Trip to Melbourne

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Since we had nearly a week's time to kill before classes started we started researching trips that were too long to do on a weekend but were short enough to do in the space we had. We really wanted to go to the Outback but airfare was much more than we had expected and we couldn't get a good deal because we were only booking our tickets one day in advance so our travel agent on campus suggested Melbourne. We looked into some of the tours and airfare was almost 1/4 of the price so we booked the trip on Monday afternoon and left Tuesday evening, pretty spontaneous!

Tuesday night our flight got in around 11:30 and we got to our hostel, The Nunnery, about an hour later. We booked the hostel under our travel agent's advice because it was cheap, offered pickups for our tours, near the city museum and popular nightlife area. We also looked it up in our tour books and everyone recommended it highly so we were optimistic. Once we got there, we didn't understand why people recommended it. We stayed in a 12 bed, 1 bath room and found out in the daylight that probably half of those 12 beds were permanent renters. We had to get our sheets from the front desk and make our top bunk beds in the dark, and Cheyenne and I's beds didn't have heavy blankets, which wouldn't be a problem except Melbourne's winter is a little more like the winter we are used to than the Gold Coast winter. So once we got the blanket issue resolved and our beds made, we had about 6 hours to sleep until our pickup for our first tour came. Since the pickup was so early, the hostel's fine breakfast (not really) wasn't available yet.

The first day we went on a tour of the Grampians National Park, which is "one of the world's oldest and most spectacular mountain ranges, rich in Aboriginal history, and with an abundance of wildlife". The Grampian area has been struck by lightning many times during the summer which has caused some pretty crazy wildfires. A lot of the trees we saw were still burnt from the 2006 fire. Some of the plants in the forest, including a type of tree that is one of the tallest in the world, depend on the wildfires to survive though because they germinate seeds and grow in the conditions following a wildfire. After a 3 hour drive and we stopped for morning tea we hiked through the Wonderland Ranges and Halls Gap which were really pretty but didn't photograph very well as you will see. Also the day was kind of gloomy when we first started out which doesn't help the pictures either. After we finished the first hike we saw some wild kangaroos and were able to get pretty close to them. They congregate at the bottom of the Grampians around some campgrounds so people wake up in the morning to kangaroos. The best part about seeing the wild kangaroos was that we were able to see some Joeys in their mom's pouches. The mother kangaroo keeps the Joey in her pouch at all times until its about 18 months old and it just peeks its head out when shes eating so it can lean down and eat some plants too. They are really funny to watch when the mom is hopping around and the Joey's head pops out every once in awhile. After we saw the kangaroos we went to a small cafe and gift shop for lunch. The cafe was a "takeaway" cafe and charged you extra to eat in the cafe. They also charged for ketchup, which was in really weird packages that are designed to squeeze onto each individual chip (french fry). Next we went to Mackenzie Falls, a beautiful waterfall in the park we were able to hike to via a couple hundred stairs. Finally we went on the Wonderland Walk and saw the Jaws of Death and the Pinnacle rocks. These all overlooked a pretty valley filled with trees that had more of the Grampian mountains in the background.

The next day we went on the Great Ocean Road tour, which featured morning tea again, this time at famous Bell's Beach. Apparently there have been many surf movies filmed there. The waves were absolutely incredible! Even though it was freezing cold (something like 9 degrees Celsius) there were still people surfing! We stayed on the Great Ocean Road, which winds down the coast from Melbourne to the very south of Australia. Its been dedicated to the Australians who served in the wars. It offers awesome views and the road is literally right on the coast, sometimes built right into the mountains and very near the edge. Our busdriver wasn't intimidated though and drove really fast around the curves. We saw a lighthouse that is used in a popular Australian TV show. Next we pulled off into a little cove where wild koalas live and were able to see them in their natural habitat rather than a zoo, which was really cool. They apparently aren't very friendly when they're wild, however, and have been known to seriously scratch people who get too close. Like the kangaroos, the wild koalas are a lot larger than the koalas you see in the zoo. Next we went on a hike through a non-tropical rainforest. It was really chilly in the bottom and we got to see lots of really big trees and vegetation. What would have been the world's largest tree was in this rainforest at one point but the man who owned the land cut it down to measure it so it was no longer the world's tallest tree! We travelled to the 12 Apostles, Loch Ard Gorge, and London Bridge next. These are all coastal formations on the backside of mountains. The 12 Apostles are constantly changing because of the treatment they get from the ocean. There aren't even 12 of the rock formations anymore because some have crumbled into the water. Others have formed though by breaking off from the shore and existing Apostles. There is nothing between the coast that features the 12 Apostles and Antarctica, that's how far South it is! London Bridge is like this as well because it was a big rock jutting out into the ocean that looked like a bridge. In 1990 the half connecting the formation to the coast collapsed and stranded two people on the far end of the bridge. A kind of funny rumor the guide told us was that they refused to be photographed together by the media who was eager to get the survivors because they were married, just not to each other. Both of these sites reminded me of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland. Finally we saw Loch Ard Gorge, which was home to a shipwreck that left only 2 survivors in the 1800s. The entrance to the Gorge is really small so its crazy how lucky the survivors were to have drifted into it. That night, in a desperate attempt to get out of our Hostel, we ventured to Brunswick Street, a famous party street in Melbourne that is rich with all different kinds of cultures. We went to a pub recommended by one of the residents of the hostel and it was Uni night so they had a "rock, paper, scissors" special which meant you ordered your drink and then played the bartender in rock, paper, scissors to determine if you paid for it or not. We thought that was awesome when we were winning!

Our last full day in the city we explored using the free Tourist shuttle. We went to the famous Queen Victoria Market which is huge and features all kinds of things from clothes, to food, to pets and aboriginal art. After we did some serious shopping we rode the shuttle around to the Performing Arts center and walked through the Art Museum. Next we visited the Eureka building, the tallest in Melbourne and one of the tallest in the world. You had to pay to get up to the 88th floor observation deck but we had free passes to ride the "Edge" from our tours. The Edge is a glass box which juts out about 10 feet from the building so you are basically suspended over the city. When it moves out from the building it is all frosted and then they play some scary sound effects and suddenly defrost it so its pretty freaky. We watched the sunset from the observation deck and were able to see the city lights come on.

After we checked out of the Hostel this morning we walked across the street to the Melbourne Museum, which had exhibits on Australian History, dinosaurs, marine life, and other things. We spent a few hours there and then saw Batman the Dark Knight in the IMAX theater. The movie has been sold out for every showing since it came out, partly because Heath Ledger was from Australia. The girl working at the ticket counter had actually just moved back to Australia from Overland Park, Kansas. She lived there for 6 months with her dad who works for Sprint and knew exactly where my high school was, what a small world! We had a little trouble getting back to the apartment from the airport because we had to catch multiple busses and then walk quite a ways, all the while with our bags. We loved Melbourne but were glad to be back. We start class on Monday and Kristen heads to Sydney Monday night to meet her family on Tuesday morning.

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