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Published: November 24th 2022
1. Snow Capped Mountains
Caught these snow capped mountains from the plane as we were leaving New Zealand behindOur final morning in New Zealand started very early thanks to a 6am flight to Melbourne. We were up at 2:30am, out the door by 3:15am and checked in and waiting for security to open at 3:50am!
We were called over by the person opening the tape as she spotted us waiting and wanted to encourage the rest of the people to start going through – which means we were the first 2 people through security at the international departures this morning!
We got to the business class lounge about 5mins before it was due to open, conveniently, our departure gate was directly opposite the lounge doors so we waited there. Once again we were the first 2 people in, so had our pick of seats although it was still very empty in there even when everyone had arrived for the early flights.
The lounge was nice enough, I would say it was better than the Sydney lounge. We had just over an hour in there before our flight was boarding and it flew by. Then they announced our flight was boarding our seats so we wandered out, across the walkway and straight onto the plane! Nice!
2. Dame Edna Chocolate
Dam Edna depicted in individual chocolates Fortunately the flight took off as planned, no delays, and we landed about 25mins early in Melbourne ready to start our drive down to Phillip Island. Unfortunately, the entire sky was covered with miserable looking solid grey clouds!
We eventually found the SIXT desk – it’s outside and they don’t have any signs to tell you where to go! – and picked up our hire car for the next 13 days. I think we were spoilt with the Skoda, this time we have a Mitsubishi ASX, it’s OK I guess, but we were used to electric leather seats, sat nav, automatic boot with loads of boot space e.t.c. and this one is well……. Basic. Still perfectly adequate, but not a patch on the Skoda. Plus it’s a boring shade of grey/silver, which blends in with pretty much every other car in the car parks!
We set off for Phillip Island and decided to go the route with no toll roads. Have to confess, the first bit of the drive on a busy motorway (it was rush hour) was a bit of a shock to the system. It felt like driving in central London after spending a week in
3. Chocolate Train Set
All of teh scenery in this train set is made from chocolate the countryside!
Our no toll road route added about 40mins to the time, but meant we soon got away from the large motorways, and while some roads were still busy, it was mainly single lane ‘normal’ roads. We did wonder if the recent flooding would affect our journey, one road had been closed but it was a fairly straight forward detour to get around it. There were lots of tree casualties, you could see many had fallen across the roads and had since been chopped up and moved aside.
The drive was a massive change from New Zealand, the scenery during our drive was nowhere near as pretty – although to be fair, the sky was very grey and it looked pretty grim. The rivers were brown instead of the crystal clear water we have been used to. But we did see some Cockatoo’s so that was a plus!
Once we got to Phillip Island though, the cloud had broken up slightly and we could enjoy the odd patch of sunshine. We’d been up for 12 hours at this point and it was only midday as we’d gained a couple of hours with the timezone change. With
4. Our Chocolate Swirls
We had a go at making chocolate swirls, harder than it looks a few more hours to kill (and try to stay awake) before we could get into our accommodation we stopped for a visit to Pannys Chocolate Factory.
This was an excellent way to pass an hour. Our tickets were chocolate bars! And they give each of us a barcode to scan on some games later in the tour giving you 10 credits. The first bit of the tour was fairly traditional, including reading up on the process of making the chocolate, trying out the science museum style button pushing to see each stage of the process, then seeing some impressive displays of chocolate – viewing the full wall mural made of individual chocolate, chocolate statues and paintings, a massive 1 ton cube of chocolate and a chocolate waterfall.
We were able to make our own chocolate creations (which was harder to control than it looked!) then came the best bit! Playing fairground style games to win wooden balls which could be traded for chocolate balls. Roy won 2 balls (and one of those was a ‘cheat’ win as the machine accidentally pushed the ball out instead of setting it on the stand!) and I won 4 balls! (and
5. A Cape Barren Goose
Saw loads of these Cape Barren Geese down by the Penguin Parade area didn’t rub in my victory at all)
Once we were done, we took a trip to the information centre and chatted to the staff in there, then picked up a few guides for the Island and also the Great Ocean Road, which we’ll be moving onto in a few days time.
Armed with our maps of the Island, we had a quick tour around to see where everything was – it’s like driving around the Isle of Wight! The places here are all named the same, Cowes, Rhyde, Ventnor. We drove past the Phillip Island GP Circuit and watched some of the Porsche’s racing around, then headed to our little villa in the Ramada Resort.
While we were driving around, we also saw a couple of Galah’s pottering about on a grass verge, some Cape Baron Geese with their baby goslings and looking through the Wildlife Park fence opposite our accommodation we could see Pelicans and Wallaby’s!
We have a long list of places we want to visit tomorrow so are going to try to cram in as much as we can. But for now….. we’ve been up for nearly 20 hours with not much sleep
6. The Phillip Island Coast
The coastline off of Phillip Island so even though it’s still early for where we are now, I don’t think we’re going to last much longer!
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