Prancing Around Phillip

Although the Australian trains aren’t the prettiest they do the job quite well of transporting you from one place to another. That’s about all I will say about the trains because nothing else is really that great about them.

After a long train and bus ride we were greeted on Phillip Island by the most gorgeous hostel you could imagine for $35. Everything was new and felt/looked clean (which is more than you can say for the other hostel). Although we were pretty tired from spending the night on a train we decided we should try and see some of the island because it was supposed to rain the next day. Mark and I headed to a small beach where every day the local fishery feeds the pelicans. Now, for me the only pelican I’ve ever “seen” was Nigel in Finding Nemo and he looked like a decent sized bird, but in reality these birds are much larger than Pixar made me believe. When they stand up straight they’re about 4’ tall with webbed feet that could probably cover your face if they decided to step on you. In conclusion, pelicans are huge and they walk where they want so don’t get in the way or they’ll probably poop on you because that’s just what they do.

 

The rest of the afternoon Mark and I went on a short walk to see some of the amazing views of Philip Island and then went back to the hostel to rest before the “magnificent” penguin show. I put quotations around magnificent because there was quite a bit of hype over this show where the penguins come out from the sea and waddle their way up the grassy hill to their burrows. From the descriptions Mark and I heard we were expecting hundreds of penguins to pop out of the ocean and run for the hills as hawks and seagulls attacked from above creating an epic war scene. What actually happened was about 5 or 6 penguins every few minutes would pop out of the water, waddle up the beach about 2 feet, then get scared and run back in the ocean falling several times on the way back. The point is for the penguins to reach their burrows without being seen, so most of them diverged around the giant crowd of people that were watching and slipped through the shadows. Although penguins are very cute it wasn’t worth it to see tiny black and white dots appear and disappear multiple times but hey, you win some and you lose some right?

 

That night we went back to the hostel and got to know our new French and Australian roommates over some wine and pasta. The Australian was from Perth and he was on the east to watch the AFL (Australian Football League) final which was being played in Melbourne on the 28^th. He was cheering for Fremantle and I decided that I would cheer for them too because now I knew someone from there.

The next morning Mark and I were gearing up for a long hike around the island that was apparently supposed to have the most gorgeous views of the ocean and island. Unfortunately a wind and rain storm decided to roll in overnight and despite the efforts made by myself, Mark and our two French roommates we couldn’t even make it to the starting point of the hike. So instead of the hike we decided to go tour the chocolate factory which smelt amazing but cost too much to take the tour (at least it was too expensive for the cheep travelers like Mark and I) so we ended up heading back to the hostel after 2 hours of walking through the rain and wind. We had a quick bite to eat and seeing that the weather wasn’t going to change anytime soon decided it was time to leave Phillip Island and head off to our next destination…MELBOURNE!!!