Koalas and Penguins!

Sunday morning we boarded our plane out of Honolulu for Australia, and after a fairly pleasant 10-and-a-half hour flight, landed in Melbourne on Monday afternoon.  We were late taking off due to a mantenance repair (something I didn't really need to hear, thank you very much), but in the end we took off less than an hour late and had a relatively smooth flight on JetStar, a budget Australian airline.

Coming through customs and immigration was a breeze, and we walked into the Budget car rental office less than 30 minutes after getting off of the plane.  Once we picked up the car ("drive on the left, drive on the left") and said a couple prayers about finding the hotel before either rain or darkness (we made it on both counts, just barely), we set off on the adventure of driving a strange car through a strange city at the start of rush hour.  By the time we got to the hotel, we all collapsed into bed for the evening.

This morning, up bright and early, long before the sun, we made our way back out of Melbourne and down to Phillip Island.  And what a day!  We began with seeing a complete "bow" of a rainbow from the dock in Cowes, heard some kookaburras, waited for the Cape Barren geese to meander out of our way, watched a blacksmith and pet some lambs at the Churchill Island Heritage Farm, and saw some wallabies (we know they weren't kangaroos because apparently there are only wallabies on Phillip Island, so we haven't seen any kangaroo yet.)

And then we went to the Koala Conservation Centre and saw the koalas they are breeding there.  Koalas sleep for 20+ hours every day, and four of the ones we saw were sleeping away, but one quite cheerfully posed for photos, or at least kept eating and looking around so that she looked cute while we were taking photos from the walkway around her habitat.  My oldest friend has always loved koalas, and when we were kids had her room full of koala pictures and dolls...Marcia, I wish I could bring you more than photos, and at least one of each thing in the gift shops!

After a fantastic lunch at Mad Cowes on the Cowes Esplanade, we went out to the Antartic Journey at the Nobbies Centre, a joint venture between the Phillip Island Nature Parks and the World Wildlife Fund.  The journey into the Antartic was very well done, and Miriam has renewed her plan to study or work in the Antartic,  possibly with the University of Wisconsin's Neutrino Observatory.  I don't know either, it's a physics thing.  Maybe she'll be able to explain it to me someday.  The centre includes two floors of interactive exhibits, some awe-inspiring photography and video, and a fun virtual reality section where when you look at the movie screen, you appear to be on ice and right with the animals.  I think it's hard to tell in my picture, but below on the bottom left, the kids are petting virtual penguins.

Which leads us to the last and best experience of the day, a highlight in a trip full of highlights and definitely an experience of a lifetime:  The Penguin Parade! Phillip Island is home to the smallest of the 17 penguin species, the "little penguin" or "fairy penguin".  They are blue rather than black, are only about a foot tall and weight about 2 pounds, and some 32,000 of them call the Phillip Island Nature Park home.  They spend most of their time in the water, but every few weeks come back on land to socialize and check on their burrows, which means that every night at sunset, like clockwork, many of them come onto shore.  Tonight more than a thousand of them swam up from the ocean, waddled out onto the beach, and across in front of the viewing stands and made their way home.  Real live penguins, in the wild, doing what penguins do, and doing it only a few feet away from us!  It was amazing.  They cluck and squawk and caterwaul, sounding alot like frogs or chickens, or even cats, and got quite loud as they spread out all around the area, essentially standing on their front porches but keeping up the conversations with their neighbors.  Photography of any sort is not allowed from sundown on so as not to bother the animals, so we could only "take memory pictures" and have no real ones to share with you, but trust me when I say again, it was wonderful.  So cute, and so real, and so close.  Special thanks to Charlotte who suggested Phillip Island for our itinerary!