After a slightly delayed flight due to the Typhoon (we got off easy compared to Claire’s brother!), we arrived in Melbourne, Australia. Recognising that we would have needed all our sabbatical just in Australia if we had wanted to cover the whole country, we had focused our 2 week itinerary on the south-eastern tip: Melbourne, Tasmania and Sydney. One key reason for us heading to Melbourne was that Gareth cousin Joel lived here along with Alex and toddler Charlie (who we hadn’t met yet). So after checking in to our Airbnb we headed across town to see them. We enjoyed a fantastic family afternoon in the garden catching up, gorging on cheese (Japan doesn’t really do cheese) and being entertained by Charlie.
The next day we focused on the city. After a lazy morning recovering from minimal sleep on our overnight flight, we headed out for a self guided walking tour around the city. Key highlights included the bustling Queen Victoria Market; ACDC lane full of rock’n’roll street art; Carlton Gardens (perfect picnic spot as attested to by the huge numbers of Melbournians out for an earlier lunch & sunbathe).
Gareth couldn’t come to Australia without cricket making its way onto the must-do-list somewhere. As there were no games on anywhere that we were staying we couldn’t see a game (Claire was so disappointed) so we instead booked a stadium tour of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The ground is located in a massive sporting complex to the east of the city that can be accessed by a beautiful walk along the river front, with great views looking back at the city centre.
The MCG is an amazing cricket stadium, or sports stadium for that matter, as it is the 10th largest for any sport in the world (beaten by 8 American Football College stadia and the world’s largest stadium – the North Korea national stadium). It has a capacity of over 100,000 and is also the home of Aussie Rules. The ground has been on the current site in Yarra Park since 1853, but it’s undergone some serious development since then. It is now a state of the art stadium with modern seating, TV screens, a great media centre and so many bars to enable the punters to keep refreshed.
The stadium also has a great nod to it’s history as well, with lots of historic bats and caps and other paraphernalia on show as well as a very well stocked museum in the basement. There is an excellent training facility with a bowling machine that projects an image of different bowlers running in before releasing a delivery that that bowler would bowl. We enjoyed seeing Alastair Cook’s name up on the wall in three foot high letters next to 244* – the highest score by a visiting batsman in a test match. After our tour we walked back along the river, stopping at one of the many bars for some ‘happy hour’ beers.
By day 3, our hiking boots were itching to be let out for a walk so we took the train east into the Dandenong Range for a bit of an adventure. We had researched a few different walk options the night before and had found a 13km hike from Sherbrooke to the Summit of Mt Dandenong which was easily accessible by public transport.
The beginning of the walk passed through the beautiful Alfred Nicholas Gardens, before heading into the Australia bush. Until this point in our trip we felt you could have almost placed Melbourne into the UK without it seeming too out of place, but the moment we entered the bush the similarities ended. The vegetation had that slight tropical feel to it, and the bush sounded more akin to the Amazon Rainforest than a British woodland. Then there was the animal life; brightly coloured birds (some of which sounded like monkeys) and lizards sunning themselves along the path. The walk really felt like our own mini adventure.
After walking through Sassafras our track slowly began to gain altitude, and the view across out across Victoria began to open out. Along with the breath-taking views, we also enjoyed the Australian naming convention for footpaths. For starters they all had a named sign at each junction (unlike the multitude of ‘public footpath’ signs in the UK), and each name was a logical description of the track; ‘Zig Zag track’ zig zagged up the slope, ‘Towers track’ went to the broadcasting towers at the top of the hill – it made it very easy to navigate!
We reached the summit of Mount Dandenong in the early afternoon which has a viewpoint and the fancy SkyHigh café with windows overlooking the expansive valley below. We treated ourselves to tea and cake before catching the bus and train back into Melbourne.
That evening we had arranged to meet up with an old friend from Claire’s lab days at Anglian Water, who had recently moved to Melbourne. We spent a great evening with Michael and Annie, sharing travel stories, eating far too much delicious Thai food, and having a drink on a rooftop terrace overlooking the cityscape.
For our final day around Melbourne we had hired a car to head out across the bay to Mornington Peninsula. Following Michael’s advice that brunch was an important element of Melbourne culture which we had so far missed, our first stop was ‘Boyz for Breakie’ in Mornington. The food and coffee were both delicious!
Next stop was Arthurs seat (named after the Edinburgh version), a prominent peak on the peninsular where we enjoyed an after brunch walk looking out across the coastline of the bay and saw our first wallabies (or maybe they were kangaroos).
Then we continued on along to Sorrento at the tip of the peninsula for a breezy beach walk and a relaxing afternoon. Sorrento is a popular beach retreat for Melbournians during the summer, but this early in spring we almost had the town to ourselves!
We celebrated our great time in Melbourne with an evening drink at a ‘secret bar’ (a craze in Melbourne at the moment). Claire couldn’t resist having been brought up on Enid Blyton books!!!
Claire and Gareth go travelling! 