Living it Up in Victoria

My last night in (well, near) Melbourne. Having exhausted all other possible activities, I took a moment to rock out in the shower

and test the bed springs . . .

My neighbors loved me for it, I'm sure.

Phillip Island, Victoria

Seagulls greet me at the Nobbies. “Nibble Nobby’s Nuts”. They’re scavenging – they march expectantly over to the car with a demanding demeanor. They’d surely take nuts if I had them. Hold on – what did I just say?

I’m here to see the seals, supposedly the largest group of fur seals in all of A’stralia. Which means also, of course, the most, and largest, Great Whites.
Phillip Island reminds me of New England isles like Star(r), but maybe that’s just because the sea just blew in and it’s cold and drizzly and windy as George Bush on a bender. But, in all fairness, it’s similar in other aspects too: near-deserted roads that stretch off straight

delivering you now and again to the entrance points to very cold-looking beaches.


I’ve just come from seeing the koalas.

Beautiful little critters.

I was told by a very friendly employee of the Reserve (everyone on this island is nice, from the woman who told me I’ve seen more of Australia than she has to the guy at the bike shop who gave me an unspoken 50% discount on my hoodie) that it’s merely a myth that koalas are drunk / high all the time from their constant consumption of Eucalyptus leaves, yet true that they have been known to sleep up to 20 hours a day. Especially the teenagers.


Well, following in the grand Australian tradition of harmless falsity, there were no frickin’ seals at Seal Rock. There were, however, plenty of seagulls.

It’s their nesting season right now, and the grassy knolls overlooking the Nobbies

were alive with gulls – parents and babies. And the babies were pretty damn cute, all fuzzy and ruffled.

I, of course, got dive-bombed by many a protective parent

but had the good fortune not to get swerved on and not to get blown straight off the bluffs into the turbulent waters below.


While some might vehemently disagree, I am of the mind that seagulls are very interesting birds (I like pigeons too) and thus I snapped about 100 photos of them, mainly of the little buggers getting blown in the “breeze”.


I stopped into Cowes (a nice little town with cypress-lined main streets)

to have a bite to eat and much-needed Cappuccino (I’m wearing more clothes than I have to date in Australia) and now I’m off to see the Penguin Parade. The sun is coming back out just in time to set over the ocean,

and it looks to be a beautiful night ahead.


A couple of interesting facts. Little Penguins (what a creative name!) weigh about 1 kg, stand about a foot tall, and are the smallest of the 17 species of penguin that are known.

Their cohabitants Shore Plovers, a.k.a. Mutton Birds, share the dunes with them.

These amazing little birds migrate over 14,000 kilometers from the Alaskan Aleutians to Phillip Island, a 6-8 week flight! Then they vanish, for what is called their “honeymoon period”. It is thought that they spend this time, about a month or so, to fly to and from Antarctica. Amazing. I wish I could fly.

But then, come to think if it, so do the Penguins. They emerge, nightly at around dusk, from the ocean and hobble up the beach, wary of predators, to find their hole-in-the-ground homes. Some are greeted by the calls of mates left behind, making for quite a racket when the intrepid little guys arrive.

The first group arrive as if from out of thin water. One second the beach was clear, and the next there were about 30 penguins standing there, getting sloshed around in the surf.

“Little, indeed,” someone behind me remarked. How very astute.
Slowly, ever so tentatively, they made their way up the beach. A few steps onto the sand, about ten of them turned and high-tailed it back into the water. As the first group passed the viewing platform, the stragglers huddled in the surf zone, waiting for more reinforcements to emerge from the sea.

After about twenty minutes, with no other groups arriving, these dozen or so started, stealthily, to creep up the beach. The play-by-play provided by the people sitting next to me was priceless.

“There they are.”
“Oh, some are headed back.”
“Oh wait – they’re moving.”
“Here they come – they’re headed up the beach now.”
“See – look at them. Here they come.”

It was like listening to 3 year olds watching TV.


Barred from taking any photos, as flashes spook the little guys, I just sat and observed. I truly could watch penguins all night, waddling along like geriatric disco dancers, with their wide-set legs and arms akimbo like they’re gearing up and readying their little wings to take flight. They’re only about as big as large gulls, but they exude such a large amount of personality.

I picked a group to stick with, and followed them up the boardwalk toward their burrows. They stopped about halfway up to preen, feeling safe now, off the beach and out of plain sight of predators. They glistened in the pale cast of the viewing lights, their backs dark blue and their stomachs a whitish/silverfish sheen. And then they waddled on. Their movement was stop and go, stop and go. One stopped for a split second to splatter the grass with a little bit of white liquid shit. And then ventured forth into the night.

The sounds coming from the dunes were amazing. It was, in the truest sense of the word, cacophonic, like a chorus of opera singers with high-pitched snores, all dreaming of chugging through their nightly arias. Quite amazing. Quite satisfied, I hopped in my car (making sure before starting it up to check underneath for any stray penguins)

and headed back to Melbourne for to catch a morning flight.


If you would like to learn more about the Little Penguins, visit http://www.penguinfoundation.org



Other Fotos from Phillip Island:

Highland Cattle:

A baby:

A demonstration of how that baby was made:

Moto dude practicing: (Phillip Island hosts a giant Moto race each year)

The Victoria Bitter Gull, a sad sight:

A sign from God:

Great Ocean Road, day 2

I woke up early and headed out into a windy morning back toward Melbourne. It was a stupendous morning and felt glad to be up and about before the hordes.


Just past Sausage Gully (a beautiful Eucalyptus glade) I saw my first wild koala. As I approached, I couldn't quite make out just what I was seeing. A rabbit? A cat? Oh, I get it - a koala "bear". As I neared, the little fella started climbing a signpost, and scurried off as I passed.

I stopped once more in Lorne, for breakfast, by far the worst I've had in sometime. My "Eggs Florentine" arrived as fried eggs on a bed of spinach that could be better described as sopping wet than wilted, all on two pieces of under-toasted and cold white bread, garnished with unmelted grated cheese. And my cappuccino tasted like dirty mop water. Blech!

I stopped again an hour later down the road to have a look at Bell's beach, famous in my mind for its iconic inclusion as a crucial story device and setting in the film Point Break. As I drove down the crest toward the beach, flashing back to the film

I half expected to see Johnny Utah come speeding by with a forced look of determination on his unemoting visage.

I parked and, braving the wind, walked down to the overlook. I must say, it was a bit anticlimactic.

Still gorgeous, no doubt, but a bit of a letdown nonetheless. No 50 year storm. No cops swarming the sand. No Patrick Swayze out in the surf. Just a cliff and a big beach onto which were breaking little ripples that, I suppose, through a good stretch of the imagination, could be called waves (if only for their physical properties regardless of size). I'm sorry - am I being overdramatic? The warning signs were pretty amusing:

Let's see that last one again, shall we?


There were only two people on the beach: a father and his frolicking, wet-suited son. I was about to turn tail and head back up to the car when a thickly Southern California-joc/surfer-accented voice bellowed in my brain: "You gotta go down!!!"

Not one to disregard the words of God, or, in this case, Neo, I trotted down the steps to the beach. As was to be expected, the scene on the beach was not that much different than it had appeared from above.

I took a couple of photos, including this one, of the biggest wave the sea could seem to muster

and, flaunting my fanny (um, yeah I said fanny*) in the face of fate, returned to my car and pointed the bonnet and windscreen in the direction of Melbourne, fairly content, if only a wee bit disillusioned. "Ma Bell, I got the ill communication".

*Anyone who can tell me what the word "fanny" means in Aussie-speak gets a surprise.

Great Ocean Road

I rented a car and left Melbourne, headed down the Great Ocean Road for the 12 Apostles, a series of rock formations (or examples of negative space left in the wake of erosion?) jutting out of the sea just off the coast.
Initially, I was a tad dismayed to be given a Toyota Avalon instead of the fiery Falcone I was expecting, but I found myself unable to complain when I discovered the tape player (a hold-over from the Communist regime that occupied Australia between the years of 1979 to1989), which enabled me to rock myPod.

Off I sped. As wise women (and the few men who are wise as well) say, it is the journey rather than the destination that brings us to nirvana. While this wisdom might not ring true on a long flight, it certainly played out today.

I was smart enough to consult the map before pulling out into the odd (yet grid-like) traffic patterns of Melbourne, and lucky enough to find the highway by following the directions scrawled on my palm.

I drove through Geelong and on to Torquay, the “Gateway to the Great Ocean Road”. Before too long the road opened up to the coast, and I found myself driving alongside the crystal clear cerulean ocean, which, in the manner of all things Australian to tell little white lies, exuded a deceptive air of warmth strictly through its coloring.

I drove through Eucalyptus groves and over and around cliffs, in a landscape very much reminiscent of California’s Pacific Coast Highway (or Highway One, or Cabrillo Highway, whatever you want to call it) to the south and the north of San Francisco.

My trusty chariot kept the pace

(Just kidding – this is the real deal)

while I did everything in my might to keep the blessed thing on the road.

I came to a small town called Lorne and, running on little more than a blueberry muffin from Hudson’s Coffee ( the Melbourne equivalent of Starbucks – even though they have Starbucks here – for their numerous locations and homogenous atmosphere and standard fare) I stopped for lunch. Reading the paper, I was delighted to find that Bush is falling once more under (and into, let’s hope) fire. Anyway, I had lunch.

Moving on, I tripped along the same coastal road toward Apollo Bay, stopping here and again for the obligatory photo opps. Apollo Bay, I'd read, had been dubbed “Paradise” by none other than Rudyard Kipling. I’ll admit, the town is quite nice, although I’m sure a good deal of development has occurred between his time and ours. But it is nice. Particularly for the fact that its main street bridges the gap between green rolling hills and blue rolling waves.

The two come together in a melee of fish and chip shacks, ice cream parlors, and surf shops. I grabbed one more cup of coffee for the road, and drove on up the hill out of town.

Now, regardless of what the guidebooks say (they’re somewhat partial to oceanfront spread while I, a child of the Green Mountains, find hillside expanses equally breath-taking and mouth-watering) the Great Ocean Road beyond Apollo Bay is on par with the most scenic of drives I have ever made. The road curves up the mountain, inland, passing through green dells and pastures full of feeding cattle, horses, and sheep.

At times the scenery brought to my mind memories of Pescadero; at others it forced recollection of West Marin, in the areas around Bodega, Bolinas, and basically anywhere between the 101 and the Ocean.




A prisoner of two disparate desires: that to, a.) stop and document photographically anything deemed even the slightest bit worthy by its utter beauty (pun very much intended)

and, b.) my need to keep up the pace in order to reach the 12 Apostles by sundown (which falls early here in the Spring in the Southern Hemisphere, and fell tonight at exactly 6:19 pm), I found myself snapping photos as often as I found fit to stop,

and also running roadside to shave seconds off of my trip time.

I found several towns I would happily call home for the rest of my life, or at least for the foreseeable future, among them Glenaire and the two hamlets beyond to the West.

Just past Lavers Hill (the birthplace of Rod?) I came upon a crew crusading to cross a crux of cows across the road.

At this point I was humming along and had stopped so many times prior that I fought the urge to turn around and take a better look for about 10 kilometers. Finally, unable to resist any more, I pulled a U-ey (highly frowned upon in most of the country). Absentmindedly, I pulled into the right-hand lane, before righting (well, lefting, actually) myself, unintentionally flaunting the frequent signage warning the tourist-rife crowd of passersby to lean to the lefty while driving.

This error was quickly righted by any and all of the life-loving cells in my body.
What, exactly, made me turn around? Well, as is often the case, the perfection of the picture captured by my eyes and strored in my brain . . . stuck, and wouldn’t leave me be. As anyone who knows me can attest, I feel the need to document things, sometimes so much so that it grows annoying for those in my company.
But imagine, if you will: A dual-file line of cattle, side by side, a good 200 yards long, easily 500 hundred strong, trampling over green pastures toward the barn, the background a series of rolling hummocks falling off to the surreally blue sea. And imagine: a crook in the line, the cows one by one cornering from one line to the next. Oi vey, the framing would have been perfect. In addition, it dawned on me, through reverse reasoning, that while I could easily Google-image or elsewise draw up images of the 12 Apostles many times over superior to any I might be hoping to take, this shot was mine, and was surely not to be so easily found again. But alas, when I returned, the magnificence of the scene was much diminished, the degree of the able was greatly flattened, and most of the cows were out of sight just over the crest of the hill. So I shot what I could and headed back in the direction of Port Campbell.

Enough about those silly cows and the photo that got away.

Before long I was parking at the Visitor’s Centre for the Apostles, walking down with all of the other yahoos / lookie-loos to shoot some photos, and to ooh and aah before returning to the relative comfort of my vehicle.
The sun was just about to set behind a large cloud that stretched, in every shade of greyscale, to a point just above the horizon. So I hot-footed it.

The Apostles (I failed to make a head count, so I can’t in good conscience verify that there were, indeed, twelve – although since I’ve heard that the numerical label, like many Australian names, is a misnomer) were, indeed, striking, to say the least.

I played around with photographing their splendor from a number of different
snapping off as many photos as possible before the false sunset.

Well, the sun set, if only in a very phony fashion, and I headed back to my ride, pitying as I went the people I passed who were just on their way out to the lookout.

I stopped by the Gibson steps, stepping down to the beach, where I played around with some long-exposure photos. With the results coming up marginal at best,

I tromped back up the cliffs and headed back to Apollo Bay, taken by music and that mood (all too infrequent, these days) which strikes and makes me want to be the best damn driver I can be, even if and when imbibing a beer.

So here I sit, gnocchi with pine nuts, pesto, spinach, kalamatas and ricotta banging on the doors of my intestine like six siblings fighting for the bathroom before school, while Shiraz graces my gullet, happy to have writ, and even happier to have taken a drive today. Ta!