Phillip Island

Over spring break I went to Phillip and Churchill Island. I woke up super early and a bus came and picked me up from the RMIT Village and took me to the tour company's main office. I loaded up with a relatively small group of people (10?) and headed out to Phillip Island. After about a 2 hours ride, the first stop on our journey was the Moonlit Wildlife Sanctuary. They had a ton of iconic Australian wildlife. It was like a lot of the small touristy wildlife places I have been to so far.
1. Wombat!2. Kangaroo and joey Then we left and and headed to a beach a few minutes away:
Afterwards, we went to Churchill Island which is a really old home stead. The island was relatively small and is a working farm. They had Scottish cows which looked like regular cows, but they had really long hair. I got to see a guy make a horseshoe, shear a sheep, and crack a whip and a woman did a cattle dog demonstration.
Then we went to the Koala Conservation Center on Phillip Island. They had a relatively large population of koalas and they would export koalas to the nearby French Island when there were too many for the Phillip Island park to sustain. They had plastic tubes around tree trunks and tree branches to keep koalas from eating there. Koalas are known for killing trees so in order to keep the area healthy they blocked parts of trees.Next, We went to Seal Rocks and the Nobbies. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The Nobbies were a few rocks sticking out of the ocean-nothing special, and Seal Rocks were really too far away from the shore to see the seals. They had binoculars that you could look through, but they were $2 and I didn't have any coins. Something I thought about when I saw Seal Rocks-GREAT WHITES! You know they are there, lurking under the water, waiting for a poor unsuspecting seal to go for a dip! No seals were eaten though...that would have been cool to see. lol.The whole point of this trip was the Phillip Island Penguin Parade. Hundreds of fairy penguins cross the beach every night at dusk heading back to their burrows and bringing food back to their chicks. They wouldn't let us take pictures of them though. Apparently crossing the beach is super scary to them already and they don't want the flash of cameras to scare them further. They were so stinkin cute though!! They would all gather at the beach's edge in huge groups and wait for one brave guy to lead the way onto the beach. One would break off from the group and waddle a ways up the beach, and then turn back to see if anyone was following him. If so, he would continue...but if not, he would quickly turn around and run back to the group. You could see and hear the chicks calling to their parents so the parents could find their way back to their burrows. It was really amazing because they were able to recognize their young by call, and as a human you can still kind of hear the differences in the chick's voices.

After the penguin parade our tour guide took us back to the city and dropped us off at home! It was a really great day. The penguin parade was 100 times better than whale watching. For some reason with whale watching I was expecting to see something really cool-like them breach or slap the water with a tail of their fins, but it never happened. The fairy penguins were just so cute though!