All About Trey

Life, Travel, Adventure

 

australia 2001 (Part 5)

 

 
 

Well, I'm having a great time here in London.  Oh, did I say London?  I meant Melbourne.  Not that I could tell by the weather.  It's been overcast, a bit chilly, and raining off and on the whole time I've been here.  So basically London weather.  Oh well.  I guess fall had to come to Australia at some time.  

 But let me start at the beginning.  My flight from Perth to Melbourne was uneventful.  I decided not to do the shuttle bus in Melbourne. I had taken the shuttle bus from the hotel to the airport in Perth and it had taken over 90 minutes and I was just not happy with that, especially since I was almost late for my flight.  The shuttle in Melbourne takes you to downtown, and then you have to get a cab.  And I had just missed the shuttle and it was going to be another 40 minutes before the next one left so I just sucked up the cab ride.  My hotel in under renovation, so I’m getting a discount.  Love that.  The only problem is the weather.  After dealing with upper 80s to upper 90s weather, I had shipped most of my long sleeve stuff home.  Guess what, Melbourne’s having a freakish cold spell.  High in the mid 60s with a nice cool breeze.  They call it “fresh” here.  I’m freezing.  So I’m shopping again, damn the bad luck.  Just a couple of long sleeve shirts and I’ll be good.  The beautiful thing is that with the exchange rate, it’s like getting everything 50% off.

My first day here I basically wandered around a bit to get a feel for the city.  My hotel is just south of the central district, but I'm a quick 5 minute walk to one of the major tram lines, and the trams are awesome so I'm having no problem getting around.  Melbourne was another planned city, so the CBD is a perfect square grid.  It sits on the banks of the Yarra River, which is not exactly pretty.  There is so much red clay in the soil that the river water is basically just muddy brown.  So my first destination was the National Gallery of Victoria.  Victoria is the state where Melbourne is in.  Why it's called the "National" gallery is beyond me.  Of course, I do have just perfect timing. The gallery has just been shut down for renovations.   Most of the collection has been farmed out to local museums throughout the state.  Part of the collection was moved to a new temporary location downtown, so that's where I ended up.  Sort of disappointing.  The old gallery was huge, but the remaining collection was very small.  But they did have a visiting exhibit on the Dead Sea scrolls that was pretty good.  I then wandered the streets and worked my way back to my hotel via the Domain park and botanical gardens that were just lovely.  I ended up going to a club that night and got reacquainted with Red Bull.  Just love it.


Sunday the weather was patchy also.  Now Melbourne just loves festivals. While I have been here, there has been a comedy festival, a film festival, a food and wine festival, and Melbourne's Fashion Week.  Just a lot of stuff going on.  On Sunday, after I had recovered from the previous night partying, I ended up going to a street fair/festival near my hotel.  It was pretty interesting and it had live performances and auctions and it was a really good way to get a feel for the city.  Of course, when the patches of rain came, I ran to the nearest pub, which was thankfully very close by.  It's a rough way to spend the day, but hey, I'm on holiday.  It seems Sunday is a big party night also so what could I do?

Monday started my touring of the area surrounding Melbourne.  Well I first started off with a cruise on the Yarra River.  It was nice.  The thing that I've noticed is that there is a lot of art all around.  So you see big huge statues or pieces of sculpture on the street corner.  On the river cruise, we passed the Southgate complex, which is a big waterfront area with shops, restaurants, etc, and you could see the statues, sculptures, and water fountains that lined the river. It was pretty cool.  The river cruise takes you close to the mouth of the river, actually into the part area, which wasn't very nice.  Not sure why they go there, but if you've seen a working port before, you know it's not worth taking a photograph of.  After the cruise, I boarded a bus for a trip to the Dandenongs.  Now, who is on this bus?  Me, and a whole bunch of seniors.  Apparently it is Seniors Week here in Melbourne and they get pretty serious discounts on tours, so I've got the gray hair set with me.  There was only one casualty on the trip though.  The Dandenongs is a mountain range just north of the city by about 30-40 miles.  It's a lush temperate rain forest and during the Victorian era, the rich and mighty would escape the heat of Melbourne and head up to the Dandenongs.  The forest was pretty spectacular.  Tall, tall trees that are some variant of eucalyptus.  It seems there are over 700 kinds of eucalyptus trees in Australia.  They're everywhere.  A couple of the variants are the kind that koalas like so we did see some koalas just sitting up in the trees just munching away.  We stopped for our mandatory billie tea.  Every tour does this.  And apparently the tea is just not good. And can I tell you how much I would kill for a glass of ice tea.  Just not right.  Anyways, in addition, they offer crackers with vegemite.  If you've never had vegemite, consider yourself lucky.  It's foul, foul stuff.  I've had it before and didn't get suckered in like some of the rest.  While we stopped, a huge flock of birds flew down near us.  The driver had some birdseed so you could hold out your hands and they would fly to you and eat from your hand.  There was one that was gray with a pink head that looked like a pigeon and then two parrot looking types.  At one point I had 5 birds on me. Two on each arm and one on my head.  And no it didn't leave any surprises for me.  The tour was good, but I think I've got a serious medical condition.  I'm not sure what research is out there, is any, but I have TBN.  Sure tour bus narcolepsy isn't a sexy disease like seasonal apathy disorder or male pattern balding, but it can be very debilitating.  I actually have no recollection of the trip to or from the Dandenongs.  And no, no alcohol was involved.  And the unfortunate thing was that I was tour bussing again the next day.


I had wanted to rent a car to see the Great Ocean Road, but was kind of concerned about the driving.  Plus if you are driving, you can't see as much.  So I decided to do the tour bus thing.  My bus left at 8AM, so I was down there a bit early to get a good spot.  Now I have to mention this little episode.  The queuing to get on the bus did not go well.  There was some pushing.  And this old woman (seniors week!) stops this younger guy (he's probably a little older than me) and says, "You don't have to push, if everyone takes their time we will all get on board."  Or something like that.  Then this little cretin turns to her and says, "Why don't you mind your own business you old bitch."  Wow!  I was just stunned.  And I quickly turned to the woman and basically told her to ignore him as he obviously was just a rude uncivil person.  Later I heard him speaking French with his parents.  So that sort of explains it for me.  Okay, anyways, I sat next to a lovely old woman from Washington DC, how's that for a small world.  Again the TBN just wrecked me.   I did manage to regain consciousness when we approached the coast and stopped for more billy tea. Oh the other thing they serve is this weird cake.  It's angel food cake with a smear of jelly in the middle.  Then it's dipped in chocolate and then dusted with coconut.  Hello insulin shock.  Just not a good thing to serve to people stuck on a bus all day.  The trip along the winding coast was bearable.  The TBN counteracting my carsickness.  The scenery though was just stunning.  The huge limestone cliffs and the water churning below.  We passed miles and miles of empty beaches that were just majestic.  We did do all the requisite photo stops.  Getting all of the canes and strollers off and on the bus was quite fun.  The weather was actually decent.  Sunny with a few high clouds.  So the photo ops were pretty good.  The 12 Apostles were just as amazing and impressive as they look in all the photos.  I'm sure my photos won't do them justice, but I did buy some really professional photos of them.  It was really spectacular.  Then we headed to Lochart Gorge which is this huge gorge (duh!) in the cliffs that is the scene of a very famous shipwreck and where only 2 of 54 passengers made it to shore and survived.  Seeing the water crash against the gorge walls and funnel it way in to the small beach, on a day with fine weather, just made me shiver when thinking about what it must have been like during the gale storm that wrecked their ship.  Oh, I'm at the 12 Apostles and I run into Dirk, my German paddling companion from Doubtful Sound.  He was looking grungy as ever.  But just so weird to see someone you know like that.  Then after that, we were off to London Bridge.   The wind and the waves had carved out two arches into a promontory that stuck out into the water.  Had.  Past tense.  Because in 1990, the closest arch to the mainland collapsed just leaving the one arch out there as an island.  It was still magnificent and seeing the amount of rock that collapsed was just frightening.  Fortunately, there was no one on the arch when it collapsed.  However, a couple had just walked across is and were stuck on the remaining arch for about 6 hours until the weather calmed down enough for them to be helicoptered off.  Now, our tour guide says this, but I doubt it.  Apparently the couple, when they helicoptered back to the car park didn't want their photo taken.  Why?  Because they were married.  But not to each other.  True?  I hope not.  But it does make a good story, doesn't it.  The rest of the trip back to Melbourne they played a sappy Australian movie that I thankfully missed due to anther bout of TBN.  The bus didn't get back till 8PM, which makes a very long day.  Lesson learned for next time.  Drive from Melbourne to Adelaide instead of doing all this flying.

Today, I actually needed to do some work.  I'd made all these plans for my entire trip.  But not Tasmania.  And I'm off to Tassie tomorrow.  So I needed to figure out what I'm going to do and where I'm going to stay.  So I came up with a basic plan, which still has some holes it in, but I called Hobart and Launceston and made some hotel arrangements, etc.  Then I went back to the Southgate complex for lunch.  They have a Wolfgang Puck cafe there, so I decided to give it a try.  Now they had a lunch special that included pizza and that's his specialty, so I had that.  I've never seen a smaller pizza. Even Pizza Hut’s crappy individual pan pizzas were larger than this. But the pizza was good.  BBQ chicken, fontina cheese, tomatoes, red onions, and coriander.  But it did come with a decent size ceaser salad, so that was good.  Afterwards, I walked around town a bit more and did some more shopping.  My restraint is slipping.  I need to leave this country soon.

But not before I go to Tasmania!