Melbourne (Part 3)

St. Kilda is a suburb south of the Melbourne city centre.  St Kilda is well known now as a hot bed for restaurants and, like much of Melbourne, is crazy about sports.  We did a self-guided tour from one of our guidebooks and walked from the suburb edge all the way to the ocean front and boardwalk, which took about an hour. 

Melbourne CBD skyline from St. Kilda

St. Kilda has a great feel in the area around the waterfront (the only area we really explored) and there is definitely a look of a beach resort town from another era.  Most of the part that we were in was built between 1880 and 1920 and we found it quite charming.  Melbourne is given credt for revolutionizing the way that Australian drink coffee and JB had the best cappuccino in St. Kilda.  Here in Australia they drink espresso based coffees, just like in Europe.  Those looking for drip coffee find much woe instead.  (Why would anyone pick drip over espresso?!)  

Sidewalk Marker

To the south east of Melbourne, on Phillip Island, there is a huge colony of Fairy Penguins, a small, blue penguin that lives in Australia and New Zealand.  It is a very popular destination for tourists, who pay to be driven out in the evening and spend a couple of hours watching the penguins wander in and get into their little rock caves.  It was highly recommended, and sounds quite cute, but we didn't think that it would suit us as an outing, so we thought we would miss out on seeing the little guys. 

St. Kilda Pavillion

We walked out to the St. Kilda Pavillion at the end of the boardwalk and noticed that there was a little path that lead to a rough seawall.  Once we got there we noticed signs up that we were not to disturb the fairy penguins or the water rats (as if we would go near anything called a "water rat"!).  We could hear little peeping and chirping noises coming from under the boulders and then a lady called us over to see what was making the noise.  It was a cute little fairy penguin!  We don't know why he was there during the day but we very very glad to see him, and now we can understand why people stay up all night to watch these little blue birds wander home from the sea.

Fairy Penguin