Blogs from Philip Island, Victoria, Australia, Oceania - page 11

From the prom we headed onto Phillip Island. Another area with amazing landscapes and coastal views. Here, we did some more walking and came across A SNAKE which was a little bit scary but also quite amusing when Alke completely freaked out after an earlier conversation about how you SHOULD react upon seeing a snake!!! Let’s just say her actions weren’t quite as she’d planned they should be. Whilst on Phillip Island we had to do the classic tourist thing of visiting the penguin parade. A huge money making scheme taking total advantage of the fairy penguins who nest around one particular area. Every night they return from their day at sea to their burrows and hundreds of tourists come along to watch them as they waddle up the beach. Despite feeling a little uncomfortable with ... read more

On the 3rd, the day after the thunderstorm, we finally got to explore Canberra and all it's sites. The interesting thing about Canberra is the fact that the city has been totally planned out since its inception. When the Commonwealth of Australia came about, Sydney and Melbourne fought over where the capital would be. Neither city wanted to see the other as the capital, so the compromise was creating a capital of Canberra. An international competetion was held and an American design won... and Canberra was born. Although the the area around Canberra is quite beautiful (rolling hills, etc), Canberra has a noticably artificial feeling to it. We took tours at the new Parliament House, the Old Parliament House and also explored the Australian War Memorial (where their unknown soldier lays) and the Australian Museum (focuses ... read more

Hello, I hope this entry finds you all well. I am off to the Great Barrier Reef tomorrow (1/24) in Cairns, Queensland, Australia, but wanted to leave an update on my past travels before my flight. I will be taking plenty of pictures to upload, and in addition, I hope that I will be able to figure out how to post videos of my travels online too. I caravanned with a group of students to Phillip Island (located in southeast Victoria about 2 hours from Melbourne) to watch the “Penguin Parade” this past weekend. The parade occurs each night at sundown as hundreds of Little Penguins (formerly known as Fairy Penguins—the smallest of the world’s 17 species of penguins—standing approximately 12-14 inches tall) leave the ocean and return to the shore for bedtime. While in the ... read more

The Penguin Parade is the biggest tourist attraction in Victoria and the third biggest in Australia. I had already established that the War Memorial in Canberra was number two, but I never officially found out which was number one. I think that the Sydney Opera House would be a good bet. The guy who did our Great Ocean Road tour also ran tours to the Penguin Parade but he was unfortunately fully booked so I had to go with the old people on a coach tour. The guide managed to make himself heard over the moaning and he gave us a tour of the city on the way there - there were in fact several tourist bits that I hadn't covered after all. We later stopped at the "big worm", a giant work museum in the ... read more