Our last day in our second campervan…a short but sweet trip this time! The Great Ocean Road has been fantastic and we're lucky to have seen it before any more of the famous formations collapse into the sea. Only a matter of time…

This morning, we drove on to Lorne, a pretty seaside spot and our last stop before Melbourne. We had a coffee and a look in the shops before setting off to Braybrook, a suburb in West Melbourne. The drive took longer than our guide said and the traffic slowly built up as we headed towards the city. It still felt strange to be on 4-5 lane motorways after three months of empty, winding roads in NZ!

When we got to Braybrook, it took us ages to find a petrol station close to the drop-off point so that we could take the van back full. We drove around the streets for a while before eventually finding some gas and a Subway for lunch - we were starving by then!

So it was goodbye again to the campervan…good to get it back for a few days and we'll miss it. We're now 'proper' travellers again , having to carry our backpacks everywhere and ours seem to have gotten uncomfortably heavy since we re-packed them when leaving New Zealand :-/

The walk to the station to catch the train into Melbourne was only about 200m but felt a lot longer with our heavy load! When we arrived at Southern Cross station, we checked with the helpful information lady on how to get to our hostel in North Melbourne. They have a really good tram system here that shares the road with the cars and helps to take a lot of traffic out of the city centre. We were told to catch the 55 tram - $3.80 each, bargain! The only downside was that our tram was quite full, so we had to stand with our heavy bags on our backs for seven stops. We finally made it to our hostel in the late afternoon and were glad to have a rest!

The hostel was a YHA and, as usual for YHAs, was impressively ran - helpful staff, modern, clean facilities and a café on site selling cheap meals. We took advantage of this for tea and both had the chicken curry. It wasn't the best chicken curry we've ever had - more like soup and it needed more spice (that's our Masterchef opinion!) but it was filling and what we needed after a long day travelling!

After tea, we decided to head out for a drink and I asked the guy behind the desk for his recommendations. We ended up in a cosy, cool locals bar called Prudence. It had lots of booths, a courtyard at the back and a good cocktail list - we liked it a lot and stayed there for the rest of the night. We never did get to see what the other pubs had to offer! It was worth staying for the Amaretto Sour cocktails though…best of the trip so far! We headed home about midnight and were glad to get our heads down after a hectic day.