Cuties here, there, & everywhere
Trip Start
Nov 05, 2002
1
39
69
Trip End
Aug 13, 2003
Philip Island,
Australia
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
After Canberra we only had a few days to get to Melbourne. We drove south from Canberra and spent the night in a nice rural town called Cann River, a tiny township on the junction of the Cann River and Princes Highway 450 km east of Melbourne. Its importance and interest lie in its proximity to Croajingolong National Park and the access it provides to Point Hicks, the first land to be sighted by Europeans on the east coast of Australia. We enjoyed a quiet night in a local van park before continuing our journey the next day. We kept driving until we could drive no further south and were forced to turn westward towards Melbourne. At Lakes Entrance we stopped off to see Ninety Mile Beach. Not quite sure why it's called as it is. Certainly looked to be a long beach but I wasn't hanging around to see if it was 90 miles long! We spent that night in a van park in Stratford and we arrived at Philip Island early in the afternoon of the following day. Philip Island, a small Island about an hours drive east of the city. The main attraction here are the little, very cute, penguins that come from the sea every night at sunset and make their way up the sand to their burrows in the dunes. They do this at sunset every day of the year and are seemingly oblivious to the hordes of onlookers they attract. Very cute, but very busy. Cameras were not allowed to be used in the company of the penguins which is the reason you won't see any pictures of cute little penguins waddling up the beach or between the dunes. We stayed in a cool van park on Philip Island. It even had a heated indoor pool! Wow. Needless to say we took full advantage of that nice perk. One big downer on the night in Philip Island was the fact we began to make signs advertising the fact that very soon Syd will be on the market! Yep, as we're nearing the end of our time in Oz it's time we got the wheels in motion for selling our pride and joy. The intention is to advertise him in all the hostels and traveller hangouts in Melbourne and hope someone is in the market and likes what they see. It'll be sad selling a faithful and loyal servant like Syd but hey, we can't take him with us to New Zealand (believe me if we could we would!) and we need the funds from the sale so there's no getting away from it. Hopefully it'll be the only thing we do in Melbourne that we'd rather not do. Until then.
Dave
