Arriving in Melbourne and Phillip Island

I arrived in Melbourne around 9 on Thursday night. Kerry (Kerewyn) came down to meet me at my hostel and we went out dinner. They city was buzzing with people - Good Friday is a national holiday here, so it was like a Friday night. We went to a little cafe that Kerry found earlier and had a delicious dinner.

For Friday, I had booked a day tour to a wildlife reserve and to see penguins on Phillip Island. Unfortunately, I was the only one interested in the wildlife part, so my full day tour got cut to a half day. I wandered around Melbourne until 3, and then my group left for Phillip Island. We stopped once to take some pictures, and it was quite a lovely shoreline with waves crashing all over the place!



Phillip Island is a natural habitat for penguins, and in recent years the government has been buying back land to make it more hospitable for them. It's also a big tourist attraction. Every night at dusk, the penguins gather off shore and then come up on to the beach in groups of about 20 or 30. They then waddle off to their burrows. They do it in the same place every night, so there are grandstands built on the beach so people can watch. With my tour, I got the "Penguins Plus" package, which got me in the part of the stands where almost all of the penguins stop to rest, so I got to be about 10 feet away from them for the whole "Penguin Parade". It was great! The penguins were Little Penguins, the smallest breed, and they were less than a foot tall. They would come waddling up, making all kinds of noise, and then pause to shake themselves off just a few feet away from where we were. It was really cool, and quite amazing that they keep coming to the same places and don't see us as a threat. You couldn't take any pictures of the penguins, so I don't have any, but I did get one of this awesome sign on the way out of the parking lot.



Then it was back to Melbourne for the night.