A matter of days until Christmas, school is done for the year, summer holidays beckon. We decided to escape before Christmas and squeeze in a week at Raymond Island, in the middle of the Gippsland Lakes. J and the kids came down and D followed a couple of days later, taking the train to Bairnsdale.
Raymond Island is just a 2 minute ferry ride from Paynesville. Visitors get the privilege of paying $13 to use the ferry... making it one of the most expensive in the country per minute or metres travelled!
We hired a cottage metres from the water and a short walk from the ferry. We'd had this booked for Sept 2020 and had to postpone it 12 months due to COVID, then of course had to change it again in Sept 2021. We finally made it!
Raymond Island is well known for it's wildlife and much of our time here was looking for and enjoying the local marsupials, reptiles, birds and the one that had the biggest impact on our stay - the mosquitos! They are big, plentiful and hungry.
Kangaroos are often seen in people's gardens. Koalas also live among the 'suburbs' of the island. One resident koala appeared regularly in the tree outside our house, just across the street! So we not only enjoyed the birdlife from the comfort of the lounge suite, but also kangaroos and koalas.
We brought the bikes and enjoyed cycling around the island, down some sandy tracks and into the remoter parts of the island. There we encountered more bird life, including some beautiful black cockatoos. They, along with their smaller and more colourful relatives enjoy the bottle brush flowers which are huge!
On Sunday afternoon a storm hit us, we could see it rolling in as it enveloped us with thunder, lightning and rain. This left many of the local roads covered in large puddles. One of these on the road near Gravelly Point would swallow a small car, as we discovered as we encountered it for the first time! The car got quite muddy.
Today we spent some of the grandparents Christmas money from 2020 and chartered a yacht (and it's capable skipper, Doug) to sail around the lakes. The kids became the crew, managing the sails and steering the craft. It was a great few hours which included a stop to walk over the dunes to the Ninety Mile Beach.
We also sailed close to an island with nesting swans and another which has pelican nests and more pelicans than we'd ever seen in the one place!
Fortunately the ferry is free to walk on or take your bike, so that is how we travelled over to Paynesville when we needed to.
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