Sydney to Melbourne (4)

Sunday 07/01

Isabelle wakes up before 6am to go on the beach to see the sunrise on the sea.

She wakes us up around 7:30am. Breakfast is ready. Thanks!

There are a lot of mosquitoes and flies. We unfold the tents, pack everything and do the dishes.

We leave before 9am. The weather is cloudy and much colder than yesterday (thanks goodness!). We go today to Wilsons Promontory NP before going to spend the night in Cowes, on Philip Island.

We arrive at Wilsons Prom at 11:30am. Wilsons Prom is the southernmost point of Australia.

We first do the ‘wildlife walk’ (3 km, 45′). There are unfortunately many flies. We see a few kangaroos; it’s always nice to see them bouncing.

We then go (by camper) to the start of the other walk that we want to do: a walk going on the top of a peninsula. We first eat a quick salad / sandwich (this small kitchen is quite handy in fact). The (return) walk is 4 km long; it takes less than 1h30. From the top, we have a splendid view on both sides. The colour of the water is superb. Great!

I unfortunately realize that I lost my glasses (I left them in our camping spot this morning). Fortunately I have a spare pair (but I look like Harry Potter according to the kids). It’s already the second pair that I lose during this trip, the first one was my solar one which I forgot in the rental car going to the airport in… Brussels the first day of our trip! We haven’t lost much so far (and got stolen nothing except my AirPods in the hotel in HK): Jules his bed sheet and his cap, Ludivine 2 caps and a swimming suit.

We leave around 3pm. We want to arrive at our camping site around 5pm (Isabelle booked a spot in a camping for tonight).

We arrive at our camping park at 5:30pm. Just the time to set up the “outside” tent (for the parents), to take a hot shower and to put our food in the fridge of the kitchen and we go again. We want to attend the penguins parade tonight (the reason we came to Philip Island) and before that we want to go to a viewpoint to see if we can see seals (the lookout is located at the end of the island). We see a lot of old cars (ancestors) on Philip Island.

We unfortunately don’t see any seal but the walk is nice. The waves are quite big.

We see many small kangaroos from the car; this kind is not very pretty.

We arrive around 7:45pm at the penguin parade. As per the countdown, we have to wait 1h23 to see the penguins exiting the ocean.

I buy a pack of French fries that we share while waiting.

It’s cold tonight. We have put warm clothes and our windproof rain jackets but we’re still not warm.

The first ones come out of the water exactly “on schedule”. This kind of penguins is the smallest of the 12 different kinds that exist in the world. They return ashore after a day’s fishing in the ocean, where they eat half their body weight of food that they then regurgitate to feed their chicks.

It’s nice to see these squads of 5 to 30 penguins going out of the water and then coming towards us (sitting in viewing stands, with 2,000 other people), on the beach. At one point, there was even a kangaroo who came on the beach; it scared a bit the penguins. Witnessing the procession of these little penguins waddling across the beach right after sunset is a nice experience.

We also walk on elevated wooden boardwalks from where we can see the penguins going to their sand dune burrows.

It was 10:30pm when we came back to our camping. Everything was dark; everybody was sleeping. We quickly set up the roof tent and then eat tomato and pumpkin soups. We’ve had the tomato soup since Japan… We added (cold) rice in the soup. Not good; and it didn’t even warm us up…

It’s only 17C tonight.

We are in bed by 11:30pm.

 

Monday 08/01 (1/2)

I wake up a bit after 7am. The birds are very noisy.

I go to buy a nice breakfast (to compensate the meals of yesterday…) at Woolies and in a bakery. The others start packing. As often, we need to leave by 10am (check-out time).

I prepare the breakfast. When seeing the nice table that we set near the (outside) common kitchen, with a lot of fruits including raspberries, with chocolate breads, with nice bridge rolls, one of the resident camper says “What a decadent breakfast in a camping”! To make it “worst”, I replied that we were celebrating our last night of camping before a week in Melbourne…

We leave around 10:30am.

We first go to a lookout, Pyramid Rock; the weather is not great.

We drive the remaining 120 km to Melbourne. In total, we will have done roughly 1,650 km between Sydney and Melbourne (the map indicates approximately 1,000 km).

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