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Published: January 2nd 2007
Ahhh the Australian summer and finally some decent warm, dry weather after suffering New Zealand's wetter than Britain, colder than Britain, so called summer! Melbourne was hot - approaching 30 degrees most days and sunny as hell to boot. It immediately felt like a real city compared to Auckland or Christchurch. Buildings were taller, roads wider, cars bigger. The down side as a pedestrian being the length of time it took to cross the numerous multi-lane, inner city motorways.
We stayed at the Freeman Lodge about a mile from the city centre. Quiet place, except for our room which faced a major highway. Our double was comfortable with in-room TV and fridge. A bit of a greenhouse at times but at least there was fan to keep the hot air moving!
West Richmond train station was really close so we took the train into town the first couple of days. However, we soon realised that walking into town only took around 25 minutes and passed through a couple of pleasant local parks so became our preferred means of transport to the city.
I really loved the downtown area. It had tons of shopping, bars and restaurants, some hidden
View from Hostel Window
City just about visible in backgrounddown narrow, skillfully grafittied alleyways between the tall buildings. Trams were everywhere, being a major means of transport in Melbourne. The city has a superb ticketing system similar to London's travelcard allowing passage on all 3 forms of transport for a single daily fee.
After a day exploring downtown we decided to hit the beach at St Kilda. There was an amazingly detailed, almost cartoon style map of the city in our hostel allowing us to plan the route. I convinced Amy that it would make a pleasant walk through some parks and interesting parts of town. Unfortunately there was no scale on the map and what our hostel owners described as a 45 minute walk turned into a 2 hour nightmare trek in the blazing mid day heat. The first half was pleasant, passing through parks and quiet suburbs but then we had to trudge down the main road to St Kilda through places where the presence of pedestrians was clearly an afterthought. Finally arriving at the beach we dipped our toes in the water for the first time since Montanita, Peru, some 5 months ago.
We returned to St Kilda the next day, by train and
tram this time, to sample the fare at one of their famous cake shops. Spent the afternoon in a bar, reading and keeping cool with Asahis.
In the evening whilst doing our laundry we saw literally thousands of huge bats flying overhead towards the city. An Indian couple in the laundry said they were returning to the botanical gardens to sleep. Odd that because I thought bats were nocturnal.
Otherwise our few days in Melbourne revolved around correcting our serious baggage situation. When we set off from England with our tiny rucksacks we gloated as fellow travellers hauled huge backpacks around the airports. Our bags were small but, as it quickly turned out, pretty inconvenient. Frequent packing turned into a foreboding chore as we had to squeeze stuff into every tiny space. Additionally, being top-loaders, gaining access to anything but the most essential items was impossible because they were inevitably buried and involved meticulous repacking of everything. The problem has grown over the months as we've slowly accumulated extra gear: a pair of walking boots each, warm jumpers and rain coats, some self catering essentials, harsh chemicals to combat the incredible smell of my shoes, etc. As a
consequence our bags just weren't cutting it anymore.
Our flight from New Zealand to Aus was the straw that finally broke the camel's back. Between us we had 6 bags! Our original rucksack's, the bags we used to use to wrap our rucksacks (to prevent straps getting caught etc) now filled with the material overflow and of course our hand luggage. We'd talked about getting new bags for a while but now it was definitely time.
We'd looked at bags in New Zealand but they seemed disproportionally expensive so decide to hold off until Aus. After extensive shopping around we settled on a couple of Blackwolf bags, fully zippable, 75 litres each and considerably cheaper than anything seen in NZ. They're not as comfortable as our originals but that's hardly surprising considering their size. Superb though.
Time for the night bus to Sydney...
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BEK
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Are you nearly here yet?
Hey lovelies- have you made it to the land of smiles yet? we have our fingers crossed for you. we're up in Chiang mai now and have encountered our first gringos on mass. everwhere we went before that was just void of travellers- weird. It's great anyway, you'll love it. i fed an elephant yesterday in the pub!!?? xxxxxxx