Showing posts with label botanical gardens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label botanical gardens. Show all posts

Thursday, 3 August 2023

A week in and around Melbourne and The Great Ocean Road 2023

We're spending the UK summer in Australia during their winter. We've travelled light each with 15kg of checked luggage and 7kg of hand luggage. We've packed for both winter and for summer.

I visited Melbourne with child 3 in 2019, I wanted to show Peter some of the things I'd enjoyed 4 years earlier, but also wanted to have new experiences to share together. We packed a lot in, in the week and hardly stopped.


We started our trip in Melbourne where we had the first 3 days in the city to adjust to the 9 hour time difference, eating and sleeping when we felt like it. We explored Melbourne and walked around 25 miles over two days, visiting Fitzroy Gardens, the MCG and The Botanical Gardens for the light show on our last evening.

The Yarra at night





Why they brought James Cooks parents cottage over from Yorkshire, brick by brick, I'll never know. he never lived in it.

Fairy Tree

The docklands at 6am

We explored the street art graffiti in AC/DC lane and surrounding area, visited the Opal museum and enjoyed a variety of meals with plenty of coffee shops.



We hired a car and drove to Philip Island to visit the Koala Conservation and watch the Penguin Parade as the Fairy Penguins come into shore from a days fishing at sunset. We stayed in Cowes for the night.



We then drove to Colac for the night stopping in St Kilda for lunch. We stayed in a motel that looked like there would be a chalk line of a body, but turned out to be the cleanest hotel room we'd stayed in for a long time. it was spotless.



We then hit The Great Ocean Road and visited The Twelve Apostles and stopped at Cape Otway to discover the lighthouse's lenses were made in the 1850's by a company that are located just down the road from our house in the UK. 


Sadly the Great Ocean Road was down to one lane in many areas, due to subsidence

The Twelve Apostles


Cape Otway Lighthouse


Regardless of the weather, we're Brits, we'll go on the beach



We spent a night in Lorne at a caravan park and the last day was spent stopping where we fancied for coffee and lunch.

Car hire returned and airport hotel checked into before our early morning departure to The Whitsunday Islands for a week.

Peter still hasn't seen a Kangaroo and this is his second trip to Australia. He did see a Wallaby though. Peter is convinced Kangaroos are imaginary animals, like unicorns. 





Tuesday, 3 September 2019

Flora and Fauna in Australia

The thing that strikes me the most about Australia is how colourful it is and the amount of wildlife, especially the birds.

We saw a lot of kangaroo and wombat road kill and it was actually over a week before I saw a live kangaroo, then they were everywhere, not many photos of them in the wild as they really do move fast.

It was winter time when I visited to see my son who lives out there. I've posted some random photos of the wildlife and in the sanctuary's we visited as well as views of the country side, the greenery and flowers.

An Ibis, affectionately known as a Bin Chicken

Royal Botanical Gardens, Sydney at the wharf

The seagulls were small and beautifully clean everywhere

Sydney

A bird on the rocks on the beach

Succulents on the beach

The Blue Mountains

Cockatoo's in the wild, very friendly but also pestering people for food in the towns and cities



These Magpie Larks are also aggressive with food, in the parks there are signs warning people that they will dive bomb

Turkey on Manly beach

Open space and parks in Sydney

Not sure what this bird is called but it was very noisy

No bigger than a tea cup on the beach

Seaweed

Coast Road from Sydney to Melbourne

Shrub on the beach


Phillip Island Penguin homes

A Galah

Kookaburra 

Unable to identify the mushrooms, but they were big and lots of them

Koala


Look at his little hands holding on

Rear end view

Front view

Cultivated plants at a farmstead 

Sea bird

1st live kangaroo

Galah's


We visited a lot of waterfalls

Didn't spot any whales but we were informed some had been in the bays

Wallaby

Oyster Catchers

Greenery on the rocks

Walking through the bush

Open fields with kangaroos in the distance

Bird of prey, possible an eagle

No dogs, no picking flowers. But No Cats? Apparently people travel with their pets both cats and dogs

Emu at a wildlife park

Long necked turtle

Purple Swamphen

Brightly coloured parrots in the wild

Well camouflaged

Starfish

Jellyfish

Daffodils in the Botanical Gardens in Melbourne

Melbourne Botanical Gardens

Kanga and Roo

And finally a Fairy Penguin, hiding under the rocks on St Kilda Beach


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