Phillip Island

Phillip Island

We made our way further up the coast towards Melbourne, and stopped off for a couple of days at Phillip Island. The road towards Phillip Island became less like the tropical style beaches of south NSW and more like Land's End, as vast cliffs and large waves battered the coastline. 

Eagle's Nest Lookout/surf spot along Victoria's south coast.

When we arrived at Phillip Island, we booked into a campsite at San Remo, the town that connects the island to the mainland, and drove over to view the main attraction of Phillip Island - the penguins!!

Phillip Island is home to 32,000 Little Penguins, and this has caused the Western end of the Island to become completely closed to the public after dusk as they come into shore to nest. However, they have opened up a (surprisingly large and heavily commercialised) attraction called the Penguin Parade, where you pay $20 to sit by Summerland Beach and watch the penguins come into shore. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take photos at the event, they claim to prevent distress to the penguins (despite shining enormous spotlights onto the beach so we can see them), but actually so they can sell you photos. This was a little disappointing, but still, it was awesome to see hundreds of penguins getting swept onto the beach in very high tides and big winter surf, before waddling up the beach to the burrows. You can follow them up the burrows on raised platforms and watch them make their way right up to near the car park!

The beach. Notice the cones signalling the designated seating area. This is where the penguins were getting swept into shore.

I snuck a couple of photos (without flash) of the penguins making their way up the shore.

Phillip Island is also known for excellent surf, which wraps from the south around the western end (Seal Rocks, which hosts the largest fur seal colony in Australia, around 16,000 seals that we couldn't see because of the weather and swell on the west side) and comes in around to the North, where the winds are offshore and the island channels it into clean, long, quality surf.

I went for a couple of surfs here, at Cat Bay and at Flynn's Beach. The area is extremely sharky (seals, go figure), so I was a bit nervous, but ultimately had a great time!

There was also a famous F1 circuit on Phillip Island that we saw some people in Lamborghini's blasting around on.