Touching Down Down Under

Tim, Sara and myself (with pots)
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Due to flying across the International date line on the way to Melbourne, my Tuesday lasted approximately 4 hours and was spent entirely on the plane. I felt a little cheated, but then that's price to pay for the easier jetlag you encounter from flying westwards around the world.

I met up with Tim at the airport, who'd just come to the end of his month long 'Kiwi Experience' doing all kinds of adventure activities in NZ. You can read his log elsewhere on this site. We got the bus into town and spent a few hours exploring Melbourne city centre before meeting up with Sara and Ants.

Immediately Melbourne felt like a more familiar type of city than LA. I was back in a city that belonged to Pedestrians rather than cars, and there were regular patches of green in the form of roadside trees and city parks. It  felt much more like an English city, although when I called a local taxi firm and the hold music was Kylie, there was no mistaking the fact that I was in Australia.

One thing which took me by surprise was, oddly, the direction of the sun. I suddenly realised that I tend to use the sun's direction all the time to subconsiously infer which way is South. In the Southern Hemisphere it comes from the North, which took me a while to adjust to.

We went for a wander around the botanical gardens alongside the river. I found it slightly surreal seeing the mixture here of european fir trees and tropical palms, together with the more exotic local flora. It turns out this combination is in no way unusual in Australia as all kinds of plants grow happily in this climate.

We then met up with Sara and Ants at their flat in North Melbourne, where the Victoria Bitter began flowing freely. Incidentally Victoria Bitter is actually a lager - nobody seems to have introduced the concept of English bitter down here so there are presumably quite a few bemused Australian travellers up in the North of England complaining about how flat their pints are.

After a few VBs and a catch-up we all headed into town to check out the local bars. Upon ordering a round of beers I was at first delighted at how cheap it was, then horrified when the barman presented me with 4 glasses which looked smaller than half pints. Apparently these are 'pots' and the standard measure of beer over here. After a discreet word from Ants, the barman sensibly decided not to come between a Pacific Islander and his beer and began pulling good old British Imperial Pints for us.

On the way back we stopped off for a kebab - some things just don't change the world over. I opted for a spicy lamb pasty. It was a decision that was to prove disastrous as I ended up spending much of the next day on the toilet. Again, some things just don't change the world over!

Despite this, Tim and I managed to spend the next afternoon wandering around Melbourne Zoo before my illness got really bad. We saw the majority of the Australian animals, including echidnas, cockatoos, wombats, and of course kangaroos. Koalas on the other hand were conspicuous by their absence, and I'm yet to be fully convinced that they actually exist. We did see something grey and furry barely moving behind the leaves in one enclosure, but only if we squinted, and from one particular angle. It could quite easily have been a cuddly toy from the gift shop with some kind of animatronics rigged up inside. I'm starting to suspect that the koala is some big Aussie joke, concocted to fool gullible tourists into buying cuddly toys and zoo tickets.

Unfortunately, that was pretty much where my day ended thanks to the previous night's misadventures. I'd recovered enough by the next morning though, to take another wander round town with Sara and Tim. We took in another of the parks, and took in the glitzy Crown casino - a huge and impressive building decked out with marble and glass, with shops and eateries, and of course slot machines and card games.

Although my stay in Melbourne was short and somewhat disrupted, I still really liked the place. It was recently picked by The Economist as one of the best 3 cities in the world to live in (along with Vancouver and Vienna), and I can see why. There's lots of greenery, lots of activity, but it's not stiflingly touristy or overexpensive. Hopefully next time I'm here I'll be able to stay a bit longer, and manage to avoid the temptation of the kebab shop!