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 all and perhaps I'd be better off longer in Adelaide instead. Melbourne people, she told me, were unfriendly city types who didn't have a smile for anyone - not like folks from Adelaide who were warm and welcoming and would have a freshly baked pie ready for me on arrival. On the whole, I got the impression that she may have been a little biased. But again, this really does sum up the sense that Australians think a little differently from the rest of us, and that they've even managed to get patriotism right down to small town level. Not, of course, that I would ever like to suggest that Adelaide is a small town. Please don't kill me.

When I arrived here for the first time in 1999, my guidebook to Australia (which went straight in the bin after I left the country a few days later due to the fact that I no longer needed a tome the size of War and Peace taking up my luggage space)stated that there was a lot to see around Melbourne. It then went on to say that it all revolved around shopping centres and Skyscrapers, which wasn't exactly my idea of sightseeing. According to the book, there wasn't much to see in the way of scenery - so I had set out with the Melbourne what-to-do and map pages torn from their binding and stashed safely in my pocket to see if I agreed. The first thing I noticed when looking over the city map was that my hotel backed onto Batman Street, which has absolutely nothing to do with either cricket or the caped crusader - it seems that back in colonial times Melbourne used to be known as Batmania, the sort of information you pick up on your travels over here which manages to raise more questions than it answers. Melbourne has one thing in common with Adelaide, and that is the fact that you can get around by tram. However, the system here is much more reminiscent of the one in San Francisco, with a whole network running throughout the city to provide a very good level of public transportation. A green and maroon coloured tram runs for free around the edge of the city for the benefit of tourists, although having tried it out on my first morning in Melbourne I was at a bit of a loss as to exactly what purpose this serves - in Sydney there is a brilliant tourist bus service which stops off at all the places of interest but the Melbourne tram visits none of the major attractions and still leaves the visitor a fair walk away from wherever they want to be, so wherever you get off you still need a map to get to where you're going. It is, however, nice to be able to walk around the cobbled streets and pedestrianised malls with trams trundling back and forth everywhere - it gives the city a real old world feel. In the afternoon, street entertainers appear around the central Mall area where they perform for a large crowd in much the same way as back home in London's Covent Garden - in fact, the acts were pretty much exactly the same as at home, but that didn't stop every one of them claiming to be the only person in the world able to do whatever it was they were doing. During my brief visit in 1999, there was a fire-eater, a magician and a guy on a unicycle who juggled lit torches and samurai swords and who followed every tram down the street pulling faces at the passengers. This is part of what makes Australian cities different - just when you think you've seen everything, you turn the corner and somebody's coming at you balancing a lit torch and riding a unicycle.

Remember the predilection Adelaide has for strange street statues? Well, I now realise that this art form isn't restricted to South Australia - Victoria has caught the bug as well! On the corner of one street we came across a number of life-size bronze statues of stick men, arms frozen mid swing as though walking, bronze briefcases in their hands, apparently on their way to a bronze office somewhere. Just around the corner, entering the mall, there was a giant bronze purse blocking half the pavement. The really odd thing is that these eccentric additions to Australian cities really give them a sense of atmosphere and tell you that the local people know how to have fun. Our idea of modern street art back home consists of a row of toppled telephone boxes.

Naturally, in keeping with most Australian cities, Melbourne has its own Botanic Gardens - the Royal Botanic Gardens, no less. You may recall that back in Adelaide I explained how each city seems to have its own theme for their gardens - in Brisbane, you get to walk through dense woodland down by the river and feel as though you're actually getting back to nature, whereas in Adelaide the gardens are more formal. Well I think Melbourne has got the balance just right, although I would be hard pressed to choose between Brisbane and Melbourne if there was a best gardens contest. It's possible to spend an entire day in the Botanic Gardens here, and if I lived in the city I'd probably spend most of my evenings sitting at the lakeside cafes or wandering through Fern Gully - an entire section of the park which has been set aside as a tropical rainforest complete with meandering stream and the sun filtering through the branches to fall on the ground in puddles of light. The Oak Garden, a major area of the park, is a great place to see parrots wandering around - something which always catches me by surprise as I've never before seen them outside of cages in people's living rooms. Each section of the park is set apart from the others and almost enclosed in its own habitat, so you can walk about without ever feeling that you're within a formal garden unless you visit any of the conservatories or the Herb or Rose Gardens. Although I'm not a big fan of formal layouts, the Herb Garden is one of my favourite parts of the park - built around a curious globe shaped sundial, this enclosed area contains paths leading off from the centre through beds of herbs from all over the world - the mix of smells as you wander through this area is just amazing, and something which I've not encountered anywhere else before.

The gardens are centred around a huge ornamental lake by which I sat with Eloise for lunch at the Terrace café and restaurant. The place was covered in birds of all varieties - a flock of them were crowding together on the adjoining table waiting for any opportunity for free food. Every time we turned our heads in the opposite direction, one of them would flutter over to our table, peck at our sandwich and then flutter off again before we turned back. Cockatoos wander freely around the gardens, coming right up to peck at your fingers if you bend down. Despite the fact that the guidebooks speak very sternly about not feeding the birds, its not hard to deduce that nobody takes the slightest notice as the birds here are clearly very happy to be around humans. On the lake, black swans glide gracefully up and down with their cygnets, a very rare sight which probably brings many tourists here on its own - again, wandering casually over to the edge of the water results in two or three coming over to see if you're going to feed them. Swans, not tourists.

On the 15th November 2007 one of Melbourne's most iconic great oak trees unexpectedly crashed down on Oak Lawn. The Lady Loch Oak, which had a canopy which spanned forty-three metres, had been planted by the wife of the governor of Victoria in 1889, exactly 118 years to the day before it fell. Oak Lawn is now without one of its favourite meeting spots and one of the oldest and most imposing attractions of the gardens. On the other hand, we can only be thankful that nobody was waiting underneath it at the time.

One thing which I really like about Melbourne is that the city likes to take advantage of its extensive tram system to maximum effect. Not content with simply using the trams as a means of public transportation, Melbourne has the unusual habit of decorating them in sometimes quite eccentric ways to draw attention to whatever events happen to be going on around the city at the time. It's not at all unusual to find yourself doing a double take while wandering the streets here as you are passed by a tram covered in elaborate grafitti or photographs or whatever else has struck a designers imagination. This shouldn't really be at all surprising, when you consider that Melbourne is absolutely covered in modern art sculptures, statues, wall murals, and the city seems to thrive on letting people express themselves. Probably the most famous example of the decorated tram was the so-called Karachi tram commissioned to trundle around Melbourne during the commonwealth games of 2006. A team of vehicle decorators - yes, such a job actually exists - went out to Pakistan and spent months in Karachi researching the W-11 decorated buses which criss-cross the city's streets before returning to Australia with plans for Melbourne's very own copy. Bringing with them caseloads of multicoloured stickers, strings of beads and assorted decorations, they then retired to the Melbourne tram workshop to put together their design before revealing the most colourful and spectacular tram the city has ever seen. For the duration of the commonwealth games, the Karachi tram made its way daily around the streets of Melbourne, picking up passengers who crowded around its stops waiting to board in their thousands, giving people a free taste of Pakistani culture - nobody was ever charged a penny for riding the Karachi tram.

You could see the Karachi tram coming a mile off, lit up at night to show off its colours in all their glory, the words "Love is life" emblazoned down the side in Urdu. People who saw the tram coming could be forgiven for thinking that they had travelled back in time to the sixties and were witnessing something from the era of free love. Inside the tram, passengers were handed a ticket containing a piece of poetry, a deep thought or a quote written both in Urdu and English, and then could quite literally join the party - inside the Karachi tram, Pakistani music filled the carriages and every surface was covered in gold, tassles and Pakistani art. The tram was a party on wheels, with people dancing in the aisle and standing around chatting to each other throughout the journey as though at a nightclub. Alas, the tram stopped running when the commonwealth games drew to a close - but it's only a matter of time before the next decorated tram takes to the streets of Melbourne. For now, visitors can still book a place on the Colonial Tramcar Restaurant, a tram (actually, a fleet of three) which runs in a circle around the city and provides a sit down lunch or dinner service with unlimited alcoholic drinks in a historic colonial atmosphere to those who have booked well in advance. Needless to say, the Tramcar Restaurant is very popular.

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.