Francesca and Henk-Jan's Backpacking Trip!
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Melbourne, Part Two: Kengurus! (And more...)
Hi everyone!
For Sunday, we had an all-day trip planned to Phillip Island, this tiny island about 140 kilometers away from Melbourne. Henk heard about the island his first time in Oz, and knew it had a ton of wildlife to see, but had never gone himself. We booked onto a tour that would drive us first to a wildlife reserve, serve us a gourmet sandwich lunch, bring us to a farm, and then finally end the day on Phillip Island -- watching the 'penguin parade' and having a pizza dinner. Sounded awesome! And it was. Here's how the day went:
First, we had a 40 minute drive out to the 32,000 acre wildlife reserve. It wasn't too scenic a drive -- well, to be honest, I wouldn't know because I was sleeping/resting on Henk's lap the entire time! Anyways, I woke up just in time to jump out of the van, and have a snake put around my neck! What a wake-up call. :P
We had arrived at Moonlit Sanctuary. One of the first animals we saw was a lace monitor, which looks like a large lizard. The female lays her eggs in termite mounds, and then the termites close up the mounds keeping the egg safe inside and incubated at a constant temperature. The young hatch after 8 to 9 months and the female lace monitor returns to dig them back up. Next we saw some wild birds, including one slightly blue feathered bird that is carnivorous called a Kookaburra and a very cool ‘Egyptian-eye’ bird. We saw a koala again, this one however was asleep. And!! We saw a dingo for the first time – and decided that our first dog will be a cross-breed of a dingo and a husky.
One of the highlights of our animal adventure was feeding emus! Henk fed the emu, and then forced me to feed the emu – which was kinda scary! Look at my reaction when the emu snapped at the food in my hand. Freaky! It looked like a mini dinosaur was about to attack. Next we crossed through a bunch of yellow-beaked geese to get to another famous Australian animal: the wombat!
Wombats looked like giant fluffy guinea pigs, but they are actually marsupials because they have a pouch for their Joey (in Australia, baby animals which don’t have an official name are called Joeys). We learned something awesome about their tailbones. They have a thick bone about half an inch under their fur that they use for protection from predators.
For example, if a dingo was chasing a wombat, the wombat would run into a burrow in the ground with its behind in the air. First it would have the dingo pry at its behind, then, once the dingo realizes there is a thick bone in the way, the wombat would create a little space for the dingo to get its head into the burrow. Once the dingo shoves itself in the burrow, the wombat would push its behind up, crushing the neck of the dingo or at the very least suffocating it. The thick wombat bone also protects the wombat’s Joey in case of a car accident – so always check for a young Joey inside a wombat’s pouch if you hit one on the road!
My personal favorite animal was next! Wallabies! These cute little animals looked kinda like chinchillas with larger legs and ears. They are less than 2 feet tall standing on their hind legs, and many of them had little Joeys still in their pouches! Awesome!! Henk and I got to feed a bunch of them, and I even got to feed one of the Joeys because the mother realized I wasn’t a threat. Their larger relatives, the kangaroos, were a little further into the park. These were a bit bigger than I had imagined them, standing at around 5 feet tall. We fed the kangaroos the rest of our animal feed, and then walked back towards the park entrance to get some lunch ourselves. Just sandwiches, but we were pretty hungry so we ate them up. On our walk back we tried to lure the Tasmanian devil out of its cage, but it wasn’t interested in showing its face. Sad!
Our next stop was on Churchill Island at a working farm from the late 1800’s. We pet some of the animals, and watched a trained dog run around some ducks. I also chased after some sheep, unsuccessfully trying to catch one of them. After the farm, we made a quick stop at a chocolate factory (our driver’s awesome suggestion!) to grab some free samples and buy a chocolate lizard to snack on. Then we finally got to Phillip Island at around 4:30 pm. We had some free time to walk around reading information about seals and penguins, because our ‘Penguin Parade’ show didn’t start until around 6:30 pm. We learned that ‘Korri ‘Yong’ is the Aboriginal tribe Bunurong’s name for Phillip Island, a name which means ‘Sandy Place.’ As we were leaving the information center, we were shocked by the number of seagulls all over the place!
The ‘Penguin Parade’ is a daily event during which the tiniest species of penguins (called the ‘Little Penguins’) standing at just over a foot tall each, come ashore after a multi-day fishing trip. They waddle in groups across the beach over the course of an hour, moving quickly towards their burrows which can sometimes be up to over a mile away. Henk and I found a good spot to sit, waiting for the penguins to come. They arrived a bit later than expected, around 6:45 pm (the penguins come in depending on the time the sun sets) and started to move clumsily towards us. We saw a group of about ten penguins stumbling slowly but carefully over a bunch of rocks, rather than taking the smooth path on either side of the rocks. Silly little buggers!
After seeing a few dozen of them crossing, we headed back to the walkway which ran alongside the area the penguins were waddling. Here we got to see a bunch of them up close! We couldn’t take any pictures however, since flash photography could disorient the penguins. Penguins are quite funny when they are disoriented however. We learned from our guide earlier in the day, that these little penguins ‘fight’ with each other for the best burrow spots – and they ‘beat’ each other up: one penguin will grab another penguin under its little flipper arm and run in circles to ‘spin’ the other penguin. Then, the attacker penguin would let go, leaving the other penguin confused and disoriented, walking in circles dizzily. Such a cute way of fighting!
As we were leaving the parade, we saw a sign to check under the car for little stray penguins. Some of the penguins have a habit of crossing over the car-park on the way back to their burrows… and we don’t want to squash them under the tires! Once we had seen the penguins, we stopped off for our pizza dinner. Yum! We chatted with a few fellow passengers while we filled our stomachs with free pizza, and then got back on the bus for the 2 hour drive back to Melbourne. A long day, but well worth it!
On Monday, Henk and I planned to take a tour of Town Hall, hopefully learning a bit more about the founding of Australia – which in perspective was pretty recent. But first we walked through some of the interesting shopping streets and stopped off in Federation Square to admire some of the cool architecture. We saw that there was an event going on: the AFL’s (Australian Football League) finals are coming weekend, so several companies were giving away freebies; others had us guessing how many footballs were stashed in a car to win that car/ tickets to the AFL finals. We even got some free Vegemite (bitter tasting jelly), which tasted horrible. Henk took pictures of the view over the Square, which is located right next to St. Paul’s Cathedral.
As we made our way towards Town Hall, we saw another major train station, Flinders Street Station, on the corner. We jumped on the 1:00 pm tour, which ended up being just three people besides our guide! First we were led through the halls and were shown paintings/drawings of Melbourne both early and late in its ‘growth.’ Basically, Melbourne went from all grasslands to high-tech city in just 40 years! Pretty much exploded out of nowhere. The streets were designed to be 30 meters wide, quite large for a city of that day. It paved the way for the tram system, put in by Americans, that is still in place today (and used by tourists and locals alike!)
We learned the meaning behind Melbourne’s city crest – which included a kangaroo looking over its shoulder. Our guide explained this was because a kangaroo can only move (hop) forwards, and as the city would move forward, they would still need to look to the past for guidance. The highlight of our tour was a sneak-peek behind the huge organ in the large auditorium/ball-room. It was massive; 8000 different sized pipes in total, and controlled by 5 keyboards. Finally, our tour concluded with a walk out onto the famous balcony where years ago the Beatles waved to their massive crowd of 40 thousand fans.
Right after our tour ended, we made our way to the Koorie Cultural Heritage Centre, where we spent the next couple of hours. There wasn’t too much to see, which was kinda disappointing, but we sat around for a while watching little video clips of modern Aboriginals explaining the ways of their people. Aboriginals are extremely dark-skinned people with prominent features such as a heavy brow-bone and wide noses. They were a mostly nomadic people that had hand-made weapons such as greenstone axes (much like New Zealand Maori!) and boomerangs, and they created unique music with didgeridoos.
Unfortunately, the arrival of European colonialists – much like with the Native Americans – decimated their population. Aboriginals were first massacred by settlers (killing off 10% of their people) and then plagued with smallpox (which killed off more than 80% of their people.) This resulted in the near loss of an entire culture, which probably explains the lack of information at the cultural center. Sad story…
That evening, we returned to the Pancake Parlour for more pancakes and more free internet! On our way out we found a fun-house mirror, which resulted in this awesome picture.
The next morning we started by jumping on the free city tram which passed by some of Melbourne’s interesting artwork, such as ‘cow in a tree!’ We were on our way to Queen Victoria’s Market – which has over 2000 stands of fresh foods, including meats, fish, fruits, vegetables, breads and cheeses! There were also tons of souvenir items and random junk for sale. Henk and I decided to have a fruit and cheese ‘platter’ for dinner, after sampling some deliciously creamy cheese at one of the stands: Tilba Club Cheese! Yum! We bought some mini mandarin oranges, grapes, sweet strawberries, and a quarter wheel of Tilba cheese. Then we made our way to the bread stand to pick up a loaf of sourdough ciabatta. Before we left the market, we tried an Australian banana (dried and covered with honey – we think – and tasted a lot like raisin!).
Henk and I headed back to the hostel to see if our new card had arrived – it hadn’t. We would have to wait until 9 pm that night to see if we could rebook our flight for a day later. We left the hostel again, making a quick stop at the Exhibition Centre. Since nothing was on, we grabbed the tram out to St. Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne. This area is rather famous for its artsy nature, and Henk had said it was a nice area, so I really wanted to see it.
But before we explored the area, we stopped off in a pharmacy to see if we could get something for Henk to put on the huge red bumps (which we assumed were bites because they itched a ton) which he had since our first night in Melbourne. The woman working there took one look at Henk’s bumps and went to grab some tablets for him to take. ‘Yeah, those are bedbug bites,’ she told us, ‘which are really common in the hostels in the cities.’ Ewww! We realized we had been sleeping with bedbugs for the past 7 nights! SO NASTY! The tablet stopped Henk’s itching right away, so our fears were confirmed.
The two of us walked down St. Kilda’s pier, which provided a great view of the city. Next we made our way down the Esplanade to Luna Park, an amusement park where it is free to walk around, but you have to pay cash per ride. We didn’t want to waste any money on rides, but luckily Henk found us a racecar game that had 4 credits left in it! We each got to play twice, while taking pictures of some of the old-school games in-between.
After Luna Park, we walked down Acland Street and got some award-winning ice-cream at ‘Trampoline,’ while looking through the windows at fancy little cakes and tarts. The street was pretty cool – there were colorful mosaic decorations and fascinating shops. Lots of fun walking around that area! But we were still hoping our card would show up, and we were pretty hungry and eager for our fruit and cheese platter dinner so we left soon after.
Since our card had still not arrived, we called AA One World and re-booked to fly a day later than planned. How convenient! Even a night before our flight, with our Around-The-World special ticket, we can still reschedule at no extra cost! Also, we informed our hostel (for those who are curious, it is Nomads All Nations Hotel in Melbourne) about the bedbugs, and made sure we had a new room for the next nights. The manager is still supposed to speak with us – we deserve something for that disgusting ordeal! Our dinner was awesome and we spent the night in a fresh, non-bed-bugged bed!
For Sunday, we had an all-day trip planned to Phillip Island, this tiny island about 140 kilometers away from Melbourne. Henk heard about the island his first time in Oz, and knew it had a ton of wildlife to see, but had never gone himself. We booked onto a tour that would drive us first to a wildlife reserve, serve us a gourmet sandwich lunch, bring us to a farm, and then finally end the day on Phillip Island -- watching the 'penguin parade' and having a pizza dinner. Sounded awesome! And it was. Here's how the day went:
First, we had a 40 minute drive out to the 32,000 acre wildlife reserve. It wasn't too scenic a drive -- well, to be honest, I wouldn't know because I was sleeping/resting on Henk's lap the entire time! Anyways, I woke up just in time to jump out of the van, and have a snake put around my neck! What a wake-up call. :P
We had arrived at Moonlit Sanctuary. One of the first animals we saw was a lace monitor, which looks like a large lizard. The female lays her eggs in termite mounds, and then the termites close up the mounds keeping the egg safe inside and incubated at a constant temperature. The young hatch after 8 to 9 months and the female lace monitor returns to dig them back up. Next we saw some wild birds, including one slightly blue feathered bird that is carnivorous called a Kookaburra and a very cool ‘Egyptian-eye’ bird. We saw a koala again, this one however was asleep. And!! We saw a dingo for the first time – and decided that our first dog will be a cross-breed of a dingo and a husky.
One of the highlights of our animal adventure was feeding emus! Henk fed the emu, and then forced me to feed the emu – which was kinda scary! Look at my reaction when the emu snapped at the food in my hand. Freaky! It looked like a mini dinosaur was about to attack. Next we crossed through a bunch of yellow-beaked geese to get to another famous Australian animal: the wombat!
Wombats looked like giant fluffy guinea pigs, but they are actually marsupials because they have a pouch for their Joey (in Australia, baby animals which don’t have an official name are called Joeys). We learned something awesome about their tailbones. They have a thick bone about half an inch under their fur that they use for protection from predators.
For example, if a dingo was chasing a wombat, the wombat would run into a burrow in the ground with its behind in the air. First it would have the dingo pry at its behind, then, once the dingo realizes there is a thick bone in the way, the wombat would create a little space for the dingo to get its head into the burrow. Once the dingo shoves itself in the burrow, the wombat would push its behind up, crushing the neck of the dingo or at the very least suffocating it. The thick wombat bone also protects the wombat’s Joey in case of a car accident – so always check for a young Joey inside a wombat’s pouch if you hit one on the road!
My personal favorite animal was next! Wallabies! These cute little animals looked kinda like chinchillas with larger legs and ears. They are less than 2 feet tall standing on their hind legs, and many of them had little Joeys still in their pouches! Awesome!! Henk and I got to feed a bunch of them, and I even got to feed one of the Joeys because the mother realized I wasn’t a threat. Their larger relatives, the kangaroos, were a little further into the park. These were a bit bigger than I had imagined them, standing at around 5 feet tall. We fed the kangaroos the rest of our animal feed, and then walked back towards the park entrance to get some lunch ourselves. Just sandwiches, but we were pretty hungry so we ate them up. On our walk back we tried to lure the Tasmanian devil out of its cage, but it wasn’t interested in showing its face. Sad!
Our next stop was on Churchill Island at a working farm from the late 1800’s. We pet some of the animals, and watched a trained dog run around some ducks. I also chased after some sheep, unsuccessfully trying to catch one of them. After the farm, we made a quick stop at a chocolate factory (our driver’s awesome suggestion!) to grab some free samples and buy a chocolate lizard to snack on. Then we finally got to Phillip Island at around 4:30 pm. We had some free time to walk around reading information about seals and penguins, because our ‘Penguin Parade’ show didn’t start until around 6:30 pm. We learned that ‘Korri ‘Yong’ is the Aboriginal tribe Bunurong’s name for Phillip Island, a name which means ‘Sandy Place.’ As we were leaving the information center, we were shocked by the number of seagulls all over the place!
The ‘Penguin Parade’ is a daily event during which the tiniest species of penguins (called the ‘Little Penguins’) standing at just over a foot tall each, come ashore after a multi-day fishing trip. They waddle in groups across the beach over the course of an hour, moving quickly towards their burrows which can sometimes be up to over a mile away. Henk and I found a good spot to sit, waiting for the penguins to come. They arrived a bit later than expected, around 6:45 pm (the penguins come in depending on the time the sun sets) and started to move clumsily towards us. We saw a group of about ten penguins stumbling slowly but carefully over a bunch of rocks, rather than taking the smooth path on either side of the rocks. Silly little buggers!
After seeing a few dozen of them crossing, we headed back to the walkway which ran alongside the area the penguins were waddling. Here we got to see a bunch of them up close! We couldn’t take any pictures however, since flash photography could disorient the penguins. Penguins are quite funny when they are disoriented however. We learned from our guide earlier in the day, that these little penguins ‘fight’ with each other for the best burrow spots – and they ‘beat’ each other up: one penguin will grab another penguin under its little flipper arm and run in circles to ‘spin’ the other penguin. Then, the attacker penguin would let go, leaving the other penguin confused and disoriented, walking in circles dizzily. Such a cute way of fighting!
As we were leaving the parade, we saw a sign to check under the car for little stray penguins. Some of the penguins have a habit of crossing over the car-park on the way back to their burrows… and we don’t want to squash them under the tires! Once we had seen the penguins, we stopped off for our pizza dinner. Yum! We chatted with a few fellow passengers while we filled our stomachs with free pizza, and then got back on the bus for the 2 hour drive back to Melbourne. A long day, but well worth it!
On Monday, Henk and I planned to take a tour of Town Hall, hopefully learning a bit more about the founding of Australia – which in perspective was pretty recent. But first we walked through some of the interesting shopping streets and stopped off in Federation Square to admire some of the cool architecture. We saw that there was an event going on: the AFL’s (Australian Football League) finals are coming weekend, so several companies were giving away freebies; others had us guessing how many footballs were stashed in a car to win that car/ tickets to the AFL finals. We even got some free Vegemite (bitter tasting jelly), which tasted horrible. Henk took pictures of the view over the Square, which is located right next to St. Paul’s Cathedral.
As we made our way towards Town Hall, we saw another major train station, Flinders Street Station, on the corner. We jumped on the 1:00 pm tour, which ended up being just three people besides our guide! First we were led through the halls and were shown paintings/drawings of Melbourne both early and late in its ‘growth.’ Basically, Melbourne went from all grasslands to high-tech city in just 40 years! Pretty much exploded out of nowhere. The streets were designed to be 30 meters wide, quite large for a city of that day. It paved the way for the tram system, put in by Americans, that is still in place today (and used by tourists and locals alike!)
We learned the meaning behind Melbourne’s city crest – which included a kangaroo looking over its shoulder. Our guide explained this was because a kangaroo can only move (hop) forwards, and as the city would move forward, they would still need to look to the past for guidance. The highlight of our tour was a sneak-peek behind the huge organ in the large auditorium/ball-room. It was massive; 8000 different sized pipes in total, and controlled by 5 keyboards. Finally, our tour concluded with a walk out onto the famous balcony where years ago the Beatles waved to their massive crowd of 40 thousand fans.
Right after our tour ended, we made our way to the Koorie Cultural Heritage Centre, where we spent the next couple of hours. There wasn’t too much to see, which was kinda disappointing, but we sat around for a while watching little video clips of modern Aboriginals explaining the ways of their people. Aboriginals are extremely dark-skinned people with prominent features such as a heavy brow-bone and wide noses. They were a mostly nomadic people that had hand-made weapons such as greenstone axes (much like New Zealand Maori!) and boomerangs, and they created unique music with didgeridoos.
Unfortunately, the arrival of European colonialists – much like with the Native Americans – decimated their population. Aboriginals were first massacred by settlers (killing off 10% of their people) and then plagued with smallpox (which killed off more than 80% of their people.) This resulted in the near loss of an entire culture, which probably explains the lack of information at the cultural center. Sad story…
That evening, we returned to the Pancake Parlour for more pancakes and more free internet! On our way out we found a fun-house mirror, which resulted in this awesome picture.
The next morning we started by jumping on the free city tram which passed by some of Melbourne’s interesting artwork, such as ‘cow in a tree!’ We were on our way to Queen Victoria’s Market – which has over 2000 stands of fresh foods, including meats, fish, fruits, vegetables, breads and cheeses! There were also tons of souvenir items and random junk for sale. Henk and I decided to have a fruit and cheese ‘platter’ for dinner, after sampling some deliciously creamy cheese at one of the stands: Tilba Club Cheese! Yum! We bought some mini mandarin oranges, grapes, sweet strawberries, and a quarter wheel of Tilba cheese. Then we made our way to the bread stand to pick up a loaf of sourdough ciabatta. Before we left the market, we tried an Australian banana (dried and covered with honey – we think – and tasted a lot like raisin!).
Henk and I headed back to the hostel to see if our new card had arrived – it hadn’t. We would have to wait until 9 pm that night to see if we could rebook our flight for a day later. We left the hostel again, making a quick stop at the Exhibition Centre. Since nothing was on, we grabbed the tram out to St. Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne. This area is rather famous for its artsy nature, and Henk had said it was a nice area, so I really wanted to see it.
But before we explored the area, we stopped off in a pharmacy to see if we could get something for Henk to put on the huge red bumps (which we assumed were bites because they itched a ton) which he had since our first night in Melbourne. The woman working there took one look at Henk’s bumps and went to grab some tablets for him to take. ‘Yeah, those are bedbug bites,’ she told us, ‘which are really common in the hostels in the cities.’ Ewww! We realized we had been sleeping with bedbugs for the past 7 nights! SO NASTY! The tablet stopped Henk’s itching right away, so our fears were confirmed.
The two of us walked down St. Kilda’s pier, which provided a great view of the city. Next we made our way down the Esplanade to Luna Park, an amusement park where it is free to walk around, but you have to pay cash per ride. We didn’t want to waste any money on rides, but luckily Henk found us a racecar game that had 4 credits left in it! We each got to play twice, while taking pictures of some of the old-school games in-between.
After Luna Park, we walked down Acland Street and got some award-winning ice-cream at ‘Trampoline,’ while looking through the windows at fancy little cakes and tarts. The street was pretty cool – there were colorful mosaic decorations and fascinating shops. Lots of fun walking around that area! But we were still hoping our card would show up, and we were pretty hungry and eager for our fruit and cheese platter dinner so we left soon after.
Since our card had still not arrived, we called AA One World and re-booked to fly a day later than planned. How convenient! Even a night before our flight, with our Around-The-World special ticket, we can still reschedule at no extra cost! Also, we informed our hostel (for those who are curious, it is Nomads All Nations Hotel in Melbourne) about the bedbugs, and made sure we had a new room for the next nights. The manager is still supposed to speak with us – we deserve something for that disgusting ordeal! Our dinner was awesome and we spent the night in a fresh, non-bed-bugged bed!
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