The Mysterious Case of Phillip Island
cue the debussy...
It may sound like a Hardy Boys mystery....truth is, it's not. Matt, Lucie and I took a break from city life to go camping and sightseeing and penguin-finding on Phillip Island, a small* island around two hours from Melbourne. Why? I caught a bit of the wanderlust going around and wanted to see a bit of the coast before we head through the outback. The others liked the idea, so we booked a campsite in a little town called New Haven (Victoria, not Connecticut, which led to an incident involving a 20-something-thousand mile route planned by google).
lucie staring into the vast emptiness of the (new) trusty solar car van
*not worth invading if you're an 18th century colonial power
And when I say campsite, I mean corner of a field. We got our campsite, wandered around New Haven for a little bit, bought some food to eat/cook, and headed back. On this walk, Matt fell in love with a bridge. Ask him about it sometime. It's a really nice bridge. This is a picture of Matt and his favorite bridge.
he's in love
While making the curry, we talked to a local junior who was on the island for a golf tournament. If he ends up reading the blog, hi Bryce! He wanted some advice on which colleges to go to in order to party and get laid. We told him UC Santa Barbara. We didn't recommend Stanford. Also, he seemed to have warm feelings towards Americans. I wonder if Australia somehow maintained its respect for America after Bush trashed it pretty much internationally.
Anyways, the three of us slept an uneventful yet cozy night in Matt's two man tent and were woken up by the loudest and most myriad series of bird noises I've ever heard. It sounded as if huge flocks of birds were devouring flocks of other birds, all while trying to avoid hungry kangaroos and a fierce assault of drop bears. Apparently this is business as usual in this country.
So we packed up and headed to one of the free! activities on the island, the Conservation Hill Sanctuary. This park had several square miles of salt-water wetlands and played host to a bunch of birds and other living things part of the local ecosystem. Most peculiar were the Mangrove trees, which had pneumatophores, a bizarre adaptation where the trees had roots sticking straight out of the mud. These roots supposedly allowed the trees to "breathe" while submerged in high tide. We noticed that many of the trucks here have a similar adaptation.
since we're bad bloggers, we forgot to take a picture of the mangroves in the conservation park. instead, we've included a picture of some very confused mangrove trees in an inlet we found around sunset the first night.
A Toyota Hilux with a Pneumatophore
Anyways, on this same little hike we saw several wallabies and a very noisy parrot. Everything with wings wants attention in this country. Anyhow, we then tried to find the Koala preserve, realized that it would have cost money to see koalas, gave up, and went to the "Nobbies," to see a seal colony. What we saw there proved to be the highlight of the trip, but we didn't see any seals (their 3d-wireless-panoramic-amazement cameras were broken at the time). That being said, this conservation area (free?!?!?!?!) was home to an extraordinary seagull colony as well as some fairly spectacular views of the coastline. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves here, or, rather, I'll say that it was like a mountain had been covered with mother seagulls, each one nesting two feet away from another, with every male seagull noisily trying to defend its own territory. Parallels to suburban America aside, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves:
moi. moi. moi moi moi. nemo anyone?
...giving babysitting a whole new meaning...
the elusive penguins. these required a short hike over wet, slippery rocks right on the edge of wet, slippery cliffs to find
And then Matt went swimming. Because he's hardcore like that.
After we all dried off, we drove into downtown Cowes, the largest town on the island, got some food, and drove back to Melbourne. Also, Special thanks to our sponsor:
- we like wasabi peas
anyways, peace
-nathan
This is at the Nobbies. The editors regret the inclusion of such a cliche image, but hell, why not! On the left is Lucie, Matt is in the middle, and Nathan (blogger du jour) is on the right.
October 12th, 2009 - 04:37
Absolutely gorgeous photographs. We loved that part of Australia. Did you see the penguins?