There’s not much wildlife in Melbourne itself, but the little penguin colony in St Kilda is a nice exception. While the large colony on Phillip Island is far more popular with tourists, the colony in St Kilda breakwater is a nice alternative and far closer to the city. In addition you can take your own photos there which is always a nice bonus. I had also finally replaced the Canon 15-85 mm lens I lost in my accident in Sydney and I wanted to take the new lens for a test run.

I enjoyed my two visits to the colony during the summer so it was quite natural to take my aunt there on Monday. To prepare for the visit I packed a couple of flashlights and some red cellophane for some penguin friendly lightning. Then we headed down to St Kilda Pier and prepared for the arrival of the birds. We got there little too early though, the first birds didn’t arrive until well after sunset. The numbers seemed quite low as well, we spotted only a few penguins during our visit. There were no Earthcare volunteers around this time, and while no one was harassing the penguins on purpose, there were still a few people taking photos with their flash on. We didn’t see any Rakali either which was bit of a shame as I didn’t get any good shots of them in the summer.

In hindsight it was not the best idea to spend so long in the cold and the wind. My aunt had a sore throat during the day and after the evening she wasn’t feeling too well. At least she got a few nice penguin shots. I had already taken plenty of good penguin photos in the summer so I mainly focused on providing lightning for other people (as we were the only people around with red flashlights). To test the new lens I took some night shots around the pier, Melbourne’s skyline looks quite nice in the dark from the pier. The lens performed quite well as expected, it’s really nice to have a good walk-around lens again!

The weather was quite nice on Sunday so we decided to do some walking in the Royal Botanic Gardens with my aunt. It was a slightly frustrating trip for me as my aunt is much more into plants than I am. Nevertheless, walk in the Gardens is always a nice way to relax. Winter may not be the best time to visit the Gardens, but there were still a lot of blooming flowers and other interesting stuff. There was some bird life around too, including a couple of black swans. It would be nice if the water in the ponds and lakes was little clearer, though.

With the flora covered we decided to move on to fauna on Monday. I hadn’t visited Melbourne Zoo before (or any zoo in a long while for that matter) so this was a good opportunity to do so. While I do enjoy photographing animals, captive animals in zoos are always quite depressing. Shooting the animals in their native habitats is far more satisfying, even if it’s usually lot more challenging as well. The first few exhibits were particularly depressing, some of the big cats and the lone bear looked very unhappy. Things got bit better when we moved further into the zoo, most of the animals had bit more room to move around and didn’t seem to mind their captivity quite as much.

Monkeys in particular looked like they enjoyed playing around and some of them were clearly showing off. The large bird house was quite nice too. The open area where you could get close and personal with kangaroos and emus was a nice touch, too bad Eija’s battery ran out just as we got there. At that point we were getting close to the closing time anyway, we checked out the few remaining animals and headed back to the train station after a quick visit to the gift shop.

The day didn’t really change my opinion on zoos, I still find them pretty depressing places even if they do serve a fairly important function. At least the weather stayed nice for the whole we were there, it was sunny if little chilly.

My aunt arrived to Australia early in the Thursday morning for a three week holiday. Unfortunately her trip here was slightly bumpy with a fair share of mishaps during the flight. Her initial flight from Helsinki was delayed by several hours (by two separate problems!) and she barely made the connecting flight in Singapore. To make matters worse, for some reason there was no reception in the Singapore airport so I didn’t even know if she had made it or not until she landed in Melbourne. And as if this wasn’t enough, the airline had lost her luggage with most of her clothes and other stuff! Luckily the luggage arrived only a day late and it was delivered to our front door by a courier.

After all of that behind us we could properly focus on sightseeing and some shopping. One of our first stops on Friday was a camera shop, Eija had planned to get a new camera during the stop in Singapore but that didn’t work out for obvious reasons. After hitting a few of the local shops on Friday we ended up buying a Canon Ixus 125 HS for her; too bad it isn’t available in green. After some test shots in the city we decided to head to Docklands. There was a nice little fireworks display there on Friday evening, a perfect opportunity to test the new camera! The camera performed surprisingly well for a small point and shoot, too. The only disappointing part was rather low battery capacity, well below manufacturer rated 160 photos. My new tripod has not arrived yet, so I had to content myself with handheld shots. Luckily the fireworks is a weekly event for the whole of July, so I might get back there for some proper long exposure shots.