Australia (2/4): Victoria
From Tasmania we returned to Melbourne, from where we rented a car, planning to drive to Brisbane in ten days. Melbourne is a nice city, with a good mixture of old and new buildings. They have restaurants from all over the world, and shopping possibilities are tempting. I wanted to buy a dress, and spent a day going around shops while the guys visited Melbourne aquarium. Even though I’m not a big shopper, it’s a shame sometimes that we cannot buy many things as we don’t have extra space in the bags. For us shopping would be cheaper almost in all the other countries than back home. Luckily (for Chris :)) I don’t understand nowadays fashion, so most of the time I don’t even find anything to buy. The same happened with the dress, almost everything in Melbourne was too short, so they got to stay in shops. Streets in Melbourne look half Asian, as there is loads of people with Asian origin and Asian restaurants.
From Melbourne we headed first south to Phillip island to see little blue penguins. We had seen them already by glimpse in New Zealand and in Tasmania, but the difference here would be that we would see hundreds of them. Phillip island is famous for spectacular “Penguin parade”, where you can watch hundreds of penguins climbing ashore to their nests from the sea. This experience was truly amazing. All of a sudden tens of little heads pop up from the sea. They start to walk pass us. The same happens again and again and again. At least ten times. They are hundreds, even thousands. It’s very quiet. The penguins walk pass us one by one, and we get to see them from one meter away. When they get to their nests to their partners, they start to keep funny noise. Some of them get into a fight as there might have been an intruder in the nest while the partner was away, and it is unclear who the nest belongs to. We are wondering why the penguins still nest here, even though hundreds of people watch them every night, and the most stupid ones keep noise and shout to the animals. Perhaps they don’t have a choice, and they are used to people by now. (Luckily) it was not allowed to take pictures of the penguins, so we still don’t have one to show you. This thing you have to come and experience yourselves! :) In Phillip island we also went to a big protected area to see supercute koalas again. They look so much like big stuffed animals. As their food, eucalyptus leaves, contain so few energy, they don’t move much and sleep 20 hours a day!
On the way to Brisbane we wanted to see also something else besides the beaches, so we went to check if we could find any snow in Australia in their alpine area. At first it seemed quite unlikely, as we did not see anything even close to mountains. Then we had to believe that there has to be some snow as we got to a closed road, closed because it had been snowing a week(!) ago. There was another way through the alps so we were able to go on, just it would have been nice to hear about the road closure from the tourist information office which specifically recommended the way in question…
This caused us to drive extra 80 kilometres on a winding road, but luckily we got to a still empty skiing resort before dark. Made few snow balls and took some pictures. That was enough for us up there as it was so cold, and we started to long for a tropical heat.