April 7-10: St. Kilda, Melbourne, by Cathy

Technically, I think the highly-recommended “Great Ocean Road” route starts in Adelaide and ends in Melbourne, but I’m guessing that the stretch from  Port Fairy to Lorne is why it’s so highly recommended by tourists and locals alike.

We arrived at our Airbnb in St. Kilda, Melbourne in the early evening, immediately happy to have chosen it as home base as opposed to the CBD (especially since I had some navigational difficulties getting us there and the downtown traffic was very trafficky).

We were on the top of an 8-floor building and had different views from every window. It was also a great place to see and hear the masses of birds flying about the area.

The building was located just off the Esplanade on the back of a small park called Alfred Square, providing us access to the beach and its lovely boardwalk, streets full of cool stores and restaurants, and even an amusement park. Our first night, we ventured out to get a feel for the neighborhood and to find some takeout food for dinner.

We came upon a place called Grill’d, where we placed an order and sat outside to wait. At the table next to us was a man and a gorgeous, huge, white dog, both of whom I quickly befriended. The dog, the man told me, was not a Great Pyranees, as I’d thought, but a maremma sheepdog. Wait, why did that sound familiar?

In Port Fairy, I’d learned that nearby Middle Island had a population of fairy or little penguins that were protected by maremma sheepdogs – an idea whose success was made into the movie Oddball, which I immediately rented. I also had to do some Googling about it, the results of which I put into another post.

On our last night in St. Kilda, Mick and I decided to take a ride on the roller coaster at Luna Park.

Luna Park opened in December 1912, and its roller-coaster, the Scenic Railway is the oldest continually operating roller coaster in the world. It’s also one of only three roller-coasters in the world that is run by a brakeman (like a cable car operator).

We liked our neighborhood so much that we only ventured into downtown Melbourne once, but we saw a lot and can see why so many people like it.

We really liked the graffiti art we saw around Hosier Lane.

From Hosier Lane we walked along the Yarra River and crossed at the Southbank or Rainbow Pedestrian Bridge. It reminded us all a little bit of Singapore, with less humidity and fewer bikes (although there were a mysterious number of public bikes at the river bottom?).

Mick and I went to the top of the Eureka Building, the tallest in Melbourne, to see the views, while Jeff hung out beside the Yarra River, watching an entertaining street artist swallow swords and the like.

In addition to its gold bling, the Eureka Skydeck is the highest public viewing platform in the Southern Hemisphere at 984 ft. It also has the fastest elevator in the southern hemisphere – 29.5 feet per second or 88 floors in 38 seconds.

Back in St. Kilda, we enjoyed a beautiful sunset on the eve of our departure from Australia.

Some random stuff about Australia I want to remember:

• In 1996, within weeks after a mass shooting that resulted in 96 deaths, Australia banned semi-automatic and other military style assault weapons and since that time there have been NO mass shootings.
• The wild rabbit is considered big-time pest in Australia. Brought from Europe and the UK in 1859, their numbers have exploded (because, you know) and theirdestructive hole-digging and grass-eating now represents up to $1 billion annually in damage. In Queensland, it’s illegal to keep one as a pet with penalties up to $44,000 and six months’ in prison.
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• Australia ranks 56th in the world in terms of broadband speed. We can personally verify this one.
• Australia’s deserts are home to some 1 million camels- the largest number of purebred camels in the world, many of which are exported to the Middle East.
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• The Australian Alps receive more snow annually than Switzerland.
• Aboriginal culture is the oldest culture on Earth.
• Australia was the second country in the world to give women the right to vote in 1902.
• Australia’s Capital is located between two mountains and its name, Canberra, is Aboriginal for “woman’s cleavage.”
• Wombat poop is square.
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• Wallabies are known to break into Opium crops, get high and run around in circles to create a “crop circle”
• It would take around 29 years to visit one of Australia’s 10,685 beaches each day.
• Four out of 5 Aussies live less than 35 miles from the coastline.
• Australia has the world’s longest golf course measuring more than 850 miles long:
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• Australia is home to 21 of the world’s 25 most venomous snakes.
• The Anna Creek Station in South Australia is the world’s largest cattle station at over 13,000 square miles.
• Australians refer to English people as Pome, which is actually the acronym for Prisoners of Mother England.

With that, in the words of Roland Jordan, we bid Australia adieu and hope to be back again some day.