Little Penguin parade

I had already seen the world's littlest penguins on kangaroo island and on the great ocean road, and I will probably see them again in Tasmania, but i still was very excited to go the little penguin parade on Philip Island to see the largest colony in Australia. On KI we only saw about 5 of them and on the GOR we were so high up the penguins looked more like beetles than birds. I went with Autopia tours and our first stop was at a wildlife sanctuary. I must say I am no longer excited by kangaroos or koalas but this place had a baby wombat and an albino kangaroo so it was worth going to. Next we went to the penguin visitor center where there was a boardwalk around the ocean. I decided to go for a walkdown it even though there were about a million seagulls swarming and signs that said don't feed them because they attack. I decided that since I had no food I would be safe. I had just stopped and taken a picture of them and remarked to myself that it looked very Hitchcockian when I was attacked. A baby seagull was on the path and the birds must have thought i was standing to close to it because several swooped down out of the sky towards my head screeching at me. I ducked and hit my head on the boardwalk trying to protect myself. I then ran back to my group who were not faring much better. One woman had her finger bit by a seagull trying to steal her biscuit and another had been pooped on. Luckily we soon all boarded back in the bus for pizza and then onwards to see the penguins. Sadly you are not allowed to take any pictures of them because they are blinded by the lights so I bought a few postcards and went and sat on the beach to wait. Apparently this is Australia's second biggest tourist attraction after the Great Barrier Reef so like Uluru at sunset I was surrounded by hundreds of other tourists. The penguins wait until sunset and then cluster together in the waves. They send one penguin out first and if he is not eaten by a bird he runs back into the water and the little penguins make their way onto the beach and then to their burrows. For about thirty minutes I watched a few clusters of penguins get swept onto the beach and then swept back into the water a few times before they finally began scurrying up to their burrows. After that I walked around on the boardwalks and watched penguins mating and walking around. There were lots of school children very excited by the mating penguins and I even heard one teacher say that they would go see how many birds they could find "doing it." After about an hour we all boarded our tour buses and began the 2 hour drive back to Melbourne.
I am staying at a small hostel in old mansion in St. Kilda, a beachside suburb of Melbourne. St Kilda has plenty of funky shops, cafes, restaurants, and cake shops. It also has an old amusement park and a vegetarian curry place that I am obsessed with. I have already eaten there 3 times. My first day here it was cold and rainy so I saw a movie (Michael Clayton, very good) and then walked to the Victoria markets which were supposedly open Wednesday nights. When i arrived the markets were completely empty and I sadly walked back to the tram in the rain and hurried to my curry place. Yesterday i walked around the city and found myself at the Australian center for Moving Images. They had a display by a performance artist who made videos. Most were too weird for me, but there was one that was 4 screens of different films with people singing, dancing, and playing instruments that i enjoyed. There was also one where you stood in the middle of 4 screens that had been synchronized with scenes from 4 different movies(I only remember terminator 2 and Pulp Fiction) that involved shootouts. I must have arrived at the end because as I stood there 4 gunmen aimed at me and began shooting. It was a bit too realistic so I went back to the safety of the musical exhibit.
I just spent a while putting the rest of my pictures on facebook so I will add some links to them soon. Happy weekend!

Thanksgiving and the Great Ocean Road

I celebrated my last day in Adelaide by making Thanksgiving dinner for Max, Myst, and her family. This turned out to be a more challenging farewell than anticipated. It was decided that Pat would be in charge of the turkey since neither Myst nor I had any idea how to cook one. That left us in charge of pumpkin pie, cornbread dressing, and sweet potato casserole. The sweet potato casserole got canceled pretty quickly when it was discovered that half of the dinner party refused to eat sweet potatoes. The cornbread dressing idea got nixed when I remembered how much work it involved and realized that there was no Jimmy Dean sausages in Australia. The pumpkin pie was deemed essential but would require cutting up and boiling an actual pumpkin since there was no canned pumpkin to be found anywhere. Pat picked me up Friday morning and drove me down the street to the grocery store and vegetable shop since it was a boiling hot day and we didn't want any spoiled ingredients. She explained that she had called all over and was unable to find a whole turkey. She had found a turkey roll and a whole chikcen but decided that having a whole bird on the table was more important than having an actual turkey. Once Myst and I finished cooking and decorating the table with "fall leaves" (in actuality some dead, brown one) we pulled out the bottles of pink mink champagne to finish. Two bottles later the guests arrived and we ate our feast. Since there are no conversion recipes for making a real pumkin into a canned one I had guessed and my pie suffered. It still tasted good but we had ouor dessert in bowls since my pie had failed to solidify in the oven. The rest of the night involved Myst and I having a dance party to the Joan Armatrading song "Rosie" on repeat, singing along to the unappreciated Grease 2, and having a deep conversation until 3:30 in the morning when we decided it was time to go to bed since I had a bus to catch at 6:45 the next morning. Myst and I dutifully set 3 alarm clocks before parting ways. Of course none of them went off. Maximus woke me up at 6:30 which meant the next 15 minutes were spent frantically finsing my stuff from all over their house and backyard, packing my bag, and finding the tour company's number to let them know I was running late. It all ended up wroking out ok and I was able to board the bus that would take me to Melbourne. It was not easy leaving Myst and Max but they'll be in Melbourne with me in a few weeks so I wasn't too bad. This is the bad part of having great friends so far away from your home.
The next three days were spent on a trip to the Grampians National Park and the Great Ocean Road. The first day involved me trying to stay awake while hiking up and down waterfalls and mountains. I fell asleep pretty early that night and woke up to go on another mountain hike in the Grampians before we drove on the magnificent Great Ocean Road. My descriptive writing skills are lacking so I am going to copy from my guidebook here. "The Great Ocean Road is one of the world's greatest driving experiences and one of Australia's proudest tourism showpieces. The 175km road snakes around celebrated surf beaches, through forests clinging to the edge of cliff-tops, across windswept coastal plains, all the while passing through idyllic hamlets, vibrant beach communities, and national parks teeming with plants and animals." Tons of ships have wrecked off the coast and we must have stopped a gazillion times to admire some stone formations just off the coast, the most famous being the 12 apostles, of which there are only 8 left. Being constantly hit by waves from the Southern Ocean means that the stones sometimes get knocked over back into the sea. A few years 2 people got stranded on a new island after the "London Bridge" formation collapsed. Turns out the two were having an affair and did not appreciate the media attention they received after being rescued by helicopter. In addition to lots of beaches and big rocks we saw some koalas in the wild and a parrot colony that liked to sit on people's heads. I think I will have to write about the little penguins and Melbourne tomorrow. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

Kangaroo Island

I know it's been a few weeks since my last post, but like I said my time has mostly been spent watching movie musicals, drinking wine, and discussing Harry Potter. I have managed to squeeze some tourist activities in though. I spent a day visiting a few museums and art galleries, where I saw some giant whale skeletons and learned about the history of migration in Australia. We went wine tasting in the Barossa Valley and discovered the wonder of Pink Mink Champagne. It is pink and doesn't taste very good until you have had a few glasses, but the bottle is pink and has a picture of a woman who looks like Barbie on it. This weekend Maximus, Myst, and I drove to Victor Harbor which is a little town on the beach that has a granite island you can walk around. There have been many visits to various malls and movie theatres (to see Stardust which was great and Rogue which was not so great but is Australian and has some very nice scenery shots of Kakadu National Park before it becomes a stupid killer crocodile movie), and one eventful evening spent at IKEA picking out furniture for our future homes. I also accompanied Myst and her mother to a wedding expo where I sat through an hour long bridal wear and lingerie fashion show. Thrilling stuff.
This week I decided it was time to start being a backpacker again so I left Myst and Maximus for a 3 day tour of Kangaroo Island. The island was recently named the 7th best island in the world (and 1st in Asia/Pacific)by National Geographic magazine. The islands were rated accoring to beauty and stuff to do there but also on their ecotourism practices. Monday morning I was picked up at the train station by my dreadlocked guide before heading to the Mclaren Vale wine region for some more wine tastings (I think I will be an expert on wine before I leave this country) and a picnic lunch. We then drove to the water and unloaded all of our stuff onto a fishing boat that would take us to the island. The boat ride took about an hour and was extremely wet, but we did have dolphins jumping beside us for part of it so I didn;t mind so much. When we got to the island and loaded all of our stuff into another van and then headed off to explore. Our guide had heard about a beach he wanted to check out so we drove around until the road ended and decided to walk in the direction of the supposed beach. We had to carefully hike through a path overrun with prickling nettles and kangaroo poop. We gave up on finding the beach a half an hour in and headed back to the van. On our drive to the campsite we saw the first of many kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, possums, and goannas (crazy looking giant lizards) that inhabit the island. They weren't as annoying at the Rottnest island quokkas, but they were still everywhere.
We spent the night in an eco hut by the beach sleeping in swags. The campsite had one of the coolest bathrooms I have ever seen. The two toilets and two showers were both in big round rain water collecting barrels and a solar powered radio played in the background. The showers did not have ceilings so you could wash under the sky while singing along to the radio. The next day we explored the island more, visiting a few (amazing!) beaches, a eucalyptus oil distillery, and seal bay. At seal bay there were a few hundred giant sea lions hanging out on the beach. The pups were chasing seagulls while the males were getting ready for mating season by fighting over the females and occasionally running towards my group. We would have to quickly move away and watch the sea lion plop down on the spot of sand we had just been standing on. Next up we drove to a place called Little Sahara to try sand boarding. I didn't bring my camera with me on this part because I was warne dit would get full of sand and possibly break, but it was basically a large area of sand dunes surrounded by trees. Sand boarding is kind of like sledding down sand dunes and is loads of fun until you have to climb back up the giant sand dune you just zoomed down. It was hard work! We then set up camp at another cabin and after dinner drove to a bay to see some little penguins that only come out at night. Thet don't get any taller than a wine bottle and are super cute.
The next day involved more beaches, including Stokes Bay which was voted 3rd best beach in Australia where I went swimming in the Southern Ocean. I now only have the Arctic ocean left and I will have swum in all the world's oceans. The water was pretty cold and had some pretty strong rips so I didn't stay in too long. We then drove to see the creatively named "Remarkable Rocks" which are a bunch of giant, weather sculpted boulders precariously perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. After lots of pictures we drove to the even more remarkable Admiral's Arch which was a stone archway over the sea that is home to a colony of surprisingly agile fur seals. It was then time to drive back to the fishing boat for another wet ride back to the mainland and onwards to Adelaide.
I have only a few days left with Myst and Maximus before I continue my travels and this makes me very sad. We are off to the grocery store to do some shopping for our Thanksgiving feast I will be attempting to prepare tomorrow. I'll let you know how it turns out.