Two final exams down… one more to go! I’ve wanted to write
about our trip to Melbourne/New Zealand all week. However, I thought it would
be a tad irresponsible of me to procrastinate on studying even more than
already did. I mean did tons of studying during our study week… as long as you
count studying maps of New Zealand and Melbourne. No worries though both of my
exams went well and I had plenty of time to prepare for them when I got back to
UTAS, so I haven’t been that bad of a student! After a week of studying I can
finally write about our trip and not feel guilty about it.
Day 1.
We started our journey off in the Hobart airport. One of our
friends from Christ College was nice enough to drop us off, so we didn’t have
to take the bus! Thank you Oliver! Our first destination was to Melbourne (pronounced Melbin), Australia. It is a quick flight and I
of course fell asleep, so it felt super fast.
Once we arrived in Melbourne we grabbed our luggage and went to find the
Skybus (or airport shuttle). We walked outside and the Skybus line was right
there. Much simpler than I was anticipating! We purchased our tickets and took
the shuttle to the Southern Cross Station in the city. Since we weren’t
completely sure where we were and it was dark out we decided we would use the
Skybus’ free hotel transfer service to get to our hostel instead of wandering
around the city. This part of our travels proved to be a little bit more
challenging for us. We walked right past the hotel transfer meeting point
without noticing. After a few minutes of confusion and walking back and forth a
little we found our destination. We told them where we needed to be dropped off
and a few minutes later a bus arrived. Off we went again! We got dropped off
very close to our hostel, United Backpacker, which was awesome. Then we got all
checked in and settled at the hostel. It turned out to be an awesome hostel
with a perfect location. It had great facilities, colorful decorations, great
security/24 hour reception, friendly staff, and it was super clean! Basically
everything you could want from a hostel… it was probably the nicest hostel
we’ve said at in Australia.
Once we were settled in our hostel we went to find dinner.
Our hostel ended up being on a main street in Melbourne, so it didn’t take us
long to find food. This time the prices weren’t too bad either. We ate at a
place called Rocket Burger and had the best burger I’ve had in Australia. They
even had ketchup! I had to pay extra for it but it was worth it. Australia has
tomato sauce, which is basically ketchup. However, I can never remember to call
it tomato sauce and have to quickly correct myself. It was almost weird to ask
for ketchup and be right. After eating burgers and fries (they also called chips
fries) we walked around. We just kind of wandered and made sure to say close to
our hostel, so we weren’t lost in Melbourne at night. We ended up at Federation
Square, which was something I wanted to see. It also turned out it was right
down the street from our hostel, so after we had enough of looking around there
we headed back to our hostel. The hostel
had its own bar, so we went down to have a couple drinks before we went to
sleep.
Day 2.
One of the major reasons we went to Melbourne was to
experience the famous Great Ocean Road. So on Friday morning we woke up early
and got ready for our Great Ocean Road (GOR) tour! We grabbed something to eat
as we headed down to our tour pickup spot. After our short walk we made it to
our destination a tad early. We got there in plenty of time… The tour office
wasn’t even open, tour bus hadn’t arrived, and the sun wasn’t up yet. I suppose we didn’t have to be worried about
not being able to find the pickup spot in time. When the tour bus arrived we
took Alex’s advice and sat on the left side of the bus. It was a good decision,
so thank you Alex for writing about it in your Aussie blog! After about an hour
in the bus we were out of Melbourne and we had arrived at our first
destination. It was a small town along the GOR and we were only there for a
little bit. We had teatime and a quick bathroom break before we were back on
the bus. Our next stop was at the famous Great Ocean Road sign. It was very
crowded … I’ve never seen so many white tour buses! We got out and took tons of
pictures and walked out on to the beach.
After the sign the road took us along the coast and the
views were spectacular. This is also
when our left side of the bus seats started to make the right seat people
jealous. I loved looking out the window and seeing the amazing coast line! We
stopped briefly at a lookout, which was stunning.
Our next stop was one of the parts of the day I was most
excited for. It was finally time to see the wild birds and koalas!!! It was
even better than I was expecting it to be. Our guide gave us some bird food,
which the birds loved of course. There were so many beautifully colored birds
everywhere. It was INCREDIBLE! I personally enjoyed how the ducks tried to get
in on the food too. I feed a few because they were cute and everyone was too
distracted by the other birds to pay attention to them. I normally wouldn’t feed wild birds. However,
these birds lived next to a campground and this is a regular stop for tour
groups, so they were already way too used to people and not very natural
(unfortunately). Plus I’m assuming the bird food we gave them was probably the
most nutritious thing these birds were eating. While we were at this spot we
also saw wild koalas!!! Tanner was on a mission to spot the first one and he
succeeded! They were all snuggled up and sleeping in eucalyptus trees. They were
super cute… I love koalas! The wildlife probably made this my favorite stop of
the day.
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| Kookaburra |
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| Sulphur Crested Cockatoo |
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| Sulphur Crested Cockatoo |
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| Tanner's King Parrot friend |
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| King Parrot |
After our amazing wildlife stop we headed to our next
destination, which was a lighthouse. When we arrived at our stop the weather
started to get icky and it started sprinkling. We had lunch at this stop, which
consisted of sausages (on white bread) and pasta salad. I was beyond hungry, so
it tasted awesome. Then we walked down to check out the lighthouse and we even
got the opportunity to go up in the lighthouse. The views from the lighthouse
were perfect and the weather started to clear while we were up there too. Then
we walked around and saw the most impressive full rainbow. The rainbow formed
in the perfect spot right above the lighthouse. It was very picturesque!
Next we were off to see the famous 12 Apostles. There aren’t
actually 12 of them.... there never was. Now there is only eight because one
fell down. I had been waiting all day to see this site and it certainly didn’t
disappoint! When we got there it started to get rainy and windy again. It
cleared up for us as we were heading back to the bus, so we even got to see the
12 Apostles in the sunshine. I can’t really describe how beautiful they were,
so just included a bunch of pictures of this spectacular site!
Our final stop was to we the Loch Ard Gorge. I hadn’t really
seen pictures of this place or if I had I didn’t really know what it was. It
was a nice and beautiful surprise. We learned this site had an unfortunate
history though. It is where a famous shipwreck took place. A ship ran into
Muttonbird Island and only two people survived the wreck. The man that survived
swam back into the ocean to save a girl. They spent the night together and the
next morning he climbed out of the Loch Ard Gorge to get help. He later asked
her to marry him because he thought it was fate. She said no and went back to
Ireland and got married to someone else. He went on to crash his own ship… which
he also survived. Lucky guy sort of…
We took a short walk down to the beach to take pictures. Then we walked around to see Muttonbird Island and the Arch. It was definitely
another highlight of the day!
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| Loch Ard Gorge |
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| Muttonbird Island |
Then it was time for the long ride back to Melbourne. Once
we were back at our hostel we relaxed and went back down to the bar for a
little bit (since we got coupons for free drinks and they were having
specials).
Day 3.
This was our last day in Melbourne and we
decided to just wander around. We woke up early ready to explore the city… well
I was. I’m not sure Tanner is ever ready to explore cities. Our first stop was
looking at Hoiser Ln, which is known for its graffiti. I was extremely
impressed by all of the creativity and art on this street. It was not far from
our hostel, so this trip didn’t take us long. I was anticipating it to take a
lot longer to walk there, but it was right past Federation Square. After that
we weren’t really sure what to do. We ended up walking along the Yarra River for a
while. It was a beautiful day and since we were walking away from the busy part
of the city Tanner was much happier (I was happy too). We saw people practicing
rowing, black swans, teals, a large unidentified swimming creature, statues,
and of course the Yarra River. It was a very relaxing walk and my favorite part
of the day. On our way back we noticed
that the botanical gardens were close, so we wandered into there. It was also
very peaceful and pretty there, so we spent a while walking around. There were also lots of Rainbow Lorikeets
flying around, which completely amused me. Unfortunately we got super hungry so
we had to leave to find food. We saw another burger place during our night walk
the first day. I wanted to compare burgers, so we ate at Lord of the Fries. It was great, but I think Rocket Burger was
still my favorite.
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| My favorite graffiti work |
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| The Yarra River and Melbourne |
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| Along the River |
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| Trying to clean up the Yarra... Good job Melbourne. |
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| Botanical Gardens |
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| My model! |
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| Rainbow Lorikeets |
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| If you look closely the Chicago hotdog made the menu!!! Go Chicago... even though I don't even like our hotdog! |
After lunch we continued walking, but this time in the heart
of the city. We walked into some stores and I saw the biggest H&M ever. It
was pretty exciting, even though I didn’t go in. Eventually we had to stop to
figure out where we were, so we got $1 slushies ($1 is impressive for
Australia) from Hungry Jacks (aka Burger King) and used their wifi. We figured
out where we were and off we went. We saw the Parliament House, the Royal
Exhibition Building, and tons of buildings with awesome designs/amazing
architecture. We also walked to the Queen Victoria Market. It was absolutely
insane inside! There were so many people. It was cool, but we didn’t last long.
Then we started our walk back to our hostel. We still had a bunch of time until
we needed to be at the airport to fly to New Zealand, but we were exhausted. WE
sat in Maccas (aka McDonalds) for a little bit to get wifi. It was the weirdest
McDonalds I’ve ever been in. You could make your own burger and they would
bring it to you on a nice wooden board with our fries in a nice little
container (we didn’t actually get one we just saw people get served). It was
also really nicely decorated. Then we walked to Federation Square again. There
was an AFL or Aussie Rules Football game in Melbourne and everyone was going to
Federation Square in all their fan gear. I’m assuming they were playing the
game somewhere in the square. It was cool to see all the team gear everywhere.
We ate dinner and then decided to just head to the Southern Cross Station
early. We didn’t have enough time to do anything major, but too much time just
to sit around near the hostel. We walked to the station, took a shuttle to the
airport, waited around the airport for a little while, and then went through
customs. At
11pm we boarded our JetStar
flight and we were off to NZ! We had an awesome time explore Melbourne and the GOR area. I'm so glad we decided to spend a few days there instead of flying straight to New Zealand.
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| Flinders Street Railway Station (Tanner's favorite building) |
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| Royal Exhibition Building |
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| Pretty walk behind the Royal Exhibition Building |
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| Doesn't he look so happy??? The city is definitely his place... |
I need to study for my last final, Tas Fauna, so I’m going
to write about NZ hopefully tomorrow. Only 8 more days until I start my journey
back to the US. I can’t believe this incredible experience is coming to an end.
I said my first goodbyes today, which was sad. I hope Will and
Jonatan have safe travels back to Sweden. It has been the most amazing
semester and seeing people slowly leave this week/ leaving in about a week is going to be hard. I’ll save all this sentimental stuff until my last post though. I am super excited
to see everyone back home and to eat some American food!!! See everyone really
soon!
Love Always,
Bobbi
