Melbourne Again

One of the St Kilda landmarks is Luna Park, an old amusement park that you enter through a giant, sinister face. (There's one in Sydney too. They're only open weekends and school holidays.)

Its boundary is marked by a fairly grand old wooden-frame rollercoaster, one of the oldest in the world - they still call it a Scenic Railway, which I recently discovered is the old name for such rides, because they used to go past lots of painted backdrops showing exotic scenes. It's quite funny how old-school this is - there is a driver who stands (yes, he just stands, that's how scary it is) in the middle, physically pushes it off at the start and applies some kind of brake at appropriate points. My life in the hands of someone who can't get a better job than riding a rollercoaster in a purple uniform with a high polyester quotient. Yikes.

St Kilda also has a Sunday market which Lilly enjoyed - Australia seems to love its little art and craft markets.

In the afternoon Suz and Rich kindly drove us out to Phillip Island for the Penguin Parade. Every evening at sunset, hundreds of little penguins (that is both the name of the species and an apt description) land on the beach from a long day at sea, gather themselves into groups, and eventually pluck up the courage to wander up the beach to their homes in the cliff - past a couple of hundred people watching under faint floodlights. At this time of year they are fat and full of food which they will regurgitate to feed their children - if they don't get picked off by predatory birds on the beach. The first group seems set to head right for us until it is divebombed by a seagull and the cowardly penguins scatter into the water, emerging further down the beach. Curse you seagull!

Even to a tough, Manly (Beach) character like me, these penguins are seriously cute. Before any penguins land, a couple of youngsters waddle and stagger out of the cliffs behind us to watch for arrivals... Unlike the rest of us, they aren't freezing as they wait!

Eventually one of the groups of penguins gets large enough and/or brave enough to head up the beach. Then the group that would have been closest to us waddles right up to the other half of the crowd, gets very confused, and waddles around to safety. More and more penguins land, mostly in groups, occasionally individuals who have to follow the shore looking for their friends, or, right at the end, walk up the beach on their own.

After we've seen them reach safety, we can go back up the boardwalk and see dozens of penguins just below us. (The wheelchair area is a particularly good spot to see lots of penguins climb the cliff.) Sadly, no photos are allowed, but the penguins put on a good show for us.

You can take photos of the lazy penguins that haven't gone out fishing

Better than the seals - we went to Seal Rock and a blowhole on the same island, earlier in the day, and saw... a couple of penguins. No seals, no blow. Ah well. At least you can count on penguins.

On Monday we organised our next week or so and took most of the day as a well-deserved chill-out day (I won't complain about a holiday being hard work, but planning and booking in a country this big is a bit of a headache). Then we foolishly bought a framed picture that we will have to ship home, and met another Sky colleague, Laura, for a drink. Not sure why half of Sky is on this side of the world (like Chris, she's on holiday) but it's always nice to see a familiar face. Laura had kindly agreed to take a couple of little souvenirs home with her. I was looking forward to seeing her face when she saw our picture all wrapped and ready for transport, but she was too sensible to ever think that we would try to pass this to her.

On Tuesday: The Great Ocean Road! Report to follow, but I think Lilly has already posted some photos of it which will probably make anything I say redundant. (Although I have been saving up a particularly terrible post title to go with it - far worse than this one - so you have something to look forward to.)