Getting out of Melbourne and onto the beach

This is part II of my trip to Melbourne. Read part I.

After breakfast with my Couchsurfing host, I hopped on a tram and rode to Federation Square. This was the meeting point for a tour: a 2-day tour of the Great Ocean Road, with a surfing lesson. It was organised by Teepee Tours. Accommodation would be camping in a teepee.

Turned out that Teepee Tours was two guys, Andrew and Adam, who wanted to go to the beach and have some beers with friends, and Adam's dog Riley. They’d set up Teepee Tours after some of their foreign friends said they’d driven around the Great Ocean Road but didn’t really know where to go or what to do. They’ve been running tours for about a year now, twice a week, with two vans. 

There were a bunch of Americans, a few Canadians, two Swedes, some Germans, a French woman, a Kiwi, an Aussie, a Brit, a Norwegian, a Finn and possibly a few other nationalities on the tour. We compiled a multinational Spotify playlist for the drive. 

Our first stop was surfing. Despite having booked a whole surf weekend for next weekend, I was a bit skeptical. I don’t like sand and I don’t like the saltiness of the sea. I also find the power of the sea - that is, big waves - intimidating. That day the waves were a good size, “if a bit messy,” as Andrew put it. They were not huge, but big enough to surf, although it turned out that they generally ran out of power a bit too soon. 

We wriggled into our swimmers and wetsuits, grabbed some surf boards and headed to the beach. Our surf instructors had us run along the beach and swing our arms as warm up. One of us expressed her doubt that the instructors were simply having a laugh at our expense. Then we got on our surf boards. On the sand. We were assigned into groups of six, with a surf instructor for each group. Our instructor, a young guy called Jack, had each of us individually go through the motions of paddling and getting up on our boards under his watchful eye. I was sure I would forget everything he’d said as soon as I got in the water. 

We headed for the waves. Jack looked at me and said, “You’re first” (or something to that effect), and I was pretty sure I would be the first to capsize my board. To be honest, I have no idea if I was, because as soon as I was on my board, I forgot about the others, about making a fool of myself and about the sea being salty. I lay on my board, waiting for a good wave, Jack gave my board a push, I paddled, drew myself up on my knees, got up and fell off my board. Then I did it again, while Jack gave someone else a sendoff. And again. I capsized my board just lying on it, as I wasn’t in the middle of it. I capsized it by being caught sideways in a wave. I capsized it by falling off. I fell of backwards, I fell off sideways. I discovered I make the same mistake in surfing as I do in my aikido: I don’t bend my knees enough. But I also rode a wave pretty much all the way to the beach a few times. And Andrew, back on the beach, was true to his promise and captured photos of people standing on their boards. (Also sitting on their boards and lying on their boards. He took something like 100 photos.)

It was such good fun. A great workout, too: you didn’t know you’d been working out until you got back to the beach and realised how tired your muscles were. 

Lunch was Subway on the beach. Adam and Andrew were good at almost everything, except counting. They never got their heads around how many vegetarians there were. While disaster failed to materialise during this tour (i.e. I didn’t go hungry), one part of my mind was constantly calculating my own snack reserves and their adequacy in case we ran out of veggie food. 

On that first day, we saw koalas, hand-fed birds, played football (soccer) on the beach, jumped in the middle of the road under a ‘Great Ocean Road’ sign, saw the effects of the bush fire that had raged two months earlier (also the rapid regeneration that was already taking place), had a barbecue dinner and shared stories of all manner of adventures in a teepee around a fire. I was the only one to go to bed (in another teepee) around midnight. Everyone else headed to the beach, where - I heard in the morning - the breeze was rather chilly and nothing much happened. 

A koala at a camping and caravan park.

Feeding a bird at said camping and caravan park.

The effect of a recent bushfire. It 'jumped' over the road and burnt the shoreline vegetation too.

Breakfast the next morning was rather subdued and we set course for the Twelve Apostles rather later than the 10 am planned. The Apostles were rock formations on the coast. It was a beautiful place, and despite the hundreds of tourists, I wished we’d had more time there. But time was running fast and we still had a beach to visit, lunch to eat and a two-hour drive back to Melbourne to endure. 

Breakfast.

After said beach, we headed inland for a quicker route back towards Melbourne. The countryside was green and idyllic. After seeing beaches and towns for so long, I’d forgotten what a farmed landscape was like. It put me in mind of my three-month stint at a dairy farm in New Zealand. The happy memories. 

Lunch was fish and chips or, in the case of vegetarians, potato cakes and chips. Potato and potato, that is. We had also been offered pizza, however. Although this time, Adam had really miscounted and one vegetarian ate around the fish. 

The rest was a longish drive back to Federation Square. The others were heading to a local pub later, but I had an overnight coach to catch. I would arrive in Sydney at 7 am on Monday morning and my first lecture would be that afternoon...

A mad trip to Melbourne

Eleven days ago I realised it was Wednesday and that I had no plans for the weekend. In fact, I realised that it would be my last long weekend before Easter (as it happens, that is no longer the case, but that’s another story) and decided that I should use it well. 

I decided to go to Melbourne, that being a place that was fairly easily reached by coach. I found a 2-day tour of the Great Ocean Road that sounded like fun, contacted a few people on Couchsurfing and bought the coach tickets. Everything got sorted in a day. 

On Thursday afternoon, after having been to the university for an O-week (Orientation week) meetup and after spending an hour more than planned packing, eating and sorting other stuff, I headed to North Wollongong Station and caught the train to Sydney. As always when one catches the last service that will get one to the connection on time, the train was late. The train which was supposed to arrive in Sydney just after 6 pm arrived at 6.25. I was supposed to check in for my 7pm coach at 6.30 and I flitted around Sydney Central Station nervously looking for the coach stop. Of course, it then transpired that I could check in with the driver (rather than at the office) and that didn’t start till 6.45. 

Short version: I made my overnight coach. 

I slept remarkably well on the full coach, waking up twice: at each half-hour meal stop, the first around midnight and the second around 3am. I got out, stretched my legs, read some of my Finnish e-book (Neidonpaula, by Kristiina Vuori), bought some overpriced muesli bars and even chatted to a few of my fellow passengers. We arrived in Melbourne just after 7 am on Friday morning and I was feeling refreshed but hungry. 

Meal stop at 3 am.

Having a smart phone with a data connection (something I didn’t have back home) allows for less organised travelling. I hadn’t planned breakfast and I didn’t even have a map of Melbourne. I was relying on Nokia Maps and good luck. So far I’ve found that there are a few features that are handy on a smart phone: maps, the ability to research my travel destination en route and the ability to check my lecture timetable and location info on the bus to uni. Though when it comes down to it, I also have offline maps on my tablet that would do the job and after week 2 I’ll know my timetable by heart. So that just leaves the ease of travelling speaking for smart phones. Once I’m not travelling… well, we’ll see if the smart phone just ends up gathering dust in a drawer. 

I wandered in search of breakfast. A local saw me looking lost, staring at the map on my phone, wondering about strategy and asked if I was trying to find somewhere. “Breakfast,” I replied. She recommended a couple of streets with lots of cafés and I headed in the direction she pointed out. I ended up having a delicious breakfast of muesli with fruit, yogurt and honey, two slices of raisin toast and a café latte in Cafenatics. An excellent start for an excellent day. 

 

It was too early for any museums to be open, so I walked down to Federation Square, over the bridge and towards the Botanic Gardens. Along the way I discovered the Queen Victoria Gardens, the King’s Domain (park) and the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden. Typically, the memorial for women was designed by a man. Though the garden was constructed and planted in 1934, so maybe I’ll let it slide, just this once. 

The Botanic Gardens were a haven and I could have spent the entire day there, but I wanted to see a few other things in Melbourne as well, so I settled for a slow amble through the Australian Forest Walk. I find it amazing that Australian forests have dwindled - for the sake of match sticks. Some of the slow-growing conifers of Australia were logged by Europeans for match sticks. How important.

Having purchased a Myki travel card from a 7-Eleven, I caught a tram back to Federation Square. There, I briefly explored the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria - Aboriginal and modern Australian art. I don’t really understand art, but from a purely aesthetic point of view, it can be relaxing. After that I decided I needed to sit down, so I caught the free city loop tram and rode around Melbourne until I felt the need for lunch. 

I grabbed some Indian dahl to go and ate it on the lawn of the Carlton Gardens. The night spent on a coach was catching up with me, so after eating I stretched out in the shade and dozed. I was woken by a phone call from the guys running the tour I was going on the next day (I would say “tour operator”, but that would seem really odd, considering the nature of the tour - that’ll be a topic for the next post). Feeling refreshed again, I headed to the nearby Melbourne Museum. I only had time for one exhibition (I was pretty thorough) and a respite in the museum’s rainforest. The exhibition was called First Peoples, all about the Aborigines of Australia. Some stories were happy, some were sad, a few made me angry. 

After this I met up with my Couchsurfing host and we ambled around for a while. I spotted this great Star Wars mural and, of course, had to take a photo of it. With me holding my Aiki Wars mug. We had dinner at my host's favourite restaurant, an Indian place. That meant Indian food twice in one day for me, but I didn’t mind. I love Indian food. One of my host’s friends joined us, a chap who had just returned from India. We compared Finland and Australia, India and Cambridge, and talked about identity, politics, feminism and uni life. Afterwards, we walked down to the river and just sat talking some more.

I had couchsurfed twice before, in Gothenburg, and this third time did not let me down. In fact it was brilliant. We had a friendly game of table tennis before going to bed, I slept like a rock (though my host told me later that he’d been cold overnight and couldn’t sleep for fear of me being cold), and in the morning my host provided me with breakfast. 

Thus I headed back to Federation Square to jump on a tour of the Great Ocean Road, with a surfing lesson waiting for me...