Well, the last few days of my trip to Melbourne were fab - spent the weekend on the Great Ocean Road, first stop Geelong, where we took a few pics with the various bollards they have there in the shape of people including sailors, fishermen and a town band (see headline pic). Carrying on the drive, we stumbled across a little wildlife park, with an incredibly friendly kangaroo, wallabies and a donkey (which looked just like the donkey off Shrek). The guy at the wildlife park told us about a place where we could see wild koalas, and we did - 20 of them! Most were sleeping in the trees but one was being very adventurous trying to eat the leaves at the very end of the tree branches, we thought he'd fall on us! Too cute for words...
We then went to the Otway Fly treetop walk, which was really high up in the treetops of the rainforest: www.otwayfly.com then stayed the night in a place called Warrnambool, where we had a fab Mexican and fishbowl margarita, then watched the locals getting leathered in an Irish bar! The following day we headed back via the 12 apostles and went for fish & chips at Apollo Bay - the weather had really turned by this point and we were freezing, then to top it off it started to rain... not what we ordered! We stopped off at a few more places, Torquay, Lorne, and Bells Beach, and Lee drove us to a place where he said we were guaranteed to have loads of parrots literally eating out of our hands, so we turned up with a load of bread and they were a complete no-show :-( However the koalas more than made up for it.
That night we thought we'd see if we could get tickets for the Australian Open which started the following day, and to my delight we did, in the equivalent of centre court, to see Maria Sharapova, Novak Djokovic and Samantha Stosur! All great matches and a brilliant atmosphere, weather was amazing and they had a band on after the tennis, it was like being at a mini music festival - a great day all round.
The last couple of days were spent chilling, with a trip to the beach in an attempt to get some kind of colour, then Caz & I went to have a look around some incredible show houses, they were absolutely stunning (might seem an odd thing to do but I absolutely love noseying round houses, especially ones as gorgeous as those!). Having not been on a bicyle in more than 20 years Caz got me out for a cycle round the lake, I really enjoyed it - don't think it would be quite the same at home in cold, hilly Yorkshire though! Ended the trip with a lovely meal at Sam's boatshed in Williamstown, before a tearful goodbye at the airport as I headed off to Thailand...
Thanks so much to Lee & Caz for all the researching, planning, driving, navigating, and being very naughty in not letting me pay for anywhere near as much as I should have! Hope to see you both again when I return to Aus in March/April xx
