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By Kate, 15 April 2009 1:56 pm

DELAYED

We arrived in Melbourne, not at 7pm like we were supposed to, but at 5am the next morning due to a typhoon in Hong Kong (which was our long haul flight’s stopover). I won’t get into boring details, but spending 7 unexpected hours in Heathrow Terminal 4 after only 1 hour of your 24+ hours travelling time isn’t something I endorse. The only upside of the experience was the free food vouchers Qantas was nice enough to give us, which led to some much-needed lunchtime beers. Hours and hours later, Hong Kong was a blur of off the plane, through security, wander through various airport electronics shops, sit on the floor in a daze, back on the plane, take off through a massive rainstorm.

Melbourne showing us a lovely first morning.

To say we were tired when we finally got to Australia would be a gross understatement, but going to sleep right away would have screwed us up for days, so we dropped our stuff in the hostel and went for a walk in the gorgeous weather. The people of Melbourne were headed off to work and we were walking like zombies among them, but we couldn’t be happier about it.

Fish and chips in St Kilda.

At around 10am we decided we needed some kind of nap in order to function anywhere near normally, so we slept on and off til about 1pm and then decided to head out to St Kilda,the beachy bit of the city, for a late lunch and a poke around. We took a tram out and found a pub on the beach where we ate some fantastic fish and chips and had our first official Aussie beer while looking out at the water. We were REALLY on vacation now. And that lack-of-a-care-in-the-world feeling persisted from that moment til the end of the month-long excursion.

The roller coaster at Luna Park.

We checked out Luna Park while we were in St Kilda, but we were still too sleepy to consider standing in line to ride the old roller coaster. The thing is controlled by a guy who stands on the car operating a handbrake. He just goes round and round on it all day. Amazing! On our way back to the tram, we got some seriously amazing gelato. I had chocolate and blood orange and Scott had white chocolate wasabi. The latter was a taste explosion of the best kind, but hard to eat more than a few spoonfuls.

Fruit for miles!

Melbourne had a lot of fantastic things for a foodie and a beer aficionado. We went to the Queen Victoria Market which, in addition to a lot of random crap and silly souvenirs, has miles of fruit, veg, meat, fish, bakery, and deli products, most from local growers and producers, and all at really reasonable prices. On our last day, I also discovered a company called ReWine which sells unbranded wine from various wineries all over the region for reduced prices in reusable, refillable plastic screwtop wine bottles. You bring your bottles back for refills and it costs even less. Plus they let you try before you buy. I only wish we had been sticking around longer so I could go back for more. And I must mention the meat at the market. There must have been something like 20 different butchers, and we bought two huge rump steaks for $6 AUD (about £3GBP or $5USD at the time). We were definitely the envy of the spaghetti-cooking hostel kitchen that night.

So many cows, so little time. I don't even know what kind these are, but they were enjoying lounging about.

We also went to the Royal Melbourne Show, which is sort of like an enormous county fair. We saw so many different kind of cows—I didn’t even know that many different kinds existed—as well as all sorts of other animals. And in the main pavilion, we did a local beer tasting and sampled loads of local produce and specialties. This is prime stuff on vacation for me. I love seeing and tasting all the local stuff.

Apparently, we missed out on a lot of the big shows in the arena—sheep shearing, wood chopping, etc. We just couldn’t get our vacation brains in an organised enough state to sort out a schedule. But we had a blast anyway. We love animals! And we saw tons of them! (We were amused that they even had highland cows.) We even got wise to the Australian obsession with showbags, though we’ve yet to really understand the fuss. It seems that you pay for a bag full of mostly cheap crap and candy and get really excited about it. Every place on earth is entitled to their own wacky traditions.

The next day was the day of the Aussie Rules Grand Final. Australian Rules football, from what I can tell (which isn’t a whole lot when we’re talking sports), is a sort of mix between rugby and American football. It was invented to occupy cricket pitches in the off-season, so it’s played on a big oval. Melbourne is absolutely mad about Aussie Rules, so the excitement in the air was actually palpable. We didn’t bother getting tickets to the match because the cheapest ones were about $150 AUD, so we just planned to catch the game in a pub or something later on.

An appeal to the ladies. In Scots! (at the Immigration Museum)

We started the day at the Immigration Museum, which had a lot of great interactive exhibits for us to play in. The coolest was probably the different eras of ship’s cabin that people would have stayed in on their way to Oz. The other exhibit I found really interesting was the one about a Latvian family. Back in Latvia, they used to be weavers (or at least the woman was) and when they moved away, they had to leave all the equipment behind. So the woman recorded all the traditional Latvian weaving patterns from memory in one of her notebooks and eventually, her husband gathered up all the equipment he needed to build her a new loom. Then she was able to make traditional wedding dresses and things for all the other Latvian immigrants because she had remembered all the patterns. It was really impressive. I know I’m forgetting important bits of the story, but that’s the general line of it.

I do love you Jamie Oliver. And your restaurant too.

We went to Jamie Oliver’s Melbourne branch of Fifteen for lunch, which I had been looking forward to for months. We were oddly enough the only people there because of the Grand Final. They hadn’t been expecting anyone that day, but we were treated like royalty and the food was amazing. Scott had carpaccio and some kind of pea and bean risotto, and I had seared tuna to start and smoked duck risotto for my main. We were too stuffed for dessert, unfortunately, but we did get to watch one of the chefs in the kitchen preparing some crazy looking octopus tentacles.

Damn near half the city watching the Grand Final in Federation Square.

We headed to a pub after lunch to watch the first half of the game, then on to Federation Square—Melbourne’s answer to the Sydney Opera house in terms of landmarks—for the last quarter. They had a huge screen set up in the middle of the square and there were hordes of people there cheering for their favourite team. The Hawks (who were apparently the underdogs of the situation) won the game and everyone around us exploded. I couldn’t tell you exactly how they won or what really happened because I found it hard to pay attention to a game on a giant screen when there were so many people around to watch, but the experience was interesting in any case. As people filtered out of the square, we went for a walk across the river before our last dinner in Melbourne, which was something simple cooked in the hostel kitchen again.

This hot chocolate alone was worth the trip. Seriously.

I was sad to leave Melbourne, not only because it signified the beginning of a great holiday and an awesome adventure, but because I would love nothing more than to live there. I won’t lie, this urge has a lot to do with the Queen Victoria Market and the fact that the city has more restaurants and cafes per capita than pretty much anywhere else on earth. But it’s also the feel of the city. It’s not a big place, but it’s got everything you need in a small space. And sometimes the smallness of the space makes what they pack in to it all the more attractive. There are so many little shopping arcades that form a maze of secret passageways between the streets of the city and they all hide such great little shops and places to eat, not to mention the best hot chocolate I’ve ever come across. I miss Melbourne, and I sincerely hope I get to go back someday soon, and hopefully for longer than a few days this time.

More in this series:

Australia (Part 1)

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By Kate, 3 April 2009 10:45 am

Ben's upright tack piano on stage.

Unless you’ve been living in a hole, you’ll know that Australia has recently experienced its worst natural disaster in over a century. The bushfires in Victoria claimed too many lives and even more homes and businesses. In some cases, entire towns were levelled. And what’s even more frustrating about all of this is that parts of the disaster weren’t strictly ‘natural’ due to absolute scum-of-the-earth arsonists who started some of the fires.

Seeing Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on the BBC at a total loss for what to say about such a thing aside from calling it mass murder made me feel awful for him, and I rarely feel bad for politicians. But how do you even process something like that happening in your country? What can you say to all those people whose lives have been ripped up? We all know that W was no expert at finding the right words after Katrina either, but at least Rudd took some action for the citizens he’s responsible for protecting. He also promised that communities would be rebuilt with no limit on federal spending. Suck on that, FEMA.

In any case, I was happy to find out that Ben Folds has auctioned off his tack piano (and a signed photograph he took) as part of a benefit for the victims of the bushfires. The auction closed on the first of April, and I have yet to find any information on how much the piano went for, but when I looked a week ago it was at $4,000 with an estimated value of $10,000. If I were rich, I would have been all over that!

For those of you who weren’t massive Ben Folds Five fans, the tack piano is one of two pianos Ben played on tour as well as on some album tracks. It’s got tacks in the hammers which gives it a kind of tinny, metallic sound, and it was a treat to see Ben play it back to back with his normal piano. Unfortunately, I don’t have over $10,000 plus shipping costs from Australia to pay for such a thing, but it seems that someone does and a bunch of Australian families will be all the happier for it.

Another pleasant surprise in all this was that the auction was set up by Music for Relief, which was started by members of Linkin Park and has raised tons of money for the victims of natural disasters all over the world. I kind of hate Linkin Park and always thought they were a bunch of whingers, but this kind of thing is seriously commendable. I may never like their music, but I can certainly respect the work they’ve done here.

For those of us who can’t drop a few grand in an auction but still want to help out the Australians, the Australian Red Cross is taking donations for the bushfire victims. The appeal is closing soon, so please go and give a little. Australia is an amazing place. Donating some money (and asking other people to do the same) is the least I can do to help out a country that showed me an amazing holiday.

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By Kate, 26 March 2009 3:56 pm

Loch Ard Gorge, Great Ocean Road

I kept seeing postcards in Australia with pictures of things like the opera house and a few koalas right next to each other, under the heading, ‘Australia: land of contrast’, and they’re not kidding. It’s a strange place. In so many odd ways, Australia reminds me of the US, especially after living in the UK for so long. The massive six-lane highways full of automatic cars, the sheer size of everything, the buffet restaurants, the space. These things all scream America. It’s a young country with a some similar problems (the treatment of Aboriginal people in particular reminded me of the issues that Native Americans face in the US). However, as Oz is still part of the Commonwealth, British influence shines through here and there.

But the Aussie attitude is ever more laid back and the culture more eccentric than that of the UK or US (in a good way, naturally). Australia is truly its own place. It’s very far away from the rest of the world, both in distance and culture, and this seems almost immediately obvious upon arrival. You get the sense that you’re in a familiar place that’s been flipped on its head. Perhaps because it’s so hard to grasp that you’ve made it all the way to the other side of the planet and yet people are still carrying on as you might expect them to outside your own door. It seems right and wrong all at once.

Grapevines at the Wine Centre of South Australia

Australia, while absolutely massive, is largely uninhabitable. Humans have put things in place to make the land live-able, but they still have to battle it out with nature, who clearly is not interested in helping out on the ‘sustaining modern human life’ front. As my friend Lauren who lives in Sydney said, ‘We shouldn’t even be here.’ The country is in serious drought and has been for a long time. It is dry and hot and dry and apparently never rains (we saw otherwise, so hooray for the farmers!). This leads to, among other things, massive water shortages, to the point of the council sending every home a shower timer, and raging bushfires, as we’ve seen quite recently. There’s also the gaping hole in the ozone layer that hangs out just overhead, causing major sunburn in almost no time at all if you aren’t a good friend of a thick layer of sunblock. Despite all of this harshness, the land produces some of the tastiest fruits and vegetables and the nicest meat I’ve ever tasted, and the lifestyle in general is very outdoor-oriented.

And the size of the country itself is something almost too amazing to wrap your head around. On the second in a chain of four flights carrying us back home to the UK, I managed to bag a window seat in the exit row. From so many miles above the earth, I could see quite clearly the expanse of Australian outback we were flying over on the way to Singapore. I felt like this view really tied up the Aussie experience. I’m glad I got to see it from above. And let me tell you: It. Is. Enormous.

Kangaroo at Australia Zoo

I mean, I knew it was enormous, but… it’s HUGE. I’d been seeing nothing but red desert for ages and I assume, being that far above the earth, one can see pretty far. And it’s all just red nothingness. Even the air at the horizon is red. The sun was on its way down and the desert seemed to fade into a lighter orange, then yellow, then magically into blue as if there were no actual horizon and the desert was just part of the extensive empty sky. Occasionally there would be a sort of track in the dust below, but I had to wonder where these tracks were going to or coming from because I hadn’t seen anything remotely like a point A or B for at least an hour.

I spent 3 weeks in Australia seeing something completely new and different almost every single day, and I still haven’t seen the bulk of it. This just serves to remind me that the variety of experience I have had here tips the balance in terms of value for money in a holiday. It also reminds me how impossible it is to experience everything I’d like to in one lifetime. There are billions of books to read, recipes to try, songs to hear, places to see. I’ll never pack them all in, but hopefully I’ll be working my way through them at the optimum speed–slow enough to relish the experience but fast enough to see as much as possible.

It’s hard to sum up such an epic vacation. And it’s been a while since we went. We took the trip in September and October of 2008. We saved for nearly a year and were probably planning it for longer. It’s hard to get over such a significant chunk of leisure time, even six months later. Our itinerary was ambitious, but not so hectic that we’d need a vacation from our vacation. We started in Melbourne and drove the Great Ocean Road and the Limestone Coast to Adelaide. We flew to Sydney and then to Brisbane where we spent some time with Scott’s family. Then it was off to New Zealand for a week, which is an amazing country deserving about ten books’ worth of reflection on its own. We didn’t have nearly enough time there.

(I’ll be posting about each leg of our trip over the next few weeks. Once those posts are up, I’ll link them here.)

Australia (Part 2): Melbourne