The Melbourne Ultimatum…

(Riding the sofa, St Kilda Beach, January 2008)


Chelle spent most of the night either sitting up in bed or sitting in the, er, sitting room of the hostel. She felt right crook, I reckon (see! We speak Aussie!), but – apart from feeling tired – she felt better in the morning. I felt knackered, although to be honest I had slept through most of it, but realised that I should really drive, so after saying goodbye to our new German friends we loaded up and drove off.

Before getting to Phillip Island, where we had a cabin booked for two nights (luxury!), it was deemed important to go to Wilson’s Promontory, a bit of National Park which sticks out below Watarah Beach and Sandy Point, our discoveries of the previous day. Each National Park costs money to get into, to pay for the construction of the gates from which to collect the money I suppose, although they claim it’s for the upkeep of the park. As far as I could tell, ‘upkeep’ means letting things grow in peace without doing anything to them, but what do I know.

We paid our $10, and drove through some bush before following a sign to Whisky Bay. According to the map we had been given, this was a beautiful sandy bay, and when we got there after a 10 minute walk from the car park, we could see that they were spot on. What they hadn’t mentioned, were the damn flies. It really is hard to appreciate scenery with one or both of your hands constantly waving around in front of you.

We almost ran back to the car, and Michelle talked me into driving to Squeaky Beach, which is the main reason for heading down this far. In another of those genius ‘tell it like it is’ Aussie namings, Squeaky Beach is so named because as you walk barefoot in the sand, it squeaks. We tested it out for a few minutes – yes it really does squeak - before high-tailing it back to the fly-free environment of the car. We drove down to Tidal River, drove past all the campsites, wondering how the hell all those people coped with the flies, and headed out of the National Park. As we got to the gates, another first. A kangeroo wandered out of the bush in front of us. Luckily I wasn’t going very fast, and we managed to stop, watch it bounce around in front of the car, stop and look at us, and then bounce off the other way. How cool!

We could tell that the day was going to get better when I noticed that we were very short of gas, and about two miles down the road a gas station appeared. They are few and far between out here, and everyone tells you to fill up when you can, not when you need to.

It’s a long drive up and along the coast but Chelle is feeling better, it’s a sunny day and before we know it we are going over the bridge into Phillip Island, and heading for the main town, Cowes. Yes, Cowes. Phillip Island is twinned with the Isle of Wight. It’s a small island, and within 15 minutes we’re driving up the main street, turning left and finding our YHA lodge, which is actually a cabin. A walk to the supermarket and a splendid Chelley-cooked stir-fry later, we walk down to the waterfront where there is an evening market happening, along with a solo singer doing Crowdies songs quite well. We sit and listen as the sun disappeared, and it’s a good end to a good day.

It’s a bad start to any kind of day the next morning, with rain falling, a grey sky and the necessity of wearing more than just a t-shirt for the first time in a long, long time. Breakfast is provided at this place, and we have cereal, toast and coffee over in the communal dinning room, sitting and chatting with a Nigerian Lady and her three kids, who all now live in Melbourne and are making use of the school holidays. The room is packed full of people in no real hurry to go out in the rain, but we eventually decide to go down to the main beach and have a look. Looking is all we can do, because Watamai Beach is closed. It’s easy to see why, as it is difficult to stand upright in the winds that are blasting off of the sea. The next beach along is only accessible via a steep set of steps, so we try and hold on to each other as we watch the one brave/stupid surfer in the water from the cliffs above. The beautiful houses overlooking the sea provide some distractions as we drive along the clifftop, and we find a café to have coffee and egg sandwiches and take refuge from the wind.

We nearly decide to miss out on Smiths Beach, the final public beach along the south shore of Phillip Island, but then change our minds. We’re glad we did. It’s packed, as it’s the only beach that’s open on the whole island, so we get our towels and books from the car, put on another layer and find a space. It’s not nearly as windy down on the beach, and we settle into watching the hundreds of kids (and adults) with body boards tackle the waves. The lifeguards have about 20 layers of clothes on, and we muse on how long it would take them to get the layers off if they needed to get out in the water quickly.

We reluctantly leave, and nip back to the cabin for more layers and to make some sandwiches, because we’re off to see the Penguin Parade. This is one of those ‘tourist’ events that generally leave me a little cold, along the lines of some of the zoos we’ve been to. Mostly it’s me being a bit of a snob, but sometimes it seems that the event has impinged on the natural order of things, and I often feel that we, as people, have little or no right to be there. But simply by being a tourist I’m perpetuating the order of things, so I guess I don’t really have a leg to stand on. This is something that I could go on about forever, and I do actually lay awake at night thinking about, but suffice to say that I’m still travelling, only with a conscience to always try and do the right thing. More of this probably when we go into the Northern Territory, and see Uluru.

So, anyway! We head for the south-west of the island and firstly the peninsula called The Nobbies – I guess because, no, I have no idea why they’re called The Nobbies. It’s almost literally blowing a gale, and we’re wearing woolly hats and snowboard jackets that we didn’t think we would need until we hit New Zealand. The coast-line is home to seals and, surprisingly, seagulls. Surprisingly, because it never occurred to me that seagulls would have a home.

The Penguin Parade is a fancy name for the moment each evening at dusk when the penguins leave the water, where they have been looking for food, sometimes for up to three or four days, and return to their burrows. The scariest bit of this journey for them is across the beach, where they are exposed to predators and defenceless for the time it takes them to waddle up the sand. In the water they are agile and can get away from most things, and in the bush they are small enough to hide and have camouflage, but across the sand? Scary. So, of course, the centre have set up terracing and lights, where up to three thousand people sit and watch the penguins run for their lives.

Now to be fair, this of course means that the penguins are actually a lot safer then they would be if there wasn’t three thousand people watching their every move, but if you had three thousand penguins, twenty times as big as you, watching you drive home from work every night, wouldn’t it worry you? According to the rangers however, the centre has been there so long that the penguins are used to it, and, as they rightly point out, if they didn’t like it, they would build their burrows on another part of the island without the viewing stations. The centre build lots of burrows for the penguins, which helps because they are essentially quite lazy creatures, but don’t interfere beyond observation, and ensuring that us tourists stay back and don’t interfere either.

Some people seem incapable of following simple instructions, like no flash photography, or don’t try and reach out for the penguins, but I guess these are the people that ignore advice anywhere, and hopefully the Darwin theory will kick in at some point and do the right thing by these idiots.

So I feel somewhat reassured, especially after chatting with Ranger Dan, and we get back to our cabin late and sleep.

This time it’s my turn to feel crook, and I spend most of the night out of bed and feeling sorry for myself. By morning I feel better, if a bit tired, and after Michelle has some breakfast she does first stint at the wheel as we drive back around the coast road to Melbourne. I doze for the first hour or so, and then take over at the wheel as we head into the city, as we have discovered that my driving is better than my navigation, and Chelle’s navigation is a lot better than my driving, or indeed my navigation. Luckily the hostel, in the beachy suburb of St Kilda, is easy to find, and we check in to our expensive double room, which is big enough for the bed and very little else such as bags. Or feet.

The ‘luxury’ (as it is billed) room usually costs $99 a night, which for a double with a bathroom in a beach suburb of a city, isn’t too bad, but because we have managed to schedule our stay to coincide with the Australian Open tennis tournament happening up the road, is now costing us $140 a night. And they can only do 4 nights of the 5 we wanted, so we have found another hostel across the city that has a twin room for the last night. The hostel is part of a chain called ‘Base’, which is a triumph of style over substance. The place is designed to the hilt, with the façade covered in red plastic squares, the reception decked out in funky red and white, a clubby looking bar and lots of good looking staff. But for your $140, you don’t get any towels. They are $6 extra. You are not allowed to bring alcohol into the hostel, but you can drink yourself stupid at the (expensive) bar. The kitchen is big, but it’s hard to find a knife or fork that hasn’t been mauled, and certainly wasn’t washed and dried up, or put away. The washer/dryers are a reasonable cost of a dollar for ten minutes, but there is a minimum charge of $5. Even if you just want to, for example, dry your towel after being on the beach all day because you don’t get towels in your ‘luxury’ room. And there’s more, but I’ll shut up now.

We have to take the car back to the Thrifty office, which of course is in the centre of the city. We have a map in the Lonely Planet bible, which looks useable, so we set off up the St Kilda road, with a plan to turn left onto Flinders Street, and then right into Elizabeth Street, where the office is. This plan goes very well, until we see the no right turn sign at the Elizabeth Street junction with Flinders. It seems that, if we had been in London, what we were trying to do would be turn into Oxford Street. Chelle does her usual top notch navigation job, and, including a few intuitive guesses when we had wandered off the map, we finally find the Thrifty office, just as we realise that we have fill up with gas before returning the car. The three people we ask as we are stopped by the pavement have no idea where we could go, so we set off, following all the one way roads and trying to remember where the office was and stumble across a 7/11 gas station north of the city. We fill up, take the car back, where they don’t bother to check if we’ve filled up or not, and set out down Elizabeth Street for a look see.

It’s a compact city, and all the usual city stores are here. We get down to the station and find Federation Square which seems to be the hub of the city, and where the Information centre can be found. Melbourne has a fantastic tram system, so we buy a weekly ticket each and find the number 16 tram back to St Kilda, which is 5km out of the city, along with all the commuters, which briefly reminds us that normal life is going on around us.

Back at the hostel, and after finding a local supermarket, we manage to cook a noodle stir-fry with a fork, a pan and two toasters, before walking along the beach to the pier. It has been a warm day, but with the wind added to the evening, it’s chilly and we wish we had bought something to wear over our t-shirts. I call my friend Fiona, a St Kilda resident, who I also met in LA, and we arrange to meet the next evening, as well as planning a bit of a reunion with some other Melbourne-ites and Nick, who is visiting for the tennis. I call Ben, one of ‘the others’, who is up for the plan and offers to gather another couple of people. I’m looking forward to seeing them all again.

We go back and watch the tennis, which is happening live just 5km up the road.

Breakfast at the hostel is a reasonable $6, and sets us up for a wander around the area, which we like to do. Some of it is similar to Venice Beach or Santa Monica in it’s welcoming and encouragment of an alternative lifestyle, some of it further away from the coast is like a London suburb with seemingly specific ethnic areas, all mixed in with cafes and those expensive clothes shops with nobody in them. There are plenty of eating options for us, with a healthy slab of veggie or vegan places, and we discuss these later while sitting on the beach. The sun is strong today, and I decide to go for a walk along the boardwalk to find drinks. It’s nearly 4.30pm, and considering it’s school holidays, the middle of summer, and we’re on the beach, all the kiosks bar one have closed down for the day. The one I find is in the process of closing, and it seems odd as people from work start descending on the beach and riding their bikes along the boardwalk.

We leave the beach by 7pm, and eat gorgeous veggie burgers (chickpea for Chelle, tofu for me) with salty, herby big fat chips at a place called ‘Grill’d’, before showering and dressing up in jeans and coats to go and meet Fiona. She turns up in shorts and t-shirt, it’s quite warm out, and we’re way over-dressed.

It’s great to see her again, she looks fantastic, and we buy wine and go back to her excellent flat, which is a two minute walk from the hostel, and chat until we realise it’s 1.30am. We arrange to meet the next night, she insists that we stay at hers for the last night instead of the other hostel, and we walk back to the hostel.

Despite the late night we are up early and eating raisin toast, before walking 50 yards down the road to a bike hire office and getting a couple of ‘cruisers’. The bloke assures us that we won’t need any gears for our journey along the beachfront, so we head off and try and get used to the things. They are so soft it is like trying to ride a sofa, and initially we glide along the flat bike lanes alongside the beach.

There are a couple of steep-ish hills, which would have been easier with a couple of gears to change too, but all in all it’s a fun ride into the wind. We get to Brighton Beach, but continue down to Hampton where we find a waterside café by a yacht club, and drink lattes and water. There is some kind of race going on from this club, and the roads are awash with the spoils of richness – Porsches, Mercedes and all types of SUVs clutter the road while their owners sail water-going versions against each other.

The cycle back is much easier with the wind, and we stop off at a beach that is lined with beach huts. It’s like being on the Suffolk / Norfolk Coast again, without the rain obviously, while the road alongside the beach is just like the beach road from Brighton to Hove in the UK. We feel a little homesick, remember where we are, look up at the sun and carry on having a great time.

Stopping only to consume an ice-cream back at St Kilda, we continue our ride to the north, spotting the port a few km up ahead, to make the most of the hire. It’s a nice ride there, but an absolute killer on the way back. The wind is like a gale coming off the sea, and blowing right in our faces as we try and peddle our sofa-bikes with one gear. After what seems like hours of hard work we make it back to the cycle shop, mention the wind to the guy who says he would have given us mountain bikes if we’d told him we were going that way.

We have plans to meet up in the city tonight with the LA crowd, so we try out a veggie pizza joint in Aclund Street and eat early. They turn out to be more like pies with piles of veggies on top of a wholemeal crust, but we like them anyway, and then get ourselves smartened up for going out. Fiona calls and says she’s running late, gives us the address and says she’ll meet us there. It’s odd dressing up (as well as we can, we hadn’t really packed for social functions), and getting on the tram into the city as the sun went down seemed somehow glamorous. We got off at Collins Street and walked along the road, looking for the number we had been given. It turned out to be about four blocks along, and just as we got there, Fiona stepped off a tram, which had pulled up next to the bar.

I was a little nervous about tonight – this group of people hadn’t been together for three years, since I had been in LA during my lost weekend, and I worried that we would all be sitting looking at each other, wondering what the hell to talk about. I was also nervous for Michelle. Meeting one at a time had been fine, but I worried that meeting 5 in one go might be a bit full on, and that she would feel a bit left out. But I needn’t have worried. She had already meet Nick and Fiona, so they were great, but Ben, Jared and Georgie were excellent, and as soon as we walked in it was all about the hugging, the drinking, the talking, and it was so good to see them all again. Ben has pretty much been frozen in time, and is such a nice guy that I wish there was some way I could help him figure out what it is he wants to do. Jared already knows what he wants, and pretty much knows how to get it. He had an audition set up for the next day, which he still hadn’t learnt any lines for, but he’s the kind of bloke that will charm his way through pretty much anything. Once you get past the bluff he’s a rad ninja to know, and I’m so pleased we got to meet up again. Georgie, well, I don’t really know her that well. She wasn’t around in LA for very long, but we did share a room for a couple of days, and she remembered me as “the Austin Powers bloke”. It could have been worse, I suppose. The bar was pretty empty and the waitresses joined in, and all too soon it was time to go catch a cab, as the trams had long since stopped running.

We had made plans to meet up with Jared in March, on our way back through LA, where he now lives, and more immediate plans to meet with Nick for coffee in the morning, before he flew back to Wollongong early afternoon. A cab ride with Fiona back to St Kilda, and another late night walk back to the hostel.

The next day we meet Nick at Federation Square and he shows us a side street near the station which is chocka with cafes. We sit and have coffee, chatting away until he has to go and get the bus to the airport. The second goodbye is a lot harder, as we won’t see him again for a while. Get sorted, my friend, and we expect to see you on the telly soon.

We wander off around the shopping centre of Melbourne for a while before heading back to Degraves Street and lunching at a wonderful place called ‘Café 5’. If you’re ever in Melbourne… Southbank was next, and a slow walk along the riverside leads to the Casino. Now we’re not what you might call gamblers (as two of the very few people to go to Vegas and not bet any money on anything), but this place was huge. Room after room of people betting on all sorts of events from cards to horses to roulette to cricket to football to – well, you get the idea. Fascinating for a while, but the desperation hangs heavy in the air, and we needed to get out. We found another tram, the 96, which took us back to St Kilda and while I rested my knee, which had now started to throb and puff up, Chelle went to do some washing at a launderette down the road. More difficult than it should have been, she got back 2 hours later looking like she had been out with her mum for a while (only kidding Anne!), and needed resting before doing anything else.

Still, we now had a whole pile of clean clothes to choose from, and we chose carefully before going down to Aclund Street to find some noodles. The place we found was closing, at 9.30pm, but let us in. Excellent noodles, excellent rice and back to the hostel by 10.30pm, where we sat and caught up on emails for an hour while listening to the increasingly bad chat up lines from the Irish lads in the hostel, which fought with the increasingly bad, and very loud dance music coming from the bar. Maybe it just seemed that way, but there can’t be many 18 – 21 year old blokes left in Ireland, as they all seem to be in the Base Hostel in St Kilda.

We go to our ‘luxury’ room on the 2nd floor and Chelle falls asleep almost instantly while I watch the Bhagdadis v. Saffin match from the Open on the telly, turning it up to compete with the bar downstairs. I finally fall asleep to the sound of a room full of Irish boys singing ‘YMCA’. At least I can tick that off my ‘must do’ list now.

Surprisingly we are both quite spritely in the morning, but Chelle is more spritely than ‘others’ and goes out for a run. We’re packed and out of the room at 10.00am to meet Fiona outside with our bags, to move to hers for a night. We go to Café Brewhaha – which is next to the vegan restaurant ‘Lentil as Anything’ (one for Kilbey there) - for scrambled eggs and lattes, we meet Fiona’s actor friend Daniel who co-owns the place and then we go for a drive.

Fiona gives us the grand tour of Melbourne districts, including Pahran, Toorak, Richmond, Smith Street, and Fitzroy, where we stop off in Brunswick Street, famous for it’s coffee, and have green tea. She has stuff to do so drops us off at the Victoria Market, which is full of Aussie tat, beautiful looking veggies and fruit, and stalls selling leather look goods. We catch a tram back into the city and go to Federation Square before looking around the exhibitions at the ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image), spot a really old Mac Plus in a store window, and walk down to the Yarra river, where we sit and have a drink as people drift by to and from the tennis going on just down the road.

Another tram ride back to Fiona’s, where we all get ready and walk down to the Pelican Bar on Fitzroy Street (confusingly, not in the district of Fitzroy, but in St Kilda) and meet two more of Fiona’s actor friends, Josh (more Woody Allen than Woody Allen), and Andrew (an Aussie Pierce Brosnan). They are both excellent people and we talk over the hub-bub of the bar before heading to another place up the road called Mink. Josh goes home and leaves the four of us wanting coffee as we leave the bar at 2.30am. Coffee is hard to find so we go back to Fiona’s flat for a brew and carry on talking, and talking, and talking and it’s 5.00am before we grudgingly give in, and Andrew calls a cab. We sleep in Fiona’s bed, she borrows her neighbour’s spare room.

Remarkably, we’re up, showered, packed, out the door and on a tram by 10.00am, and picking up our car in the city by 11. We pick up our bags and Fiona, and have a last coffee round the corner before heading off over the West Gate Bridge, and away from Melbourne.

Everyone had told us that we would ‘love’ Melbourne, so it was inevitable that it couldn’t quite live up to all that expectation. The tour with Fiona helped, because we realised that the city has an ‘energy’, and a buzz about it. It’s more villagy and less international than Sydney, and I think it’s worth another visit. Or two. Maybe three…