2015/11 Australia trip - Phillip Island |
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Tuesday November 24th
It was a murky morning, with promise of sunshine, and John was taking us to Phillip Island, our first visit in twenty years. The roads were bigger and faster this time. We noted that the Big Worm has now closed its doors. Its main attraction was the giant Gippsland earthworm, a local species that grows to ten foot long and can stretch even further. It had been interesting to see but not something you’d want to see twice.
Phillip Island is accessed by bridge and is about 15 miles across. The main tourist attraction is its coastline; the interior is mostly 
farmland. The coastal scenery is very different , with volcanic rocks rather than the granite and limestone we’d got accustomed to.
We went first to Cape Woolamai – a scenic spot, but still a bit too cool and breezy to take a walk. We had lunch at a beach park in Cowes on the north coast.
Cowes, like most towns in Australia, provides free electric or gas barbecues, anything to prevent people from having cooking fires and burning the town down. So we had bacon butties for lunch.
We went to a nearby nature reserve looking for koalas, but we picked a trail that led us out to a boardwalk through a wetlands, with few trees that might attract koalas. They only eat the leaves of a few species of eucalypts.
We moved on to the Nobbies, on the opposite side of the island. This area has spectacular coastal scenery and it is most famous for its Penguin Parade. John approached it via gravel roads to increase our chance of spotting penguins. And it worked. We saw plenty of Cape Barren geese, with their fluorescent green beaks. There was also an echidna that went into defence mode, digging into the dirt with its head down.
The penguin adults are off fishing during the day, not returning until dusk. That’s what you get to see in the Penguin Parade: the adults staggering up the beach to their chick waiting in their burrow. Burrows can be a long walk from the sea; this one was once a drainage pipe. Chicks mostly hide in the back of the burrow for safety but this one was taking a look out.
The Nobbies area has a great boardwalk for getting around the cliffs. Less desirable is the new Nobbies Centre, an ugly building 
perched right on the clifftop. I can see why it was needed with the thousands of people who come in on bus trips, but why not put it a hundred yards away from the wildlife?
Some penguins now have council houses, wooden nesting boxes, most of them in use with a chick in the 
shadows. More obvious were the thousands of noisy silver gulls nesting on the ground with their brand new 
chicks.
We weren’t planning on staying until dusk for the Penguin Parade, so we took a last walk at Swan Lake, another reserve with a trail leading to bird hides overlooking the lake. It was a great spot: herons, ducks, kangaroos, even a rabbit drinking from the lake.
It had been a good day out, ending up back at Sandown Park for dinner, a much nicer place to eat without the noisy neighbours we had last time.