Back-alley night-life and the eleven Apostles
We stepped off the plane in Melbourne in our flip-flops (thongs as they call them in Australia) unprepared for the cold, wet wind. After we got settled in our huge hostel (a 5-floor, 400-bed, overpriced monstrosity) we met up with my friend Damon who I had traveled around Brazil with last year.
Damon took us to a great, old-school Italian place for dinner and then we walked around town for a few drinks. The hip new thing in Melbourne are these unmarked bars in laneways (the back alleys where the garbage dumpsters and packing crates reside). Take a graffiti-strewn alcove between two buildings, wall it off, put in a couple of gas-powered heat lamps and a bar and open for business. They were fun little places that we never would have found on our own.
The road west from Melbourne to Adelaide, the Great Ocean Road, is the Aussie equivalent of Route 1 in northern California. With a little research, we found we could pick up a rental car downtown and drop it off the next day at the airport for about the same price as taking the shuttle. So we took advantage of this to do a little road trip for a day and headed off along the coast.
The next morning we reached our destination - the twelve apostles (although one collapsed into the ocean recently, so now there are only eleven): a string of sandstone columns left rising out of the sea after the nearby cliffs receeded.
We made it back to Melbourne just in time to drop off the car and jump on our flight to Sydney.
Damon took us to a great, old-school Italian place for dinner and then we walked around town for a few drinks. The hip new thing in Melbourne are these unmarked bars in laneways (the back alleys where the garbage dumpsters and packing crates reside). Take a graffiti-strewn alcove between two buildings, wall it off, put in a couple of gas-powered heat lamps and a bar and open for business. They were fun little places that we never would have found on our own.
The road west from Melbourne to Adelaide, the Great Ocean Road, is the Aussie equivalent of Route 1 in northern California. With a little research, we found we could pick up a rental car downtown and drop it off the next day at the airport for about the same price as taking the shuttle. So we took advantage of this to do a little road trip for a day and headed off along the coast.
The next morning we reached our destination - the twelve apostles (although one collapsed into the ocean recently, so now there are only eleven): a string of sandstone columns left rising out of the sea after the nearby cliffs receeded.
We made it back to Melbourne just in time to drop off the car and jump on our flight to Sydney.
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