Advertisement
Published: January 14th 2012
Edit Blog Post
Welcome back to the road trip with Emma and Jenny. After spending the week in Melbourne Emma and I debated extensively about the price verses value of visiting Phillip Island and the Great Ocean Road on a tour or trying to drive it ourselves. It would cost about half the price of the tour, but it would be more stressful. Finally Emma decided that she was confident enough to drive. We invited our Friend Marcella, from the Fruitshack, to come along since she had just arrived in Melbourne as well. So I studied the map and we trudged our way through the traffic of the Melbourne suburbs and made it to Phillip Island in about two hours We stopped at tourist information and bought a "3 park pass" to see Churchill Island, The Koala Conservation Center, and the Penguin Parade. Churchill Island is a small private island off the coast of Phillip Island. It was originally a farm, but has been converted into a park for tourist to visit. At the Koala Conservation Center you can walk through a forest with boardwalks built up around the trees so you can get a close look at the Koalas that live there. The
real appeal of Phillip Island though is the Penguin Parade. Every night at sunset about 700 tiny fairy penguins swim out of the ocean and waddle back to their burrows on land. At this time of year the sunset comes at about 9pm and it is breeding season for the penguins so there are plenty to see. There were no pictures allowed at the parade, but I saw a few penguins nesting in burrows around the coast of the island. While we were waiting for the penguins to arrive a flock of seagulls decided to stand guard at the beach and their presence posed a problem for our intrepid penguins. Many times they would swim ashore only to scurry back into the water if a seagull squawked at them. We cheered (quietly) whenever they made it through to their burrows.
We left the penguin parade at about 10:30 to make the 2 hour drive back to our campsite in Melbourne. At about 11:30 we got a call from our friend Andy who had left us in Albury to go to Sydney for the New Year. He had hitch hiked from Sydney and wanted to know if we could come
pick him up where the truck driver had dropped him off. Since it was all Emma and I could do to get back to our campsite in the middle of night we told him that it was impossible for us to come get him. We suggested finding accommodation in the city or perhaps getting a taxi to our campsite. He said he didn't have the money for a taxi and generally made us feel guilty for not coming to pick him up in the middle of the night with no notice. As you might tell it didn't have much effect on me, but Emma is a nicer person and really took it to heart.
At about 9am we awoke to find Andy shaking our tent because he had caught the first bus to our campsite and had decided that we didn't need to sleep anymore. So ended our day in Phillip Island. We left the next day for the Great Ocean Road
Advertisement
Tot: 0.075s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 14; qc: 29; dbt: 0.0433s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Same folks as before
non-member comment
Wowsers,
Also good.