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 pedestrian malls filled with street entertainers. In particular, my "Lets Go Australia" guidebook had suggested on that occasion that a good place to go on a short stay in Melbourne would be the Central Melbourne Arcade at the top of Swanston Street, where the long haul traveller could find a shopping paradise and stock up on all those luxuries he hadn't seen for many weeks on the road - so I had dropped off my bags and gone straight out to investigate. The arcade had been huge - I mean seriously mammoth - not, of course, a touch on the sort of places I was expecting to encounter in the states, but nonetheless quite amazingly bloated for a shopping centre. One of the things which I found really incredible about the Central Melbourne Arcade was that it was built around another building - a lead pipe and shot factory which could not be knocked down because it was on a list of protected buildings. The shopping complex had been built around this huge brick tower which dominated the central atrium and served as a rather unusual cafe.

The Central Melbourne Arcade actually occupied several city blocks, each section being connected by covered bridges which spanned the streets in between - something which reminded me very much of the way they do things in Hong Kong. At the centre of the complex, a huge dome covered the main block, including the lead pipe and shot factory in the very middle, and on the stroke of every hour crowds of people would line the balconies around the atrium on every level to watch a huge stopwatch descend magically from the dome and a cast of electronic characters drop from its base to dance around and sing Waltzing Mathilda. I remembered thinking that this was something everyone should see, even if just to reassure themselves that Australia actually was as odd as they'd thought it was.

In fact, as soon as I realised that Eloise and I would be passing through Melbourne in 2003, I started telling her all about this bizarre piece of animatronics in the Central Arcade and promising that it would be something she'd be just as taken aback by as I had been - so imagine my annoyance to find that, in accordance with sods law, every internal corridor and walkway of the arcade turned out to be covered in plasterboard and scaffolding when we got there as they were in the middle of renovating the place. These were renovations on a level I hadn't seen before in my life - frankly, I couldn't believe that the place was still trading. When I'd been to the Central Arcade before, it was a multi-level gleaming precinct with hundreds of colourful shops arranged around an atrium, corridors lined with cafes and bars and shops stretching away in every direction - what Eloise and I found was so boarded up that walking around the levels was like walking around the London Underground, the atrium totally hidden and the once lively walkways replaced by dull lifeless corridors of plasterboard on which people had scrawled graffiti or pasted notices advertising local events. The entrances to the shops were, in places, not much more than cut-outs in the plasterboard walls, and, needless to say, the stopwatch clock was out of action and not even visible. It took us a while to even find our way in, which required walking down a long plasterboard tunnel from the street which forked half way along and went off in one direction to the station and the other into the shopping centre. The whole thing was a bit of a disappointment, to say the least.

The area in which Eloise and I were staying reminded me of a little of Nottingham in England, in so far as the Victorian style of buildings and the layout of the streets seemed, at least at face value, to be of a similar design. The obvious exception to this comparison with the old world charm of Victorian England (I'm talking about the buildings here - there was nothing particularly charming about death and disease and Jack the Ripper) was that the quaint little corner hotel and pub at which we were staying in Melbourne, the Stork Hotel, was almost directly opposite a sex shop - a fact which probably would've raised an eyebrow or two had we been staying on a quiet side street in Nottingham. We had phoned ahead to book the hotel, having picked it out of our guide book, and didn't really know what to expect as it would be the first time we had stayed in anything other than a youth hostel for quite a while. The Stork Hotel turned out to be a pretty standard Australian pub-stay of the type we had been in while travelling through the outback at Boulia - downstairs, most of the floor space was taken up by a large bar and lounge area containing slot machines, pool tables and locals and visitors sitting around getting progressively drunker by the minute. All par for the course. The Stork Hotel was considered to be one of the most atmospheric places in Melbourne, and it certainly had atmosphere oozing from every pore - at the time of our visit it was one of the two oldest operating licensed premises in the city. Since our stay, however, it has been announced that renovators are coming in to, well, renovate the place and may even decide to tear down the facade which, unbelievably, is not protected in any way. The Stork Hotel will then possibly become just another modern eyesore of some sort containing theatres, bars and whatever else will bring the punters in. Of course, this has created a media frenzy to save one of Melbourne's oldest taverns, but it remains to be seen what will happen and I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky to have experienced the Stork Hotel before the changes began.

When I came through in 1999, the hotel into which I had booked was about as far removed from the Stork as you could imagine. For a start, the Taxi driver claimed to have never heard of it - which is usually a good sign of what's to come - but to be honest, I wasn't expecting much anyway as I'd generally been pre-booking hotels from my "Cheap hotel guide to Australia" by that point and expected to get what I'd paid for. From the outside, the place looked rather normal and homely, but it was all just a clever trick to get me inside where the really weird s*** was happening. Do you remember the sort of wacky stuff that used to happen in episodes of the sixties classic TV series The Avengers, where the writers would totally lose touch with reality and have the hero go into a house and find that the garden was inside and all the furniture was arranged neatly outside in the street for no apparent reason? Well, my hotel in '99 was like that. Honestly. Beyond the reception desk, I remember very clearly going upstairs and finding myself in the garden. I don't mean to suggest that the stairs led up to a roof terrace or anything normal like that - I simply came out into a corridor with a cobbled floor, along the centre of which were brick flowerbeds and fountains, and right in the middle was a Spa Pool complete with a neat little picket fence around it.

The rooms were arranged around an indoor courtyard with light pouring in from a roof light, and around the perimeter there seemed to be trees sprouting from the floor. In fact the whole building had been constructed inside-out, probably helped by an architect who had been smoking something pretty heavy the day he designed it. I blinked a couple of times, went back down the stairs and out into the street to rub my eyes, and then returned to make sure I hadn't been dreaming - but nothing had changed. It's was all just too bizarre for words.

To be honest it amazes me that, having been to Australia three times and having spent a considerable amount of time in the country, I still find any of this surprising. After all, there are a number of reasons to conclude that the Aussies don't fully grasp some of the basic logic the rest of us apply to the world on a daily basis. Here, for example, we have a country which shows some of the most horrific anti drink-drive commercials on television, involving people bouncing off cars and being catapulted quite graphically through the air in small pieces as their horrified children look on, shaking their heads from side to side in slow motion and screaming "Noooo" at the top of their tiny little lungs - but a country, nonetheless, which finds nothing at all ironic about having invented the concept of the drive-thru Liquor Store, where you don't even have to stop the car to pick up a six pack! I mentioned this to an Australian friend of mine recently, who honestly could not see anything at all strange about encouraging people to drive through an alcohol shop, stick their hand out of the window and be handed a six pack - it was, she said, simply "convenient".

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.