Melbourne

We hit Melbourne on Monday 17^th December, 50 days after we’d started our Road Trip back in Mount Isa. We’d be spending about a week here, ready to celebrate Christmas basking in the sunshine in St Kilda.

We spent the next two days not doing a whole lot, which suited us perfectly. Getting back into the swing of Melbourne, we had a leisurely walk around with a trip to Victoria Market and Federation Square. This was followed by a trip to the cinema to see the new James Bond film ‘Sky Fall’, which we really enjoyed!

That evening we made plans with our friends from Perth, Andy, Ste and their friend Bez, who also happened to be in Melbourne at the time and enjoyed a good night out, beginning in our hostel bar with cheap drinks and a few games of pool and then heading out into Melbourne.

Everyone in our hostel was very friendly and we ended up going for drinks with more newly made friends the following evening too!

The next few days turned a little more cultural as we found a funky museum called the ACIM (Australian Centre for the Moving Image). This was no ordinary museum… it brought back memories of the old Science Museum back in Birmingham (although a lot more modern), where there are lots of interactive pieces of ‘art’ to play around with… we particularly enjoyed our matrix re-enactment, take a look at our video:

http://www.acmi.net.au/timeslice/Timeslice.htm?file=ts-20121221-376a806dab91647e928a74dfa9e69104.flv

After having some childish fun at ACMI, we headed to the Botanical Gardens. We wandered through the beautiful paths of trees and flowers, posing for a few photos along the way.

On Saturday morning we went to the National Art Museum of Victoria with our German roommate Rob. Compared to some of the other ‘state galleries’ we had been to, this didn’t rate too well, but it was worth a visit at least and we enjoyed gravy and chips on the walk there.

We made the most of being in the city and went for a night out again, this time with our roommates. What seemed to be turning into a bit of a tradition, we followed our night out with a trip to the cinema the next day to see ‘Pitch Perfect’ which was really funny!!

Time had flown by in Melbourne and before we realised it was ‘Christmas Eve’. We drove to St Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne on the beach to spend Christmas day enjoying the sunshine on the beach. A friend from back home, Laura, was spending the day with us on Christmas Eve, so we all decided on the evening to attend the service at St Paul’s Cathedral. Their male choir was superb, especially when they sang ‘Holy Night’, albeit in French.

It will probably be our first and only hot Christmas, but at least we can say we have experienced it! It was rather strange sitting on the beach in our bikinis with our Christmas hats on… it didn’t really feel like Christmas at all not being around your family!! We tried our best to make it feel more ‘Christmasy’ by opening a couple of presents in the morning and heading for a meal that sort of represented a Christmas dinner as best as possible, haha!!

The beach was full of travellers and English people who were away from home. We made friends with some Northern boys from England and finally got to taste our bottle of ‘Moscato’ wine from Jacob’s Creek Winery that we had been saving all this time. Shamefully, on the way back to the apartment we hit McDonalds… never again will this happen on Christmas Day that’s for sure!!

We had a night out on the evening of Christmas on Chapel Street in St Kilda, obviously followed by a trip to the cinema to see ‘The Hobbit’ on Boxing Day back in Melbourne Central before we said our goodbyes to Melbourne on this road trip.

From Melbourne, after so many weeks on the road, we would finally be visiting the capital of Australia, Canberra. More from us soon…

Peace and Love,
Lyds & Bex
xxxxx

The Grampians and The Great Ocean Road

 We crossed the border into the fifth Australian state of our road trip – Victoria, ‘The place to be’ according to their car number plates.

Our first stop took us to ‘The Grampians’, a giant mountain range made up of sandstone ridges. We drove to some high look-out points and saw some great views.

In the heat, we undertook a short trek to a beautiful waterfall called ‘Mackenzie Falls’. We stopped to relax for a short while, but quickly made our way back as the humidity was creating giant rain clouds above us that were ready to explode any minute.

From ‘The Grampians’ we headed towards the start of the ‘Great Ocean Road’. The road is a beautiful 243 kilometre drive along the south-eastern coast of Australia. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t hold out for us, but that wasn’t going to stop us!

The drive had lots of look-out points to view the stacks and arches that stood along the rugged coast line, it was a geographers dream.

The Twelve Apostles created a particularly lovely view.

We continued driving and the lush greenery prevailed as we drove through the Great Otway National Park. We stopped overnight in Apollo Bay for a well-deserved rest.

In the morning we continued our drive along the Great Ocean Road and stopped off at ‘Lorne’ renowned for surfing, so we grabbed a drink, took a seat in the sun and enjoyed the view, haha!

We even managed to catch a photo of a wild koala in a tree afterwards.

We then got to visit the lighthouse that appeared in the TV series ‘Round the Twist’!!

“Have you ever, ever felt this… strange things happen, when you’re going round the twist!”

We got an obligatory photo next to the ‘Great Ocean Road’ road sign and then it was onto Melbourne for a week for the run up to Christmas in the sunshine!

Peace and Love,
Lyds & Bex
xxxxx

Adelaide and The Barossa Valley

After our exciting shark diving experience, we decided to have a few days of relaxation instead. Adelaide was the perfect city for this, much quieter and chilled out than some of the other big cities we’d visited so far.

The sun was shining (as usual) and we hit Glenelg first. There were lots of cute little shops near to the golden sandy beach, so we took the opportunity to treat ourselves in a chocolate shop to some coffee and home-made cake – yum!

We visited The Art Gallery of South Australia, which although had a few interesting pieces, it was not one of our favourites so far. The architecture of the building was pretty impressive though.

In the morning, we grabbed breakfast and had a quick mooch around the markets in centre which held everything from fruit and veg to clothes.

A fellow traveller Becky had met when she first came out happened to be in Adelaide too, so we met up with Ros and had an afternoon of chilling out in Adelaide’s Botanical Gardens. Becky even made friends with a duck by coaxing him in with her favourite lime and chill sensation biscuits.

Our time around Adelaide was fairly short, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. The surroundings area of Adelaide are famous for their wine, however, after our Margaret River shenanigans, we decided to avoid another wine tour. Instead, we took what we’d learned from our wine tour and decided that we would buy a lovely bottle of Moscato from the Jacob’s Creek Winery, which happened to be in the Barossa Valley region just north of Adelaide. Our plan was to save our fancy bottle of wine until Christmas day… let’s see if it would last!

The winery was beautiful in the glorious weather and spread over so much of the surrounding areas. We had a little sample of the few Moscato wines on offer and chose our favourite, wrapping it up safely in our car.

Although we had only spent a short time in South Australia, it was definitely an exciting state! We would be travelling over the border in the state of Victoria next. More coming soon…

Peace and Love,
Lyds & Bex
xxxxx

Port Lincoln - Shark Cage Diving!

It took us two whole days of driving to make it across the Nullarbor Plain. After all of our driving around Australia so far, it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be, but to others we could see how it would be a horribly boring two days. The Nullarbor Plain is a flat landscape with hardly any bush land or trees, that just keeps on going and going. Nothing to stop and see, we even camped out at a rest area in the bush land with no amenities what so ever… we’re right happy campers now!

The only interesting thing about the drive is that at one point you are literally driving on ‘the edge’ of Australia. Although it looks like flat landscape, the road detours towards the southern coast line of Australia with no beach, just a sheer drop into the sea. We were warned about this, as you could just drive off the end of Australia if you weren’t careful… imagine that!

Whilst crossing the Nullarbor Plain, we crossed the border into South Australia and passed one of the famous road trip signs on the side of the road.

 

Our journey took us to Streaky Bay, where we camped overnight and then onto our exciting destination of Port Lincoln where we’d booked to do a ‘Shark Cage Dive’ with Great White Sharks, ARGH!!

When we booked the Shark Cage Dive, we got a free night’s stay at the brand new YHA hostel in Port Lincoln. The place was SO clean, easily the nicest hostel we’d stayed in Australia so far. The inside was even shark themed...

We decided to do a bit of baking and bought some cake and cookie mixes to things easier… somehow Becky managed to mess her cake mix up, forgetting to put the butter in and adding 2 to 3 cups of water, instead of two thirds of a cup, haha!! It was an early night for us after that, as we were up at 6:00am for the dive.

Here is the exciting part you’ve all been waiting for!! It was a sunny day, but obviously a bit windy out on the ocean. We travelled from Port Lincoln out into the ocean for a whole two hours, passing some dolphins chasing the boat and some sea lions on the shore.

We were asked to put our names down for which ‘group’ we’d like to be in, so we choose the second group as the crew informed us the second cage dive tended to be one of the better ones. The group consisted of six of us, Becky and I, Kylie and Sam (a lovely young married couple from Adelaide), Sean (another young traveller from Liverpool with a guitar in tow) and Brendon (an Aussie who worked in the mines who was secretly loaded).

We had to wait quite a while for the first shark to appear, even with the crew pouring lashes of blood into the ocean, along with very gross looking tuna guts… yummy! Got a chance to hold a pair of shark jaws whilst we waited.

The first shark finally appeared and it was very exciting, so the first group got ready and jumped into the cage.We were next up after this and luckily another shark had come to the boat, so there were two swimming around. Both sharks were around 3-4 metres in length and looked pretty damn scary from the boat. We wet-suited up, grabbed our snorkels and we were ready to go. They even equipped us with underwater cameras!

The ocean water was freezing cold and made it a little difficult to catch your breath. The cage was rocking all over the place in the ocean sway, so we grabbed hold of the bars tightly whilst we were down there. There were masses of tuna fish swimming about and one even got caught in the cage which we managed to rescue. Then we saw a shark!!!! Everyone was tapping each other and pointing, spotting where it was as we couldn’t talk. It was so exciting, as the sharks appear out of nowhere and can suddenly move so quickly. Here are a few shots of what we saw…

We even caught one smiling at us… though it looks a bit creepy!

The shark at one point got so close that it bashed the cage really hard with its tail and swam off underneath the cage.

Although we were down there for 45 minutes, the time flew by and it was time to get out. We’d seen two great white sharks, which we were happy about!! We cleaned ourselves up and watched the other groups from the boat

 Even outside of the cage on the boat, we snapped some awesome photos of the sharks!

Having spent a great day on the boat, we decided to make a night of it too and headed out with our ‘shark cage group’ into Port Lincoln for a well-deserved drink and dance. Kylie definitely knew how to dance, haha!

After a fun night out, it was time to leave Port Lincoln and head to Adelaide for a nice chilled out time around the city.

Peace and Love,
Lyds & Bex
xxxxx