Tourist Trap #2: Phillip Island

So, Sunday came around. Hung over, camera dead, no clean clothes... Let's go to Phillip Island.

Ingenious!

Actually, apart from our collective desire to see the penguin parade, the whole trip doubled as a disincentive for Andrew's friend Lorraine to fly to Kangaroo Island. As the brochure at the hire car store implied, Phillip Island is like Kangaroo Island but with a Formula 1 track. And it was.

We ended up seeing a kangaroo and a blustery beach. It was good to see the beach again after all this time but I (and my newly sand-blown skin) would have preferred some more amiable weather.

Somewhat misguidedly, I assumed that going to see the penguins would involve sitting down on the beach and creeping up on the little devils. I expected a solitary, quiet evening. When we booked our tickets they told us that the previous evening had seen 2000 punters walk through the door; quiet and solitary? Not in the slightest.

After walking out of the information centre and along the boardwalk you are greeted with grandstands, floodlights and marshals, cleverly disguised as rangers. After a brief and uninformative preamble in three or four languages you get to sit in the biting wind waiting to see rolly polly penguins make a dash for the dunes. In all honesty, they are cute as hell, but the grandstand is a little too distant from the action. The real action starts in the dunes.

As you muscle back through the crowds to the information centre you get to see the penguins in their burrows taking tea and chatting to their pals. We were lucky enough to attend the parade during mating season, or something along those lines, so we had been promised some courtship action and maybe a bit of territorial biffo. I was half expecting to see a gang of penguins roaming the dunes with machetes but it didn't happen.

Then, as we approached the exit, just when we thought our money had been wasted, we hit a cordon. Some penguins were crossing the bitumen walkway. Aw, cute, hurry the fuck up! It was then that we saw it. Two penguins doing the nasty thang. It astounds me how watching animals going at it can still reduce a crowd of grown adults into tittering schoolgirls. Oh, the innuendo. My favourite was a father, pissing himself laughing as he told his young daughter that they were playing leapfrog.

Good times!

Drive, home, bed, food, Great Ocean Road...

More photos to come, it is just that I have to scab them from the others because my camera was dry.

Okay, not too many more, but I did manage to find this one with the cute sign...

They do insist in removing all the fun, don't they!

Tags: melbourne, tourist, penguins