And so on Friday, at sunset, I went to take photos of The Pinnacles at Phillip Island. I can safely say it was a bigger undertaking than I had imagined.

The first thing that made it exhausting was the fact that to get to the rock formation, you had to walk 2.5km from the Woolamai Surf Beach Parking lot. The terrain varies from sandy beaches, to stairs to hills to a dirt track (because the tide was high, otherwise it would have been 2.5 km of sand and stone). So, as a starting point, to take the photos it was a whopping 5km round trip.

The second factor that made it so difficult was the fact that I had scouted all day for other sites to take photos. On that Friday, I had already gone to the SS Speke shipwreck site, which was another 2km round trip of sand, rocks, slippery steep mud/dirt slopes and stairs. We had also taken photos at Tenby Point, which involved a lot of crouching. My legs were giving in by the time my friend and I walked back from the Pinnacles.

The third reason that made The Pinnacles photo shoot less than great was the fact that during the shoot, my phone fell out of my pocket and was lost forever. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t misplace it; it fell out of my pocket when I sat down and it just tumbled down into an area where I just could not reach it, for the life of me. To be fair, I couldn’t even see the phone, even though I heard the clickity clack of it hitting the rough surfaces until I could hear it no more. No calls would reach it, no GPS location could be locked, nothing. So, for the remaining time at the Pinnacles, I was very deflated and tried to make the most of the evening. Needless to say, my photos on site were not as good as I had hopped.

I do have to say that the Pinnacles are extraordinarily beautiful and despite all the harrowing trials of the day, I have to say it was worth it. Here is one of the photos of the site.

To view all the entries related to the trip, visit the Phillip Island 2021 trip page.