While we were in the area, we made arrangements with the local backpacker travel centre to take a day trip out to Phillip Island - home of the famous Penguin Parade. One hundred and forty kilometres from Melbourne, Phillip Island is certainly a lot smaller than Kangaroo Island but by no means less interesting to visit - in fact, I would go so far as to say that any visit to Victoria which doesn't take in this small island simply hasn't been planned properly. Stra...

While waiting for a coach earlier in the trip, I had struck up a conversation with a young woman by the name of Christine who had warned me that I should expect to find a much more residential lifestyle in Melbourne. There would not be, I had been told, anywhere near as much to do as in her beloved home town of Adelaide where she had been born and raised - and when she came to think about it, she didn't think that there was any point in me going to Melbourne at ...

When Eloise and I arrived in Melbourne at the end of our tour along the Great Ocean Road, our plan was to stay just long enough to take a trip out to nearby Philip Island to see the world famous Penguin Parade and to book the ferry which would take us to Tasmania, the only remaining Australian state to which I hadn't yet been. I had passed through Melbourne before, on day 85 of my 1999 world tour, and remembered it being a vibrant city of trams trundling along pe...

The region beyond the small town of Nelson, past the Surfing beach at the curiously named Port Fairy, is known locally as the Shipwreck Coast. Over the years nearly seven hundred ships have crashed against the rocks here, the most famous being the Loch Ard in 1878. So the story goes a young sailor called Tom Pierce swam back into the ocean to rescue his sweetheart after having already made it safely to land himself, and the young couple clung to each other in a r...

Built in memory of those who fell during the First World War, the Great Ocean Road often gets missed out when travellers are planning their itinerary across Australia, perhaps because places such as Uluru and the Gold Coast are so much more well known and publicised. This is a shame, as the South-Western corner of the Victoria Coast from Nelson to Torquay - the surfing capital of Australia - is home to two National parks and is easily one of the world's most scen...