Great Southern Touring Route: Food & Wine - Britz

Four nights and 848 kilometres in a loop from Melbourne in a campervan, built around food and wine rather than scenery, though it collects a good deal of that along the way.

Geelong and Anglesea come first on the Great Ocean Road, with Brae at Birregurra nearby, a restaurant on its own farm that is among the best regarded in the country. Port Fairy follows, a whaling and sealing port from the 1830s with its bluestone buildings still standing.

Dunkeld comes next below the southern end of the Grampians, where the Royal Mail Hotel keeps a kitchen garden of several thousand varieties and a wine list that runs to thousands of bottles. Halls Gap follows inside the Grampians themselves, then Ballarat and its gold rush streetscape, and Daylesford, where the Lake House has been doing this longer than almost anyone and the surrounding spa towns sit on mineral springs.

Britz supply the camper and the day-by-day plan, and the hire is priced live per vehicle rather than per person; campsites, fuel, ferries, park fees and activities are all extra, with a nil-excess insurance pack available at booking. Five days is the right length for this, since the point is to eat properly rather than to cover ground, and the three headline restaurants all need booking a long way ahead. A camper also solves the obvious problem with a trip of this kind, which is getting back from dinner. The Great Ocean Road section at the start is worth allowing extra time for, since it is slow going in a long vehicle and the pull-offs for the Twelve Apostles fill up by mid-morning.