide, or the other way round?
The rental companies are indifferent — every operator we checked charges the same one-way fee in either direction on this pair, so there is no saving hiding in the reverse. Two things do differ. Driving west keeps you in the landward lane for the whole cliff section, which is easier in a wide vehicle, at the cost of turning right across traffic into most of the ocean-side lookouts. And the structural logic of the relocation market runs against a westbound traveller: Adelaide is where the outback circuits from Alice Springs, Darwin and Broome finish, so vehicles accumulate there rather than needing to be sent there. If a cheap relocation is the reason for the trip, check the boards in both directions and read the terms first — the durations attached to them tend to suit the inland highway rather than this road.
Do you have to book campsites in advance?
Yes, and the system changed recently enough that most guides still send people to the wrong place. Since 1 July 2026 the Great Otway National Park drive-in campgrounds — Blanket Bay, Johanna Beach, the Aire River sites and the rest — are booked through the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority rather than Parks Victoria, and bookings must be made before arrival at every one of them. Peak summer sites are released in a single timed drop months ahead rather than rolling forward day by day, and over the Christmas-to-January blocks Blanket Bay and Johanna Beach move to a seven-night minimum, which a touring itinerary cannot use. In South Australia camping fees must be paid before you enter the park. Have a second and third choice for every night in summer.
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