a patrick foley kind of day.

jeff has had a bit of time to explore the local area outside of melbourne, but i haven't really had much opportunity.  this saturday, we decided to go for a hike or bushwalk somewhere, so we broke out the guide book and i chose french island.  it was a patrick foley kind of maneuver because i knew nothing about it and said, "let's go, it will be fun."  the only thing we knew about french island was what our guide book told us, which was essentially nothing except where to catch the ferry.  we gathered the necessary sunscreen (sun is very strong here), a bottle of water, and an extra sweater.  and off we went.

huge pelicans at the ferry.  huge.

another ship at the dock.  not ours.  our
captain had long fingernails that were
painted black.  i don't think
he had a hook for a hand.

we arrived at the ferry port in time to have a meat pie and a coke...just as yummy as you would think (this is another very patrick foley-like thing...if there would have been beer, it would have been perfect.)  once we were on the ferry, i started to read the brochure i picked up in the ticket/meat pie shack, where i find the following text:

"french island is a curious phenomenon lost in time, which has no power poles, no sealed roads, no shopping strips.  with no local government, no churches and no main electricity or water, self-sufficiency is a necessity for the approximately 90 residents that live on the island..."  

so i recommended that we go to an island without running water.  brilliant.

we arrived at the tankerton jetty expecting to see information of some sort...nope.  we walked off of the dock and watched our ferry drive away - not knowing what the day was going to hold (except no working bathrooms).  we found ourselves at a "welcome center" (and i use that term liberally) and a nice local woman told me which "bush walk" we needed to take - which was listed to take 5.5 hours (our return ferry was exactly 5.5 hours from then...coincidence, i think not.)  we set-off on our 14km bush walk, and it was beautiful.  probably the first time in my life that i was around so few people.  the bulletin board at the "welcome center" warned us that there was no water on the bush walk, and that we should have on gators or thick socks to ensure we don't get bitten by snakes.  I had on thin pants, no socks, and thin-soled running shoes...jeff had on thin pants, ankle socks, and hiking shoes.  awesome.

the only map that we had.  we took a close-up of our trail on the
iphone so we could make sure we were going the right way.  

this is our walk.

in addition to having no running water, french island boasts the most dense disease-free koala population in the world (many of the ones on mainland australia apparently have chlamydia), so we spent much of our time craning our necks looking in trees that may or may not have been eucalyptus.  we followed a road for quite some time, saw some beautiful scenery:

lava stone beaches.  not so good on the tootsies.

one of four rivers on the island

much of french island is an 11,100 hectare national park
for patrick, that's 27,428.1 acres :)

then came across this:

kangaroo keeper-outter

we assumed that we were supposed to go through, and that this was some sort of kangaroo keeper-outter.  so, through we went.  after this gate, things went downhill...we saw a snake, and when i say saw, i mean we both almost stepped on it.  jeff actually did the "mom-seatbelt-arm" at me so i wouldn't step on it.  i screamed and threw the camera at jeff to take a picture - nope, didn't happen.  we think it was a copperhead - one of two brands of snakes on the island.  after that run-in, it was awfully hard to crane our necks up to look for koalas, considering we had our heads down making sure we weren't stepping on any more snakes.  we waded through swamp (i was convinced that there were leeches in my shoes), bush walked, and finally made it to a road less traveled.

once on this fine piece of road, we were able to continue our koala searching...until i saw snake number two.  we didn't get a picture of that one, either because i ran to the other side of the road.  finally, we see this:

he's in the center of the picture.  hard to see in a picture,
imagine what it's like in real life.

then, we run into this:

the general store on the island.  we met the proprietor on the
ferry back to the mainland.  nice bloke.

then we see this:

all doped up on eucalyptus

i may or may not have clapped my hands to wake him up.

there's the cute little fella

all in all, a great day.  the feet are a little sore (not from the non-present leeches in my shoes), but we got to see clean koalas!!

very happy to be getting back on the ferry to running water.