Arrival in Oz

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The flight over from Hong Kong to Melbourne was dull, but fortunately the taxi driver who took me from the airport into the city itself had a bleached mullet to liven things up. I was a little alarmed by the preponderance of strip joints along King Street, which was part of my hostel's address, but it's on the fringes of the Central Business District so that made perfect sense.

The hostel itself, which I'd chosen purely because both my guidebooks had rated it very highly, was bright and open, with the walls near reception awash with leaflets for tours and activities. I briefly looked into the kitchen, which contained enormous glass-doored fridges like you'd find in a supermarket frozen food section, and a large central collection of hobs. Of the few people lounging around in the common room watching TV, none looked within 10 years of me.

It was with some trepidation that I opened the door of my 4-bed dorm, but it was an anticlimax. There was no-one else in there, but the lower bed of one of the two sets of bunks showed signs of occupancy. Two sets of lockers and a couple of tables completed the furnishings. The room was clean and appeared to be afflicted by neither dirt nor cockroaches.

I had a beer over the road in a quiet pub, watching some Aussie Rules Football ignorantly on the TV then, as I was unsure of the etiquette of arriving late in the dorm room, I returned to the hostel to find a hairy Frenchman called Roma also in the room. He was visiting from Sydney for a couple of days and expressed his dissatisfaction with the weather and starchy attitude of Melbourne. "No-one in the street wears sunnies or thongs", he moaned, which required a couple of seconds of thought to translate to sunglasses and flip-flops in English English parlance.

The following morning gave me my first taste of a hostel bathroom. The shower cubicles were fairly small without any obviously dry place to hang/rest your clothes while showering. There were gaps under the door and cubicle walls that meant any water not immediately heading drainwards was free to flow out into either neighbouring showers or the main bathroom area. I didn't inspect the floor too closely, but from six feet away and without my contact lenses in, the quantity of hair was within acceptable limits - at least, it wasn't blowing around like tumbleweed. While shaving, I noticed the discarded but unwashed-away debris from a previous shaver scattered about the basin. And then when pushing my face up close to the mirror to check for cuts, I noticed a bogey smeared on the glass - all the more alarming for only coming into focus at such close quarters. I also discovered that one of my Hong Kong luggage labels had been stuck to the back of my T-shirt for some indeterminate period of time.

Back in the dorm room, a guy with an enormous rucksack had just arrived. His small, dark-rimmed glasses announced that he was German before he even opened his mouth. He introduced himself as Leif, returning home to Germany via a 6 month RTW ticket, after a 6 month internship in Detroit, with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering to be completed. He'd just flown in from New Zealand but was eager to explore the city, so we headed out together.

Melbourne seems like an appealing city - it has a European vibe, with some sidewalk cafes like Barcelona and shopping areas like Middlesbrough. It's clean and has a relaxed feel, though the weather was decidedly English. There were a lot of Asian people, which I shouldn't have been surprised by, but the migrant stories always tend to focus on the European influx rather than on those people coming from much closer.

More generally, people here seem to be genuinely friendly and not prone to pretension. Not to mention quite free with their swearing. It's dangerous to make judgements after just a few days but this is what I've noticed so far. Also, beer and food seem to be relatively cheap.

By the time I left, my impression was that Melbourne would be a great place to live in, but maybe wasn't brimming with numerous tourist attractions (in the way that I imagine, say, Sydney is).

Leif and I wandered south towards St Kilda's, a suburb of Melbourne containing a lively restaurant and bar scene. The final leg of the journey necessitated interaction with the city's tram system. Though there are ticket machines on board each tram, the only enforcement that you pay a fare is provided by roaming teams of inspectors - and if you're so inclined to fare-dodge, you can spot the inspector getting on at one entrance and you can then exit sharply from the other. I'm assuming it's an indication of the honesty of the local citizens that such an honour system can work.

One drawback is that the ticket machines give no change so, if you're only recently arrived in the country and aren't yet burdened with kilos of shrapnel, you may find yourself unable to pay, in which case you either walk, or travel for free. I mention this because this is exactly what happened to Leif and I. Faced with the prospect of a 1 hour walk, or committing a minor crime, we opted for the latter. For the whole journey, I imagined the other passengers had mentally labelled us as fare-dodgers.

Leif and I were getting on well, so when he floated the prospect of sharing a campervan to go around the Great Ocean Road - a journy that we'd both said we wanted to do - it sounded appealing. Now I'm generally not someone who can blithely forego regular showers, and even the thought of not washing my hair every morning can make my skin crawl, but it sounded like it would be something of an adventure. And having spent a couple of days hanging out together, we were pretty sure that our personalities were compatible enough to survive a week together in a campervan.

There seemed to be 3 ways of getting around the Great Ocean Road to Adelaide - on an organised tour (quite expensive, done in a rush in about 3 days, no independence), in a hire car (expensive, and you still need to pay for accommodation), or in a campervan (total independence but lacking some amenities). By the time we'd done the maths and enquired about availability, the campervan route was the only sensible option. We'd hoped to hire one from a company called Wicked, whose vans are groovily painted, often with a musical theme such as ABBA or the Beatles, but they were all out, so we ended up with Calypso instead - the vans looked boring as hell but, rumour had it, would be in better condition than the Wicked ones.

I'd like to note here that the Melbourne Visitor Centre staff were unbelievably helpful in getting this arranged, and they also assisted Leif with some tricky planning for his itinerary subsequent to the arrival in Adelaide.

When we'd finally nailed down all the details, we repaired to a nearby bar - which fortuitously was having a happy hour - to celebrate with a couple of beers. In what I feared at the time might be an omen for the whole trip, a slightly deranged guy approached us and launched into an extraordinary speech that started with a woman's opinion of his feet and then progressed to some circular but grammatically correct monologue that hinted that perhaps a woman in his life had died. By the end of it he was crying. After 4 years in the freakshow that is New York, I was quite eager to get rid of him before he started a frenzied axe attack, but he wandered off anyway. Rather more charitably, Leif said he'd been about to buy the guy a beer and listen to his problems.

After just 2 nights in the hostel, I was the longest-staying resident of the dorm, and by the time my fourth and final night was over, 8 different people had been in the dorm, one of whom had arrived at ~2AM one night then left at ~6AM. I wasn't expecting such a high turnover, but it certainly means you meet a lot of people. I had nothing to compare the hostel with, but the consensus of my various dorm-mates was that it wasn't a very good place, with some people saying it was a bit grubby and others commenting that having the TV in the main lounge area discouraged social interaction. Such is the difference between the word on the street and the word in the guidebooks.

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Photos

Street art
Detail

Melbourne message wall
Detail

Comments

[Faiser]

Round 2
Looking forward to more stories of axe-wielding maniacs in round 2 of the '06 world travels. The recent random stabbings on the subways of NYC should give some comfort at least that you're not in the craziest place in the world anymore.