Phillip Island
Trip Start
Jun 18, 2008
1
43
72
Trip End
Ongoing
Phillip Island,
Victoria,
Australia
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Phillip Island is around 100km from central Melbourne, and is famous for two things, depending on your interests. If you are a tourist, it's famous for it's Little Penguins, which run out of the ocean at dusk to their nests, and you can pay a lot of money to go watch them. If on the other hand, that's not your thing (and it's certainly not ours), then Phillip Island is famous for it's race track, which holds the Australian MotoGP amongst other things. Oddly enough, we are motorsport fans, and this weekend was the V8 Supercar races, so we were going to be in the area for sure.
V8 Supercars is basically Touring Cars, but with only two makes - Ford and Holden. And it's huge here. The event was sold out months back, so the best we could do was drive very slowly past the fence, and managing to see a few laps before being moved on
Nobbies
. So instead we went up to the Nobbies (only went because of the name), a few rocks with Fur Seals on, and some very stormy water. Also home to various Sea Birds who nest there during the year, which at our time of visiting were mostly Sea Gulls.
We also walked around a huge conservation reservation, which had a wealth of wildlife in - Koalas, Wallabys, Possums etc. However we only saw a few Hares and Swamp Wallabies. Those Koalas sure are shy fellas. There was a centre nearby that was for Koalas but we didn't fancy that. Would rather see them in the wild, not in some petting zoo.
We headed into the main town, Cowes (and yes, it does indeed have an Isle of Wight hotel), where there was some entertainment for the race fans. We sat out in the main street for a meal, a few drinks (Thick Shakes for me) and then watched a few V8 Drivers be interviewed on a small stage, after which a band played. Great evening, and was very impressed by the accessibility of drivers for the fans - F1 only becomes accessable when you dip very, very far into your pockets, sadly.
And with that, we made it back into surburban Melbourne late at night, ready for a few weeks of relaxation and a proper bed, shower and cooking facilities.
