Visiting Victoria 2: Penguin Prom
(Continuing my Visiting Victoria series)
Kangaroos, koalas, platypii… Australia is full of iconic and unique animals, and the list goes on: emus, wombats, numbats, penguins…
Wait penguins? Yes penguins. Marsupial penguins. No just kidding that was a filthy lie. About them being marsupials anyway, but there really are penguins.
The penguins are one of the top sights to see in Victoria. You can go with a tour group that will leave from and return to Melbourne. Because the penguins come out after sunset and the “penguin parade” location is two hours from Melbourne, expect to make a late night of it.
As a visiting tourist you’d probably most likely take an organized tour, but as I drove there (with my parents who were visiting), that’s what I can and will tell you about!
Eastward, around Westport!
One first heads east out of Melbourne along the “M1 Princes highway,” the major east-west highway through the length of Victoria. For the first 45 minutes one is driving through outer suburbs of Melbourne and then suddenly one is out in the broad open countryside of “West Gippsland” (Gippsland being essentially the entire area of Victoria east of Melbourne). Shortly after leaving the Melbourne suburbs one gets off the M1 and heads south on smaller roads through an area of reclaimed land from the former “Great Swamp” (now farmland) and small farming towns with names like Koo Wee Rup.
One skirts around another large bay that’s just east of the bay Melbourne is on. This more eastern bay is naturally called “Western Port Bay.” This is apparently because the early European explorers were coming down the coast from the east and this was the westernmost bay they found before turning around, not discovering at that time the much bigger bay just a little further west. Oops!
Western Port Bay is like a doughnut of water with a big island in the middle (French Island — apparently there were French explorers lurking about at the time, imagine if Australia had become French! Baguettes with vegemite?!). I have not been to the island in the middle but it’s definitely on my list.
There’s plenty of airbnbs (& presumably “normal” b&bs) and hotels on Phillip Island itself, but we got a place in a small town called Coronet Bay just outside Philip Island on the shore of the bay. I forget why, it was probably cheaper, or perhaps we were booking last minute again and everything on the island was booked up. Anyway, no complaints, as it was close enough for convenience. Coronet Bay appeared to be a sleepy resort town of a few blocks of nothing but holiday rentals. It’s just on the edge of Western Port Bay, but don’t get so excited that beaches and watersports might abound — nearly a third of the bay is mudflats at low tide and there aren’t sandy beaches.
But First, Let’s Go to Prom
If you’re going on a package tour you’ll probably go straight to the penguins, but if you happen to be driving like we did, let me recommend you do what we did, and go to Prom!
And by Prom I mean “Wilson’s Promontory,” generally known as “the Prom” — the southernmost point on the Australian mainland. It’s twice as far from Melbourne as Philip Island / Coronet Bay (ie two more hours drive) but see, if you are driving, you can either drive four hours round trip to see the penguins all in one night, or see something else while you’re up there. We drove to the Prom the next day and did the penguins that evening, but you could easily in one day drive to the Prom, do the penguins that evening, and drive home the next day.
Waking up in Coronet Bay we found in front of nearly every other house families similarly putting all their stuff in their cars — is every house in Coronet Bay an airbnb?
The drive from Coronet Bay to the Prom is very picturesque, with rolling green hills, small seaside towns, and occasional glimpses of beaches with crashing waves (there’s mainly a continuous sand dune obscuring the view of the sea). The area looked a lot like the scenic Point Reyes area of northern California. Once we got onto the peninsula of The Prom the farmland around us gave way to thick forest of low shrubby trees. The narrow peninsula is surprisingly hilly, with many views of the sea as you wend along the road.
Presently we arrived at Tidal River, the one town on the Prom, and I have no doubt that every house here is a vacation rental, other than perhaps a few for rangers and staff. This is as far south as you can drive. To get to the actual southernmost point is a multi day hike from here — which I’d absolutely love to do but every time I’ve looked the campgrounds on the way have been entirely booked up.
We went on a nice hike loop for an hour or so that started and finished at the visitor center, which went around a nearby hill, with beautiful views of the sea and surrounding forest. We talked to a couple we encountered who mentioned they had met at the Prom thirty years go, and I pointed out excitedly “So.. you met at prom!!” but this bit of Americanism may have been lost on them.
The visitor center has a busy cafeteria and we got food there. While sitting outside, my dad was just holding up his fish sandwich to take a bite when a kookaburra swooped by, deftly grabbing the entire thing and flying off with it. We sat a moment in shock, then mom said “here have some of my burger” and proffered it to him … only to have another kookaburra swoop in from the other side and make off with a significant chunk of it! We hence forth carefully guarded our food.
And then we headed to “Squeaky Beach” just beside Tidal River. The fine white sand of this beach indeed squeaks a bit as your feet sink into it. It was a nice sunny day and the ocean was beautiful and blue, a great day to be on the beach!
From there we returned via the same picturesque seaside road up the coast to Philip Island, once again stopping here or there to look at the views. Philip Island is connected to the mainland by a short (640m) bridge and seems to have a particularly dense concentration of little towns on it. We proceeded to one of the larger towns, Cowes (pronounced “cows”) for dinner. There were many restaurants here, being as the after-dark penguins are by far the area’s main draw I suppose they have a disproportionate demand for dinner We ate at a nice Italian place by the shore in which no kookaburras attempted to steal our food.
Okay, Back to Penguins!
And then it was penguin time!! Fortunately my dad had ordered tickets online a few days before. If you plan to come see the penguins, it appears you need to buy your tickets a few days beforehand (I’m not sure, package tours might arrange that for you). Around 7:30ish we were part of the long parade of cars entering the penguin viewing park on the west end of the island. Once we entered the facility, one travels down raised boardwalks to the beach. Before we even got there we saw an echidna (the Australian giant hedgehog)(my parents’ first) in the grass off the boardwalk, and a swamp wallaby. Later we also saw a possum. It had not occurred to me that we could knock so many things off my parents to-see list here at once!
At the “penguin parade” center they had a big visitor center and raised boardwalks leading to stadium style concrete bleachers on the beach facing the waves. A ranger addressed the gathering seated crowd with the rules (no photos after dark!) and general explanations, and also it turned out she was aboriginal, though in the fading light from where we were seated we could barely make out any distinguishing features of her. Anyway, it turns out the little penguin, the world’s smallest penguin species, always returns to the same beaches where they have their nests. They may come back nightly, or go out for nearly a month and travel a hundred or more miles before returning to exactly the right spot. They used to nest all over not only Phillip Island but much of the south coast of Australia, but many of their nesting sites have been completely disrupted by human development (I hear you can even find sad little penguins trying to nest right in the downtown waterfront of Melbourne).
The first penguin emerged from the dark waves around 8:50, surfing in and then hesitantly waddling ashore, waiting for friends to join it, and eventually groups of them would dash-waddle across the open beach like it’s penguin D-Day, headed for the low shrubbery on either side of the bleachers. Only a handful came up for the first fifteen minutes, after which point the majority of viewers started to get up and leave (people drive four hours to watch penguins for fifteen minutes!). We stayed longer and more penguins began to emerge but not quite the overwhelming onslaught we had expected (promotional material proclaims 30,000 penguins come out a night! … maybe on the whole coast?), though people watching off to the side of the bleachers told us they were coming out in groups of 20 way off in the dark (the bleachers of course had floodlights illuminating the beach in front). When we finally left the bleachers we found that one could see lots of little penguins scurrying up the paths among the grassy dunes from the boardwalk. Couldn’t get a picture since it was verboten but the penguins were very cute. I don’t like to use other people’s photos so you’re just going to have to google “Little Penguin” to see one (but here, let me google that for you). This is the only photo I was able to get:
Stayed in an airbnb on the island that night. The next day we visited the picturesque western end of Philip Island, a place called “The Nobbies” where the waves crash against rocky outcrops just off the island at the entrance to Westernport Bay.
The whole Western quarter of the island was once a commercial housing development called “Summerlands,” but conservation groups apparently bought out the development company as well as every property that had already been sold, and demolished any buildings which had already been built, to restore the area to natural habitat. Nice to see a completely successful conservation effort.
And then we drove the two hours back to Melbourne. To catch a ferry to Tasmania, as it happens, but this series here on Medium will put Tassie aside for awhile and visit the Grampian mountains next!