After the return from the remote island, we spent the last day in Melbourne to explore the city and the St Kilda suburb.
On Sunday night, John & Yas took us to a St Kilda institution, the "Espy", which hosts live music almost every night of the week and represents a true Aussie watering hole (excuse my language). We were there primarily to see the 80s band that produced the one-hit wonder "Funkytown" perform (whilst drinking beer out of pitchers). The gig was cool and we had a fun night!
The next day, Mike and I took the metro into town and checked out the so-called "central business district" (the city centre). Later on, we met J&Y at sunset for an ice-cream on St Kilda beach.
I really liked Melbourne. It is a cosmopolitan, yet laid-back town, not too pretentious, and seemingly full of music. If only it wasn't so far away from all my family and friends in Europe, I would immediately consider it as a place to live.
For our last night in Melbourne, John fired up a fantastic spontaneous bbq, and we left the next morning, by car, towards the mountains. We decided to take this route, rather than the coastal one, to get a climpse of what life is like outside the big cities.
Australia is in full autumn season now, which is slightly strange coming from Europe/the northern hemisphere, because the days are short and the sun sets already around 6. However, contrary to the European autumn (except maybe the blessed Mediterranean regions), temperatures are still a very pleasant 20-25 degrees celcius during the day, and don't drop dramatically at night.
Driving up the Victoria State mountain highway, we passed numerous sites where the damage done by the recent and past bushfires are clearly visible. Entire fields and forest have been burned down, and in many occasions, only a few burned trees remain in the landscape, like used matches. The entire area is also very very dry, and there are actually severe water restrictions in place everywhere.
The picture changes dramatically when you cross the border from Victoria to New South Wales (another state). Suddenly, everything is green again, and vegetation is flourishing. It's really amazing how it all changes within about 100 km.
On our way to Sydney, we spent the first night in Corryong, a little town in the Mountains that is busy during winter months, when there's skiing, but not now...After 6 pm, the town is pretty much dead, except for the one pub in town, which serves a delicious chicken parma, but only until 8 pm...
in any case, you don't really want to be out driving the streets of rural Australia after dark, because your chances of hitting a poor animals creature (kangaroos, wombats, etc) increases exponentially.
The 2nd night, we spent in Narooma, a small seaside town which lies on the coast about 180 km south of Sydney. There are currently Easter holidays in Australia, so beach places like Narooma are filled with families.
So there was two days of quite a lot of driving, but today we had a little less to get all the way to Sydney, and allowed ourselves a few stops on various beaches. I had planned to actually go into the water for a swim, or a surf, but I chickened out, because the water was a liiiittle bit too chilly. But the beaches were all incredibly beautiful, and soooo big!!
So the only swimming I did today, was in the pool on the rooftop of our hotel in Sydney, where we eventually arrived at around 7pm, after we had several arguments with each other, and the satelite navigation system (I am of course always right, and the sat nav is always wrong :-)).
We are staying in Sydney for 4 nights, right in the city centre, near Chinatown and the Spanish quarter (I might go there tomorrow morning to check out whether they have Spanish hot chocolate for breakfast - yum).
Tomorrow, I am also definitely getting into the water at one of Sydney's many beaches, and maybe even on a surfboard...
