A tale of two cities - Sydney to Melbourne!

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Our flight to Melbourne was uneventful, which is a good thing I suppose! From the airport we negotiated public transport to St Kilda - where our hostel was! This area of Melbourne is very cool, we loved it, it had a real cool, trendy urbanite scene - and had a beach for good measure! We chilled here all day, good food with some wine! Good way to start of our time in Melbourne!

Whilst in St Kilda we ate in a really cool, quirky resturant called "Lentil as Anything"! The food was to die for, it was all vegetarian and lentil based! The USP for this place was the fact that it had no set prices - you just paid what you thought it was worth or what you could afford and all the taking went to community programmes aimed at helping those less fortunate!

Whilst in Melbourne we met our friends from China, and went to another local part and stayed in Catherine's brother's! From here we hit the tiles in the city centre - managed to get a free bottle of wine and beers with our meal, partied in a jazz club, jumped over some puke and wobbled home!! Up early the next day and had a drive to a very nice little beach village where we had probably the best fish and chips so far, all cooked to order.... We headed off to the Great Ocean Road for a cruise! We stopped of at another really popular beach, really popular with the local surfers! We went body boarding here - this was really fun, I can see the attraction of surfing! I caught a fair few big waves and also got dumped by a whopper wave - these were the biggest i've ever seen (in real life anyway)!! After the bodyboarding we dried of in the sun and watched the locals have a surf competition! Not quite sure how they judge it though - but was good to watch!!

We cruised the Great Ocean Road some more and took in the sights!! We got back, had a lovely fish dinner and went to bed pretty early - shattered!

Back in Melbourne at our new hostel in the city centre we head, just me and Rox now, to a Thai food and wine festival which was good for a cheap lunch, then we hit the cinema to chill - we were still really tiered!

We viewed the rest of Melbourne on foot - we walked mile after mile - vsiting all the corners of the city, and found some pretty cool places like Brunswick street where we had a potter around lots of extremely cool shops ranging from art houses, interior decor, 2nd hand shops, and of course clothes! We can safely say we loved it here - Melbourne is definatly the place to impress your taste buds, drink nice coffe and waste away hours rummaging through unique little shops!

Our next destination was Sydney - journeyed to on an overnight bus (we thought we'd seen the last of these when we left Asia!) - although flying was the fame price and about 11 hours quicker we chose the bus to save on a nights accomodation! Tight we know!

We arrived in Sydney praying we could check in early to our hostel - thank god we could! Also - bonus - we had the dorm to ourselves, and have done for the past four days, we hope it stays like this until we leave for NZ! The first night in Sydney was spent watching Duffy at the Sydney Opera House - very cool! We arrived here nice and early to view the Opera House and Harbour Bridge in the daylight, have some dinner in Circular Quay and drink some vin! The views were obviously very good, the food piss poor (that'll teach us for going in the cheapest place) - but more importantly the wine was perfect, and well deserved, sightseeing is stressfull work don't you know! In the Opera house we treated ourselves to a couple of glasses of champagne and took our seats to see Duffy in action! Rox loved it - and was the first one up dancing in our box area, thus starting the chain reaction that lead to all the women in this area to also start! Peter, in the few occassions he actually heard Duffy - as Rox was singing so loud throughout - thought she was prett darn good! This was a very good night - we thouroughly enjoyed ourselves!

The next day we met our good friends from Blighty - Kev and Holly, who are also travelling for a few days! We spent our first day together visiting Bondi beach, getting lost in the city, wandering the Botanical gardens and visiting the Sydney art gallery! We all treated ourselves to a nice dinner at Darling Harbour, which again involved more wine and drinks in Cargo Bar! We called it a night pretty early as we were all excited for V festival the following morning!

The weather for V was boiling - such a change from the same festival back home! We chilled a lot, watching Duffy again, but also seeing Elbow, Kaiser Cheifs, Razorlight and the Killers. Needless to say copious amounts of alcohol was consumed, and we also met up with some girls we met when we were sailing around the Whitsundays - good day, great company - blown budget!

After a sad departing from our friends Rox and myself had the realisation that we had spent slightly more than we would have liked to - oh well - so to help counter this we scrounged lunch at the free BBQ held by our hostel, had a pot boodle for breakfast and cheese on toast for dinner followed by a chocolate bar for dessert - 7 dollars 50 each, saved a fortune!

Next time we speak to you it will be from our last country 😞 ....... New Zealand..... speak soon.... check out our new photos _ http://picasaweb.google.com/benstanlio

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