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Published: April 6th 2009
After our road trip on the Great Ocean Road we headed to Melbourne. Melbourne is a great city, and is described in a lot of our books as the 'most livable city' in Australia and it’s not hard to see why. It has such a diverse range of places from the hustle and bustle of the CBD, to the river banks, parks, boutique shopping areas, bohemian areas such as Brunswick Street and the seaside district of St Kilda, all accessible by the cities cool tram system.
For us the first thing on our itinerary was something we had been looking forward to for a long time.....a music festival called the Big Day Out. We headed out early morning to the racegrounds to catch the likes of the Arctic Monkeys, The Prodigy, Pendulum and TV on the Radio - and after not being to a gig in over 6 months it was awesome! It also happened to be Australia Day so it was also a special event for most people (and quite obvious how patriotic they are compared to us! Australia and Southern Cross tattoos were adorned on virtually every other person).
We spent the next week exploring Melbourne, taking
in the diverse areas, whilst watching a lot of tennis as the Aussie Open was on whilst we were in Melbourne. We also managed to catch some sport, watching some cricket at the world famous Melbourne Cricket Ground, which is a phenomenal stadium holding up to 90,000 people, despite the fact there were around 100 people in attendance on a quiet Wednesday afternoon.
On one of our last days we met up with some of the guys we had met in our first week, who took us out to the Yarra Valley, which is one of Victoria's best wine producing regions. We spent a day indulging in copious amounts of excellent wine, cheese and also beer, cider and spirits! It was a fantastic day, although as you can guess the next morning wasn’t quite as good....
One thing that we will never forget about Melbourne is the weather, as typically it’s known as having the worst weather in Australia. However when we were there we experienced the most extreme heat wave experienced in over 100 years, toping the thermometer at 45.7 degrees. It was quite literally like being in an oven, and it caused chaos in the city,
with railway lines buckling, car and buses overheating and people passing out. It was crazy, and welcome to the extreme weather conditions in Australia.
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