View Larger Map
After leaving Apollo Bay, we continued following the Great Ocean Road. This shot is from the car as we were just driving out of Apollo Bay.
The road hugs the coastal cliff closely from Apollo Bay to Torquay (the surf capital of Australia, according to the signs), then heads in a near straight line north inland to Geelong where it becomes the M1 freeway into Melbourne.
The views along the road are just stunning and I tried to capture some of the best views, but it was really tricky in a moving car going around hairpin turns and there really was no place to stop, so most of the images
images didn't turn out. This one happened to be on one of the short straight sections and it gives an idea of how the road clings to the cliff.
The one place we did stop was at Split Point, near Anglesea, to take a look at the lighthouse.
This is a view from the base of the lighthouse looking west back towards Apollo Bay.
This is the lighthouse itself. After a couple of cool, overcast and rainy days in Adelaide and the Barossa Valley, we had an absolutely cloudless sky on our drive to Melbourne. I love the bright white and red of the lighthouse against the blue sky.
We arrived in Melbourne at around 2pm yesterday afternoon and after checking into our hotel, we dropped off our car.
Our hotel is south of the downtown core on St. Kilda Road, a wide, tree-lined busy thoroughfare that reminds me of University Avenue in Toronto with a streetcar line running down the middle of it.
View Larger Map
The drop off for the car is on the northern edge of the downtown core, so it was a bit of an adventure in navigating, creative driving and a little blue language, but we made it. Colin appeared quite ready to give up the car for a few days.
The good news is that the cold that I've had since we left Cairns is almost gone now. The bad news is that Colin is just getting it. Oh well. I found some homeopathic stuff in the drugstore that I think is the Australian answer to Cold-FX. It certainly helped and I have enough left over to give Colin, so hopefully he won't be bothered by it
for too long.Anyway, this morning, we got up, grabbed our usual breakfast of bacon and egg sandwiches and flat whites (regular brewed coffee with steamed milk), then caught the tram up St. Kilda Road to Flinders St. where we caught the free City Circle Tour tram. Melbourne has got a very extensive network of trams and subways and a day pass costs $6.80 AUS (about $5.50 CDN). In addition, they have a free tour that travels in a circle around the downtown core and has a recorded guide pointing out the various sights. You can hop off and hop back on at will. It was a great way to see the city.
On the tram, the recorded guide mentioned a shop where you could learn all about opals, which is something Colin had wanted to do while we were down here, so after we finished the tour, we got off a short stroll away from the opal shop, so of course we went in to look.
After that, we crossed the street to the Flinders Street Railway Station and took the subway a few stops back south towards the hotel. The station that we got off at was a couple of long blocks east of St. Kilda Road, where our hotel was, but it's in a rather funky shopping section called Prahran. The street we strolled down, Chapel St. reminds me a bit of Queen St. East in the Beach, but without the beach.Stopped for a sandwich and a pint at the Prahran Market, a huge indoor food market, (twice the size of St. Lawrence, maybe?), then caught a
tram out to St. Kilda Beach and walked out to the end of the pier where we rewarded ourselves with a cocktail before heading back to our hotel.No great gastronomic delights to report. We decided to stay in tonight and take it easy, so I ran next door to Barbarino & Wong's and got some take-out: Thai green curry chicken and spring rolls. Really nice.
Tomorrow, we're off to Tasmania!
Prahran Market
View Larger Map
The City of Melbourne, as seen from the end of the St. Kilda pier.
