Day 92 - Melbourne to Geelong

  Geelong, Australia
Monday, December 3, 2007

When we woke up the sun was shining, which always makes us pack quicker, so we were out of the hostel just after 9am.

Katie had just about got over her food poisoning, and it even looked like we'd got away with our Japanese meal last night without any new stomach issues.

We headed straight to the car hire place (Hertz has been consistently cheaper than all other hire companies over here), picked up our slightly-less-executive car, and drove back to the hostel.

We collected our bags, checked-out and headed off to explore some of the Melbourne suburbs.

Needless to say by now the sun had been clouded out, and by the time we got to Fitzroy it was threatening rain.

Fitzroy is a nice area of town about 10 mins north-east of the centre, and has a nice mix of bohemian style cafes, and regular restaurants & shops. We didn't bother to stop due to the weather, so carried on towards Richmond.

Richmond is just north of the Yarra river, but east of the city, so quite near the MCG cricket ground & Rod Laver tennis arena.

Unlike it's London namesake, Richmond is a big Vietnamese area, with apparently the best Pho (beef noodle soup) outside of Vietnam!

We'd never seen so many Vietnamese businesses on one street before outside Asia, it was very interesting.

Again it looked like it was going to tip down, so we pushed on to South Yarra.

Unsurprisingly, South Yarra was south of the Yarra river (I kid you not!), and this was probably our favourite. It borders an area called Toorak, which sounded a bit too much like Borat for me to take it too seriously, but it was undeniably a pretty cool area.

The man artery was Chapel Street, which had excellent shopping, alongside very nice restaurants, bars, bistros, delis, all that good stuff...

Unfortunately our luck ran out 2 mins after leaving the car, so it was soon thundering down with rain, so we sheltered in a nearby food court. We realised it was around for a while so took an early lunch (smoothie & wrap), and then ran back to the car.

We left Melbourne and decided to head south, through St Kilda and down to the Mornington Peninsula. We didn't really have it planned out, but we hoped to outrun the rain, and a few people had told us that it was a nice area, so what the hell...

The drive down took us through some nice little beach towns, and we hugged the coast all the way down to Sorrento, where we planned to take a car ferry across Port Phillip Bay to Queenscliff.

This map shows the land in yellow, so we were going to get the ferry from the right yellow blob to the left yellow blob! Very technical Al, good job...



We cut inland from the water to have a look at a 'scenic road' recommended in the guide book, which had some very good views on a very bad day.



Pretty soon we were pulling into the ferry port in Sorrento, and had 15 mins to kill before the ferry left.

We decided on a quick walk up the cliffs to get a view over the port. The only problem was that there were HUNDREDS of bloody flies everywhere!

Katie took this snap of my camera bag, it was like a Hitchcock movie or something.



The flies were a nightmare, so we cut our walking short and headed back to the car.

The ferry itself was not cheap (A$58), but it was a new boat and a decent ride, all 35 minutes of it!



As you can see, the weather was still a bit "grimass" as Katie would say (grim), but at least we would be very close to our final destination of Geelong when we got over to the other side.



Sure enough, it was only about 30 mins from there to the town of Geelong, and the weather got progressively better the closer we got.
 
We were due to spend tonight with my friends Paul & Jacqui, who I used to work with in the Tie Rack international team. I always really liked them both, and then they got together which was cool, they make a lovely couple. They got married, and moved to Australia, settling first in Melbourne and then moved down to Geelong.

I called Paulie to get directions to their place, and pretty soon we met him in a local car park, to follow him home.

Paulie & Jaqs are a wicked couple, really easy-going and very funny, so I knew it would be a fun evening with them. They had another friend from London staying with them when we arrived who I'd met before, called Rob.

Fortunately they're renting a lovely big place in the 'burbs of Geelong, and there was plenty of room.

We had a great catch-up with them for a few hours, and then went into town for a really good Thai meal. After that Jaqs kindly dropped the boys off in Geelong while she & Katie went back home for an earlyish night.

Paul, Rob & I had a few problems finding a bar still open in Geelong at 10pm on a Tuesday night (?!), but eventually we found one in the process of closing.

We charmed/begged our way in for "one" drink, but were soon downing beers, sambucca, and a rather fruity banana liquer that I spotted lurking in the corner of the top shelf! The boys LOVED it. Ok, no they didn't ;)



After that abbreviated but fun little drinking session we walked to another pub across the road which was crammed full of "pokies", what the Aussies call fruit/slot machines.

None of us had any idea how to make any money playing pokies, but we felt a bit uncomfortable ordering drinks without playing them, so we tried our luck.

Some of you will remember that I am the world's unluckiest (worst!) gambler - particularly those of you who were in Vegas with me - so I spent a spectacularly pathetic half hour throwing money away without any reward, only to hear Paulie picking up $10 jackpots within a few minutes!

Rob's machine only paid out receipts (?!) not money, so he didn't even get to hear the money coming out... He was too embarrassed to collect his $0.35 + $0.40 + $0.25 winnings, I would have been right up there!

Check this out, have you ever seen anyone more happy to have won about 40p?! ;) 



It's a bizarre experience gambling over here because the pokies are always surrounded by a myriad of leaflets warning of the dangers of gambling and offering support etc.

Naturally Paulie thought I could do with reading these, so kindly spent a couple of minutes reading them out to me and then throwing them at me. How was I supposed to gamble through that sort of abuse?!

Eventually I got somewhere near back to parity, Paulie was up, and Rob about level, so we called it a night and hit the beer garden, which we wished we'd seen an hour ago!

After a couple more beers we got a taxi home, arriving at about 2:30am.

Seeing their dog Bill's football, I decided it would be fun to play 'Wembley' against Rob, forgetting that a) it was 2:30 in the morning, b) the girls were both asleep and Jaqs was working tomorrow and c) the 'ball' was filled with beans, so every time it hit the walls the noise would reverberate around the entire house. D'OH!

After finishing off yesterday's blog on their PC I collapsed in bed, clearly in perfect shape for our 11 hour drive along the world famous Great Ocean Road!

Great night though ;)


Lots of love,


Al & Katie xx