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Published: January 16th 2010
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Our plane touched down in Melbourne for us to be greeted by the pouring rain. This was the first myth i held to be true about Australia was broken - apparently it does rain, the second being that there aren't dangerous and poisonous animals lurking everywhere ready to pounce. I think Tom and i were both a touch disappointed by this one. (More on this later.) Anyway we left the plane to be greeted by strict biosecurity laws - so after emptying out the apples and shells from our hand luggage we went to collect our bags. After pulling our bags from the belt we were greeted by a tiny little dog running from the other side of the room dragging the customs officer towards us. Never in my life has my heart jumped into my throat like it did then, all i could think was Oh My God! What the hell is in my bag? Dreaming up the worst case scenario - imagining somebody stashing bags of drugs into my rucksack in a typical Bridget Jones type scenario. All the time the customs officer was saying 'what is it boy?' as the dog was getting over excited sniffing round my
bag. I don't think i have ever despised a dog as much as i did in that moment and resenting the fact that it had a job that got 'Man' his supposed 'best' friend into trouble. It turns out that the dog was trained to sniff out food and after emptying out both mine and Tom's bags they were satisfied that we no longer had any food products on us, after which i was happy to concede that actually the tiny little dog was quite cute even if slightly evil.
So after finally passing through customs shaken but not stirred we met Tom’s Auntie Penny who whisked us off to their housein the suburbs of Melbourne, when we arrived Tash their Great Dane came bounding up to the door to greet us and i think this was the second scary dog experience of the day, as she is huge! After being genuinally injured by the whip that is Tash’s tail, Andrew and Penny took us out for a wonderful Vietnamese meal before we flopped into an incredibly comfortable bed for another early night.
We spent the next couple of days exploring Melbourne watching the street performers, enjoying good
coffee in the side streets and exploring the amazing shopping without actually indulging... which was hard work. Tom spent quite a bit of time avoiding any areas of grass as they were bound to be harbouring poisonous snakes, spiders or even a deadly drop bear or two (i.e the ‘ferocious’ koala bear that the tourists are teasingly warned about.) Unfortunately we were quite disappointed by the lack of deadly animals that we saw in Australia... and we thought they were all hard-core croc wrestlers. Tut tut, it must be as big a myth as Australians drinking Fosters.
At the weekend Andrew kindly took us down to their beach house at Cape Patterson which is on the coast just off Melbourne. On the way we stopped of at Philip Island, where we saw some stunning views along the cliff front and went to a fur seal colony where we learnt that the sea off of Philip Island also is also well known as having a high concentration of Great White Sharks - unfortunately we didn’t see any or get eaten by one - so no exciting stories to tell there but interesting all the same. That evening we returned to
Philip Island to watch the Penguin Parade which was absolutely spectacular. We sat in bleachers along the sea front and at about 9pm the little blue penguins began to come in from the sea, they are about 35 cm tall and come in from the sea in groups but if one of them spooks at something then they all run back into the sea and then they have to try again until they reach the grass bank of the beach. There are boardwalks that are lit up for about 800m back to the visitior centre so when we began to walk along back you could see hundreds and hundreds of these penguins a couple of feet away from you calling to one another, fighting, feeding their partners who had stayed home and we were lucky as we also managed to see a few chicks which were quite big and incredibly fluffy. It was really magical to see these creatures in the wild and how they interact with one another.
We spent the next couple of days in Melbourne exploring the sites including Melbourne Zoo and Andrew took us out to a new housing estate that was being built as
i said that i would really like to see kangaroos in the wild and he said that he had seen some here years ago. When we arrived it was getting quite dark and we couldn’t see any kangaroos in the field, we were just about to give up when Tom noticed movement and as our eyes grew more accustomed to the dark we could see at least 20 kangaroos, one of them was about 6ft aand watching us very intently to see whether we were threatening and there were another two that were boxing ferociously. Again it was wonderful to see these creatures in their natural surroundings but it brought home the message to me about the loss of habitat displacing animals as they had obviously been here for years and where they were grazing was in the process of becoming a building site, which was really very sad.
The next day was scorching hot at 42 degrees (the first we had in Australia) and it was also the day we were flying to Sydney, so rather carry our bags the 2k to the station we hired a cab, as laziness always seems to overcome lack of funds. Once
we arrived at Avalon airport (almost in the desert), i have never felt a wind so hot in my life, i swear it must have been about 50 degrees, it was incredible. We then proceeded through check in where they decided to check my hand luggage for explosives - i stupidly in typical lets cause drama at the airport fashion said to the lady doing it ‘oh yeah i remember when they did this for my dad and it came back positive haha’ she gave me a stony stare, so i continued ‘oh and this is his bag that i have now haha’ slowly digging the hole whilst Tom shuffled away pretending he had never seen me before in his life. I think i am now on Australia airports most wanted list, especially as i have just tried to take an indistruial penknife in my hand luggage out of Brisbane airport, that didn’t go down to well either but thats a story for another day!
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Dave Cassells
non-member comment
Customs people and dogs
Hi guys, Isn't it strange how customs people all over the world are po faced when confronted by a sense of humour? glad you both enjoying it there, all the best. Dave and Tracy