koalas and whales and roos... oh my!

After a couple days checking out Melbourne (mostly walking around the city, as well as stopping by a museum or two and catching a film festival showing - it wasn't all hanging out in dive bars) we rented a car for a two-day trip west along the Great Ocean Road.

The draw of the road is the scenery - for most of its length, the road follows a heavily eroded cliff coastline. The water has eaten away into the cliffs, leaving all sorts of odd formations such as arches and rock stacks in the water a few hundred feet from the rest of the land.
All that was well and good and dramatic. But after a year in New Zealand, you get a bit spoiled with scenery. (About an hour outside Melbourne, Kirsten was reading a brochure on the route. She looked up, saying "This says the views are spectacular. I don't think it's that spectacular." It was at this point we realized just how spoiled NZ had left us).

What was of real interest was the wildlife. We saw kangaroo crossing signs from the beginning of the trip, although the animals themselves were nowhere to be seen as we started the trip. Instead, we scored a sighting of something we hadn't expected. We stopped at a lookout above a surf beach a little after noon, and saw something poking out of the water just off shore. At first I thought it was a bunch of kelp floating along, until it started moving. Pulling out the binoculars, we could see bits and pieces of a whale (whatever it decided to have above the water at any given time), one of the few things we hadn't seen in New Zealand.

A little further along the road was a koala sitting in a tree just off the roadside, looking mostly like a ball of grey fur. And just before nightfall, we passed a kangaroo sitting contendedly at the side of the road, completing a decent trio of sightings for our first day of traveling Australia.
Even got a repeat the next day, when we stopped at another lookout and caught two whales playing in the surf.

Watching a whale, especially from shore, is an odd experience. There were no dramatic leaps out of the water, and precious few flips of the tail. Mostly it was views of the back, which looks for all the world like a rock which happens to be somehow bobbing up and down in the water. Every now and again the black back would disappear, and a flipper would slip above the surface. The most recognizable part of a whale isn't a part at all - it's the spray of water it makes when it breathes. That's the only way I was able to conclusively tell what I was watching was a whale at all the first day.
It's an interesting experience, watching one of the world's largest creatures, but watching just a piece here and there, occasionally having it slip out of view completely.