Melbourne

Sorry its taken so long guys/girls but we've finally got round to organising our lives and keeping all of you updated.

We dont want to ramble on too much about our daily events and bore you to death so we'll try to keep it short with detail when its relevant:)

We packed so much into our short time in Melbourne and everyday we were active and there was none of this laying in til 12 business. We've been pretty good getting up most days between 8 or 9.

On our first day we took the bus into Frankston the local town to check it out and get our bearings, we explored the shopping center managing to get lost several times as it was easily five times the size of Festival Place, we then took a stroll down to the beach where Nathan got burnt pretty bad even though we were only there just under an hour, we then went home and enjoyed a nice traditonal ozzy style bbq and watched the sun go down.

On our second day we took a ride to Mornington (another local seaside town) where we explored again and then went upto a place on top of a hill called Aurthers Seat which had great scenic views which should be able to be seen in the photos?

Our third day was a big outing to Melbourne city central to the Moonba Festival, this was great! it had lots of scatty things going on like the 'birdman' competition where people ran and jumped off a ledge into the river and whoever jumped the furtherest won, we also took a trip up one of the huge buildings which had an observation deck on somthing stupid like the 95th floor which Nathan wasn't too keen about, keeping far back from the windows! Nathan the navigator then got out his map and we explored the city, booking afew trips then managing to get lost afew times and end up in the middle of a casino some how?

Monday was the first of our day trips upto ballarat to see a reconstructed gold mine village which we didnt expect to be too good but seeing as the trip wa buy one get one free we decided to go and it ended up being a great day out! we also stopped at a wildlife sanctuary which was amazing and was where we got our first taste of Australian wildlife! there were kangeroo's running around everywhere which you could feed, we also saw koala's, little joey's, wombats, kuckabura's, emew's and many more!

After our adventures on Monday we decided to take it slightly easier Tuesday and go into Frankston to get afew things which we needed like an adaptor as the one we brought had no resemblance to the socket it was supposed to fit! We also spent some more time at the beach where we got chased by seaguls and just had general good times:)

Wednesday was Penguin island day!!!! this was great! we stopped at afew places including a koala sanctuary, farm and afew towns on the island, we also encounted a seal which was just sat right next to us on a pier and we thought it was a bollard until it moved, we then went and sat in the dark on the beach and waited for the penguins to come up and out of the water, they were so small, only 30cm high! they would waddle out of the surf in groups of a dozen or so but then one would get scared and run back and the rest would run aswell, this was probably our best day so far, just a shame we weren't allowed to take photos :(

Today was the day we left Melbourne and began our real backpacking adventures up in Cairns so nothing happened apart from afew flights.

hopfully we'll be a little more organised and keep you all updated sooner rather than leave it til we've left to share our adventures with you, these computers are taking forever to upload photos as it will only do five at a time and we've got about 400 between us to get on here, anyway hope to hear from you all soon,

take care

much love

Nathan and Danielle xxxxxxxxxx