Melbourne was a pleasant change of pace from Perth. Melbourne is the 2nd largest city in Australia with around 4 million people and was also voted 'most livable city' 3 years in a row by 'EUI Global Livability Survey'. We stayed in a Pub/hostel that had live rock bands play and very reasonable rates for food and alcohol for backpackers.
The general cost of everything in the city was around London prices as before and public transport was again cheaper with the addition of trams instead of buses but other than that melbourne was a very different city to Perth. The city centre had plenty of things to walk around and without having any real purpose to where we walked, we could find a lot of things to go and see. The locals were all very friendly and helpful whoever we went. Federation square had a lot of interesting older buildings buildings in contrast to the rest of the city which was mainly modern.
One downside to the city was an atrocious beach at St. Kildas with muggy water, rubbish in a lot of places and the sand being a horrible consistency. The beach still managed to be packed with people all enjoying the sun and St. Kilda had a great selection of shops and bars. St. Kilda also had a live music festival that we went and explored before it finished that was unlike anything I had seen in a city before as the closed all the roads and had massive amounts of people walking around.
I could imagine as a local that going out to bars/clubs here would be a great experience as we walked through only a small taster of what Melbourne had to offer with a wide variety of different places to drink, including rooftop bars which were a new twist on what I was used to.
On one of our days here we decided to take a Great Ocean Road day trip on a minibus to see the famous road. Our tour guide was very friendly and had a lot of interesting stories about the road itself including a prisoner who escaped the authorities and lived with aborigines for 35 years and how the people who originally made the road had to use dynamite to blow away at the sheer rock face. The road had spectacular views of the coast line with the famous '12 apostles' (there were actually 8) and lots of small holiday towns dotted along the way, we even got to see some koalas in their natural habitat and unfortuneatley hit and killed a kangaroo on the way back.
Overall I thoroughly enjoyed Melbourne and I was sad to leave but I'm looking forward to seeing the Australian Capital, Canberra next!