As you now know, we arrived in Melbourne not feeling the best. Simon was struggling the most at this point, with me mainly through the worst of it. After a stressful few hours of travelling we made it to our air b and b accommodation, which was lovely. More on that later. Simon settled straight into bed and the rest of the day was written off. We were told by a few people before our trip and also from a few blogs on youtube that if you’re sick, just stop, otherwise you will end up unwell for even longer than necessary. We decide to follow this advice. I caught up with bake off on youtube and wrote some blogs. Simon slept.

Whatever we did worked and the next day we felt well enough to go out and explore a little. Our air b and b was located near to the Botanical Gardens and the Shrine of Remembrance in South Melbourne. We left the apartment planning to walk to the Botanical Gardens, but ended up exploring the Shrine of Remembrance for about 2 hours. The SoR is a memorial museum dedicated to Australian men and women who have been affected by war and humanitarian aid throughout history. Initially, walking around the memorial, we were impressed by how beautiful it was and how well it was presented, but then we found the museum. You could spend days in here and never read and look at all of the memorabilia. Simon was fascinated. I was amazed. We felt that the timing of finding this memorial couldn’t be any better with Remembrance day coming up and spent a good amount of time here learning. The balcony of the SoR provided the most beautiful views of the city that we had during our time in Melbourne, and despite cold, we admired the views for a while.

So… lets touch on the weather. I’m cold. I know I can’t complain. I know it’s freezing in the UK. I’ve even seen some snow pictures. We spent a good 6 weeks in 28-34 degree weather and now it’s 15 degrees… I’m cold. Melbourne has the strangest weather as well. We were told it’s the city that has 4 seasons in a day, and we weren’t surprised that this was true. One minute it could be cloudy and cold, the next up to 22 degrees and sunny and then start raining and be cold again. It’s been a bit of a shock to the system, but at least we’ll hopefully be a little more prepared for New Zealand weather now.

It was time to head into the CBD for our next ‘I’m free’ walking tour. The company has expanded out to Melbourne and I have to say, I enjoyed this walking tour more. I felt like we saw more in the 3 hour tour and learnt far more about the history of the city. Our tour guide was so funny. Everything he said he repeated about 3 times in different ways, but maybe that lead to us remembering more afterwards and therefore the feeling of having learnt more. Who knows?! We met the walking tour at the State Library at exactly the same time that a protest was happening. People were protesting about Australia not taking on enough refugees and not helping enough. The turn out was massive and our guides told us that it’s a cause that many Australians are very passionate about.

We walked up to the Old Jailhouse and learnt that this was the Jail that held the famous Bush ranger Ned Kelly before his execution. We also learnt that the youngest inmate ever to spend time at this Jail was 3 years old for being lazy and disorderly. What?! From here we headed up to see the Convention centre. Interestingly, this building was the first building in Australia to be protected by UNESCO?, even before the Opera House! Apparently, they like to brag about that in Melbourne.

We walked along Bourke street and learnt some more about the history of Melbourne and how it was named after Lord Melbourne, an old Prime Minister of the UK. Bourke was able to design Melbourne from scratch and went for a layout that involved a gird system for the CBD, made up of one large street then one small lane street. This has lead to Melbourne having a lot of very interesting little lane ways and has built up the culture of lane way coffee drinking and street art.

We walked through Chinatown. There’s always a Chinatown. But in Melbourne there is also a Little Italy, Greek street and so many other ‘regions’. We nearly asked where Britain street was, but then realised that most of Australia is officially Britain street. Whoopsie.

We had a little break and then we were heading off to see the ‘real’ Melbourne. It was time to see all the quirky lane ways and street art. Many of the lane ways allow artists to put up legal graffiti, which will stay on a temporary or permanent basis. Here’s a selection of the lane ways we saw.

After looking at all the lane ways, we walked past the famous Flinders Street Station before heading over the Yarra River. My Mum had told us about the black swans which you can find on the Yarra river so we were keeping our eyes peeled. We didn’t see any this time though. We finished our walking tour in the arts district and with a view of the Eureka tower and the Melbourne skyline. We’d had a great walking tour and felt like we’d seen a huge amount of Melbourne whilst doing it.

We walked back through the city to see some more of the lane way art, but decided that we’d probably had enough for the day and should go back and rest!!

The next day we decided to stay out of the city centre and explore South Melbourne a little more and the area of St Kilda. We were both starting to get our appetite back and it was Sunday so the best thing to do on a Sunday in Melbourne is go for brunch! I’d looked up this little cafe online around the corner from where we were staying and off we went. It was called Magic and we had the best meal. I’m not one to put photos of food on Facebook, but this time I needed to because it was so good!

Feeling fuller and happier we took a stroll through the South Melbourne markets. We kept saying how if we lived here we would definitely come here often to buy meat, fruit and veg and all the pretty home decoration bits and bobs. Everything seemed far more reasonably priced than the supermarkets, so maybe this is the key to living cheaply in Australia? The whole market was bustling and it really had such an amazing atmosphere.

After our walk around the markets, we headed down to South Melbourne beach to walk along the promenade to St Kilda beach. We saw the ferry port where the ferry leaves for Tasmania and just enjoyed a stroll. We wanted to see where St Kilda Pier was as we were going to be heading back here later to try and find the Little Fairy Penguins. The whole walk reminded me of being in the UK. The weather was far more similar than we had been used to recently and just the feel of the area reminded us of being at home. Before heading back to the apartment for a rest before coming out to see the penguins, we had a walk around Luna Park. Luna Park is an old style amusement park, which definitely is also in Sydney, We didn’t want to go on any of the rides, they were pretty expensive and also looked pretty old and rickety, but it was worth a look.

We took the tram back, had a few hours to relax and then headed back out ready to see some penguins. Most people who visit Melbourne choose to go over to Philips Island and see the Little Fairy Penguins, but everything has been so expensive in Australia that we have been trying desperately to do the same things, but cut costs where possible. We had heard that St Kilda Breakwater also has a colony of Little Fairy Penguins, but the whole viewing is far less touristy than the Penguin Parade at Philips Island, and free!

We walked down to the Pier just before sunset and were pleasantly surprised to see some penguins even before sunset. We were told the best time to visit is at sunset as the penguins come back in from a days hunting to their colony on the rock. At this time there is usually the most, but also you can see them swimming in and jumping back up onto the rocks. We had a magical evening, even though it was pretty busy. I think the word’s gotten out about the penguins there. They needed around 10 volunteers telling people to not flash with their cameras or use white lights. Luckily, these volunteers had some red light torches that they used to show us the penguins and to let us take some photos. We ended up spending about 2.5 hours wandering around and watching the penguins jump up onto the rocks, looking at the fluffy babies and speaking to one of the volunteers about the colony of around 1500 penguins. We were blessed with a great spot and were even able to see the waves they were creating as they swam in. At one point a sea rat tricked us all into thinking he was a penguin though. Cheeky sea rat! We headed back to the accommodation so happy with the whole experience.

On our last day in Melbourne we spent some more time in the CBD and to finally head to the Botanical Gardens. I think I was having a little bit of a relapse this morning as I was feeling pretty weak, so the Botanical Gardens was a bit of a green blur. It was very pretty and there was this cool boat machine thing that drove around on the surface of the water breaking up algae, as they were having problems with a bloom at the time.

We then walked up to the CBD and had a wander around trying to find the little lane ways so that we could have a coffee ‘Melbourne style’. It was a pretty good coffee and the atmosphere was great with people walking up and down the lane way while we chatted and slurped away. Simon has been pretty interested in the Ned Kelly story, so we went up to the State Library to see some of the artefacts of his life. Ned Kelly is seen as a good guy, but also a pretty bad guy as well. He was a bush ranger and many people said he was like Robin Hood as he would steal from banks and rich people and sometimes give back to the poor. An example being him burning mortgage documents in a bank so that people were mortgage free. However, he did kill police men during his run from the law and as you can see, he is also a pretty bad guy. On the day he was captured he wore a very iron man like suit as he came out from hiding which we got to see in the library. There is an apparently good movie called ‘Ned’ starring Heath Ledger which we’ve been advised to watch, but unfortunately wifi is never good enough to rent a movie and we haven’t been able to find it in any of the hostel.

Our last stop of our last day was down to the Yarra River in the hunt for those elusive black swans again. We were sat on the bank of the river watching all the rowing clubs practice when we saw some black swans on the other side. We decided to go down the river, cross the bridge and catch up with them so we could take some photos. As soon as we got to the other side they stopped and came over to us, posing for photos. It’s like they knew. The black swan is extinct in New Zealand and is only found in South East Australia. I don’t know much more about it, but they were really interesting to watch and I have to admit it was pretty weird seeing a swan that was black instead of white. I wonder if they are still protected by the Queen? I hope so… we don’t want anyone thinking she’s racist.

We had an early start the next morning collecting our car for the Great Ocean Road so we headed back to the apartment and watched some Netflix stand up comedy and a movie with one of the guys we were staying with. We had the best time with our air b and b hosts. They were so kind and caring, helpful throughout the whole stay and just really interesting guys. One of them was from Columbia originally and the other was from New Zealand so we learnt lots of interesting tips from him for our time there. It was really lovely to have some time in someones home. It has been awhile since we could just treat somewhere like ours and we were really grateful to them for that.