Melbourne (Feeling hot, hot, hot...)
Trip Start
May 03, 2008
1
44
Trip End
May 02, 2009
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Friday, January 30, 2009
We went out for a guided drinking tour with Michelle that night to get acquainted with Melbourne. We had food first and went to Chinatown. We couldn't find a restaurant we liked so settled for an Indian restaurant because we felt sorry for them. We ordered just one set menu between us because we weren't all that hungry. The cheeky beggars came out with 3 meals instead of one eventhough we were very clear on what we wanted when we ordered. We let it pass and picked at our food and drank the wine Michelle had picked up on the way.
When it came time to pay, we saw that corkage was 3 times the amount advertised. That was the final straw. I gave the waiter a big lecture on false advertising and the fact that they seemed to deliberately fleece us with bringing out 3 meals instead of one. He was either playing dumb or simply didn't understand. I can't remember the name of the restaurant but if you're going to Melbourne, don't go to the Indian restaurant in Chinatown!! I understood then why there wasn't a soul in there! After a more expensive start than we had planned, we hit some bars and drank the pain away.
We chilled out over the next few days and purchased some tickets for the Australian Tennis Open. I'm a tennis fan so this was a treat for me. On one of our wandering days we bumped into friends from Sydney that were just about to leave Melbourne for their return leg to Ireland and were having a BBQ by the river to celebrate. We weren't busy so we joined them and had food and drinks as the sun set. Once the sun was down, however it was freezing. I was in shorts and a t-shirt as we had popped out to go to the internet and get food for dinner and planned to be back in the afternoon. Ever the gentleman, Simon gave me his jumper and suffered on for me!
Before the open started, we rented ourselves a car and decided to tackle the Great Ocean Road. This a coastal drive along the southern coast of Australia that has great views thanks to the constant erosion techniques of the wind and sea that belts the coast all year. Before we left, I had located a camera repair shop that agreed to look at my camera (seemingly the only one in Melbourne!) so I was hoping to get that fixed by the time I got back. We set off on a nice sunny morning and made our way out of Melbourne without any difficulty. This is an unusual feat in any city so hats off to Simon as chief navigator!
We drove through Geelong and as far as Torquay, the official start of the Great Ocean Road for supplies to keep us going for the 3 days. The first stop after that was Bells Beach, a famous surfer's beach. We stopped there for a few minutes and then were back on the road. It was nice to be driving again - it's good to have control of your own pace, especially with our short attention spans! We cruised along for another while before we hit the real ocean road. From then on it was one view after another. There were lots of places to pull over along the way along which was good because the road was so windy that I couldn't look left a lot. I had to depend on Simon to let me know when any good places were coming up that I had to pull in for and we pulled into random lookouts along the way too. We had lunch at Point Danger and passed though Anglesea, Lorne and Apollo Bay. Soon, the ocean gave way to the forest and we had a bit of a drive back down to the coast to Cape Otway where we stayed the night.
We got up ridiculously early to make our way to the Twelve Apostles before the crowds. We were back to driving through the forest which was a bit depressing because it was raining but we saw some wallabies on the side of the road feeding which was a bonus. I pulled into a precarious lay-by to watch them but they disappeared as soon as I did - the curse of being the designated driver for the trip! It wasn't long before we were back to ocean views and we beat the tourist hoards to the Twelve Apostles, which are a series of sea stacks and arches resulting from sea erosion. As you can see from the photo's, the weather didn't clear up that much. The rain held off but the wind was blowing and it was freezing! Back on the road, we decided to spend the night at Port Fairy. There were numerous viewing stops all along the route. We got to Port Fairy in the afternoon and pulled into a car park to have lunch. There was an island with a colony of mutton birds on it so we walked around that and that was the subdued end of our Great Ocean Road experience as we were to go back by the inland road the next day.
We set off early the next morning but were running low on petrol at this stage. When we got the car we paid for a full tank of petrol at the rental place because it was cheaper per litre and you bring the car back with an empty tank. The guy behind the desk said a tank would get us to Port Fairy and back but it was all lies!! To make things better, we had to fill it with a special kind of petrol called Ethanol E10, a special form of unleaded petrol. It's new on the market here and not all the petrol stations do it so we had to go to the next town of Warrnambool on the way back to look for it. We tried a few places and finally got directions to one of the two places in the area that did it. We put $20 in it and hoped for the best.
The return trip was fairly uneventful and we got back to Torquay in reasonable time. We stayed in Torquay that night and planned to go back up to Melbourne in the morning. I was back down to one bar on the petrol gauge and was starting to worry about getting more petrol. We were hoping not to have to put any more petrol in the tank so decided to set off and see what happens - we only had an hour to drive. When it started flashing it was time to get petrol except none of the stations along the road had any E10!! We were cruising in along the motorway into Melbourne with the skyscrapers looming out of the early morning fog and I was starting to think we actually might make it, eventhough the gauge was flashing furiously at this point. Not to be. As I went to overtake a slow mover, the car started to move with considerably less pep. I swung back into my lane and scoured around for a place to pull in - had our luck run out? Not quite, Simon pointed out a petrol station up ahead and we went for the slip road to it. I was going to pull into the lay-by as I had the accelerator to the floor yet was barely moving and didn't want to just stop dead in the middle of a road! Simon, however, didn't fancy pushing the car so we kept going and willed the car to get over the slight incline we were attempting to get over. We made it to the top and the momentum carried us to a pump that sold E10 - hoorah!! Blind luck or excellent time management? It was definitely a fortuitous placement of premises and I parted with $5 to get us back to the city.
The Great Ocean Road was beautiful, definitely worth seeing. We took loads of photos on Simon's camera as mine was still out of action but managed to get it fixed a few days later for a cool $200. It seems I got sand in the lens when we were at Manly beach in Sydney. I could have bought a different camera for that as the prices for electronics have come down a lot but I really love my camera and it was still quite a bit less to fix than to replace the one I have.
St. Kilda beach is backpacker central so we popped out to see what all the fuss is about. I didn't think much of the beach and the constant bustle from the main road right beside it wasn't a good match for a relaxing day. The day was a bit blustery so we just took a walk by the beach. On our way back, we noticed they had a scale model of the solar system so we educated ourselves and got some sea air at the same time! It was really interesting, especially the part where it tells you how a human would fare in the different environments - not well if you're wondering. We got as far as Neptune but decided to give Pluto a miss as it was ages away.
It seems even the world's bad times had stretched to Australia. Any backpackers we had spoken to were finding absolutely no work in Melbourne and a lot were moving on. Michelle had been looking for work for nearly 3 months but to no avail. We were looking for the fruit picking work but with a combination of poor crops and loads of workers, there was little of that work available either.
After the excitement of the Great Ocean Road excursion, we were ready to check out the tennis. We had ground passes and were to meet Michelle on the second day of play to check out some matches. When we got there, we decided to upgrade our tickets to one of the main courts as nobody we knew were playing on the outer courts. The first match we saw was Elena Demeteva, which seemed to go on forever. The temperature that day was 38 degrees Celsius and we were nearly passing out watching them play so they must have been under some serious pressure on the court! We also saw Venus Williams thrash her opponent and Giles Simon who was the 6th seed in the men's.
We also had tickets for the 4th day in the Rod Laver Arena which is similar to Centre Court in Wimbledon. These were third round matches and we were hoping for a bit more action and competition. It wasn't as we'd hoped, though we did see Rafael Nadal play which was good. Unfortunately, it wasn't a very challenging match for him so there weren't any of the great displays you can normally see from him. Due to the lack of action on the main court, we had a walk around the outer courts and saw a few good matches - all in all a few good days. We watched the rest of the tournament on TV as a backpacker's budget only stretches so far! All this tennis has me thinking about Wimbledon - not that I'd ever get tickets to it....
Anyway, the price of accommodation had taken a surge with the tennis on. There was also a BMX competition starting and a few other things which all culminated in us being left with no roof over our heads for a few days. I didn't want to impose on anyone while on my travels but it was time to go looking for a favour. Luckily there's always someone who knows someone and myself and Simon were able to stay with my sister in-law's brother's girlfriend! We were able to stay with Jane for a few days and continue on our search for fruit picking work. We finally hit gold with that one. We tried not to be too much trouble! Jane was packing her life up to move to Ireland so she was fairly busy but she was an excellent hostess and made us feel right at home.
Whilst staying with Jane, a massive heatwave struck Victoria. It was a debilitating temperature. Everyday was well into the 40's and there was no relief at night either with the temperatures still in the high twenties. There was a scorching hot breeze that came everyday that you could feel burning at your skin. One day as I was coming back from the supermarket that was a bit of a distance away, I had to call Simon to come meet me - I was suffering from some serious heat exhaustion. Simon had to be a big show off and arrive to my rescue jogging!! I had to get over my nausea before we could go back to Jane's. When we got back I saw myself in a mirror - I had a big red face from all the exertion! It was all very funny (certainly to Simon anyway!) but could be very dangerous. That day was so hot that I had put ice cubes into my bottle of chilled water before I left the house and they were completely melted 10 mins later.
A note on fruit picking for anyone who's thinking of doing it: the National Harvest Line is useless unless you have your own transport. You need to get in with a "working hostel". They are hostels that only take people who are doing harvest work and will get jobs for you and transport you to the farms. We just kept ringing all the hostels and they were always full. We finally got onto a waiting list with one of the hostels on a Thursday in a place called Mildura. Later that day we were called and told to pack our bags - we were to get the early morning train the next day. We'd finally gotten on the harvest trail! We were feeling lucky and swiftly got on the phone to book our train ticket. Our luck stretched even further - the tickets were free!! As compensation for all the breakdowns due to the heatwave, all public transport was to be free the next day. We booked ourselves into first class seats and rejoiced in our mounting luck.
