A new country!!!

Well...Australia started badly. We landed at about 11pm on 1st October - this was after 2 hours in Queenstown airport, 2 hours on a plane, 10 hours in Auckland airport and another 4 hours on a plane. We were tired and I was feeling a bit grumpy; getting to the hostel and sleeping was all I really wanted to do. So when customs refused to let my wood carvings from New Zealand into the country I was very unimpressed! Sooz and I went through different queues, and hers were fine, which made it all the more annoying that my grumpy b**** of a woman was making such a fuss! To cut a long and GRRR story short, I ended up handing over $30 re-export fee and posting the airport $11 of international stamps so that they'd send them home to the UK for me. (Mum, can't remember if I told you - please look out for the package! Will be about a month or so. Thanks!)

Luckily arriving at The Nunnery (home for 5 nights) changed my opinion on Melbourne entirely. It was lovely!!! So very homely and just beautiful. Sooz and I seem to have a lot of luck with these small hostels: they'd upgraded us to a twin bunk room at the same price for no apparent reason! Even better, when we went to extend our stay from 2 nights to 5 they let us keep the room at the dorm rate. How I love that place. They have a really cute cat too, named Brother Francis - how sweet! He was so friendly and talkative. On our last morning I ewnt to take a photo of him and he miaowed, waking up a woman who was asleep on the sofa in the hallway. Oops. She said he was probably thirsty, lead Brother Francis and I to the sink and turned on the tap - he jumped up there and started drinking right from the tap, it was soooo cute.

I guess that's enough about lovely hostels and their pets.

The weather in Melbourne wasn't all that, but it was significantly warmer than New Zealand so were happy! We'd asked reception which direction would take us to the city, and they recommended a tram number - so we were surprised to find that you can walk from Fitzroy (where we were staying) into the city and all around so so easily. Maybe everyone else is lazier than us (imagine, people who are lazier than me!!!), but getting a tram would have been a complete waste of money! We did our usual of heading straight for free info and coffee, after which we decided the Old Melbourne Gaol should be our first stop. This was actually really interesting, if mostly for the Ned Kelly stuff (he was a famous bushranger who murdered lots of people and was hanged in the gaol). We started our visit with the Watchouse Experience which was absolutely hilarious. The idea is that you're lead into the holding area and treated as if you are a prisoner, but the actress who was our guard was so funny! The kids in the group enjoyed it though, and it was all very interesting in terms of seeing the spaces they used. Next up we watched the trial of Ned Kelly in the court room. Again, great for kids because they used members of the public to play the various parts, but I couldn't help thinking it would have been better had they used actors. It was informative though and had me feeling sorry for Mr Kelly. What's with all this feeling sorry for murderers! Really quite worrying. After a walk around the rest of the prison, reading various info boards (most of which have now evaporated from my memory) and checking out Ned Kelly's outfit and the hanging thing (what is that called!?) it was already late afternoon, so we called it a day and headed home via a supermarket called... Woolworths! We're trying to get into this whole travelling, saving money thing(!) so we bought food to cook instead of going out to eat - something we'd got very used to in New Zealand!

The next day we went walking in the direction of Fitzroy Park because we wanted to see James Cook's house. The house belonged to his parents in Yorkshire, and was transported over to Melbourne 75 years ago and rebuilt brick by brick. I love that they went to all that effort instead of just building a replica! It was really cute, with a lovely cottage garden outside. They had done it up inside to look how it would have looked when James Cook lived there, and had some very dodgy Yorkshire accents on the voiceover! We got the impression they were not English actors! The park itself is generally really lovely, with a sweet little Tudor Village and the Fairies Tree, which is just a tree stump with fairies carved in and painted. The walk to the park kicked off a Melbourne trend, of seeing weddings! There was a wedding about to start at St Patrick's Cathedral, and throughout the next few days we saw what felt like hundreds more couples having wedding photos taken throughout the city.

After the park we walked over to Federation Square, had a look around the book market (so much cheaper - the books in this country are ridiculously overpriced in shops!) and ended up having lunch at The Pancake Parlour. This was a little naughty, in terms of cost and fat content, but as we're being good with homemade dinners we decided it was allowed. SO worth it, the food was amazing! And the coffee was bottomless, just the way we like it. Our afternoon activity was a cruise on the Yarra river, which had the potential to be really good. But due to some confusion at the ticket purchasing point we ended up on the cruise going in the opposite direction to all of the interesting stuff. So we saw a whole load of sports stadiums (as if I was interested!) and a funny little island. That was about it. The French Canadian guide was quite entertaining though. Finally, we walked down to the Shrine of Remembrance, which is incredible. The monument is absolutely huge, putting its English counterpart to shame. I guess in a country as big as Australia where space isn't an issue everything can be bigger! It would have been nice to look inside, but sadly it was closed, so we wandered around the area talking to various statues, then headed home to make phone calls and catch up on the internet.

We had 2 days left in Melbourne. The first, we used by heading to St Kilda beach for the market, which was lovely - full of art work by locals and so so so much stuff we wanted to buy. Damn the lack of space and money! There were some street entertainers wearing fireman outfits and walking around on ladders which was quite funny and killed the time waiting for the tram. Back in the city we went to the Immigration Museum. Far more interesting than you would expect, and a lot better than the American attempt at Ellis Island. It feels so weird to be in a country with so little modern history, and was quite disturbing to learn of the racist policies employed by Australia not so long ago, during which if you weren't British you'd be struggling to get into the country. Our final stop was a trip to the top of the Rialto Tower for amazing views of the city...we really are going to end up doing an observatory in every city!

The last day was spent on the Great Ocean Road, but I don't have time to do it justice now, so that will have to wait until next time...