With only a couple of months to travel in between
leaving Auckland and our full-time return to the UK, we had to prioritise and
decided to focus on South East Asia and the USA over New Zealand’s friendly
Antipodean rival. Nevertheless, we did reserve ten days to catch up with
friends in Melbourne and Sydney, two cities I’ve visited before but which, on
this trip, I found myriad new reasons to cherish.
I
must confess that Melbourne, our tour’s first port of call, did not exactly
bowl me over on my initial visit some four and a half years ago. Knowing my
character - and specifically my love of coffee and culture - friends had often
remarked that Melbourne and I would be a heavenly match, but on my virgin trip
to Australia I surprised them and myself by liking rather more the glitz and
glamour of Sydney, with its iconic harbour and brassy beaches.
Melbourne,
characterized by café-lined back alleys, grand arcades and world class art
spaces, had felt more like a European city to me, and therefore inherently less
interesting to this London-based Brit. And with limited time constraining me to
a whistle-stop tour of little beyond the grid-based city centre, the charms of
Melbourne’s eclectic suburbs sadly eluded me. But with the benefit on this
visit of local friends to show us around, I was finally able to experience the
best of a city I should have fallen for half a decade ago.
After
Auckland, where bars often sit empty on a Monday night and city squares can lie
vacant at midday but for sun-basking pigeons, I was struck immediately by how busy Melbourne was. For all the ease of living
in a quieter city, I quickly realized that I’d missed the clatter and velocity
of a London or a Paris, and Melbourne certainly had shades of both. For one, it
boasts an exceptional public transport system revolving around an extensive and
always timely tram network. I’ve often thought Auckland, in some future era of
higher population and prosperity, would be a perfect candidate for a tram line,
and Melbourne certainly showed its benefits as it rattled us from suburb to
suburb, showcasing a city sparkling with culture, shopping and entertainment.
An
early highlight was a trawl through the labyrinthine Queen Victoria Market northwest of the city
centre and home to purveyors of every food type imaginable. Recalling France’s
grand marchés, its narrow undercover alleyways are hemmed with dozens
of window stalls proffering breads, cheeses, pastries, salamis, chocolates,
craft beers, juices, sandwiches and a hundred other delectable goodies. Our
friends do almost all their food shopping there, and it was easy to see why,
the range of fresh meat and fish particularly impressing. How anyone but the
most discerning chef can hope to choose between over twenty different butchers
flogging what appeared to be exactly the same cuts, joints and minces remained
a mystery.
Our mission at the Market was to source breakfast and we left sated with the dreamy pairing of a piping hot borek (a type of Turkish bread roll laden with spinach and feta) and an excellent filter coffee from an establishment whose tagline was “We love to make coffee for the city that loves to drink it”. Pretentious, perhaps, but their caffeinated output certainly delivered to the marketing spiel.
An
afternoon was spent hobbling (on account of a new pair of Converse I’d
foolishly overlooked to wear in before packing them as my only holiday walking
shoe) around Brunswick Street
in the north eastern suburb of Fitzroy, another trip highlight that cast
Melbourne in a whole new light for me. Bringing to mind parts of San Francisco,
with screeching trams rattling through unfeasibly long streets studded with
boutique shops, bars and cafes, Fitzroy is a haven for anyone with a vaguely
alternative taste in fashion, furniture and the arts. The homeware emporiums
were particularly inspiring, with gorgeous antiques jostling with expert modern
craft, and there were so many eateries that a resident might never have to
visit the same one twice.
On
which note, this being a holiday for us as much as an opportunity to explore a
new city, a significant chunk of our visit was inevitably spent eating and
drinking. Again, we were blessed with local friends to escort us around the
hotspots, but I was impressed in general by the high quality of bars, restaurants
and cafes we encountered. The volume of rooftop bars, dotted across the whole
city and offering skyscraper views as a backdrop to a twilight beer or
cocktail, particularly stood out, and left me wondering why more cities don’t
make such crowd-pleasing use of their upper floors.
One
watering hole we didn’t enter but which certainly had me intrigued was a garish
black brick corner bar near the Victoria Market named, I kid you not, Witches In Britches. From the
rubber ghouls behind iron bars that cackled as you walked past, it was clear
this was no ordinary establishment, but given its proximity to a strip of
brothels it was unclear whether this was designed as a fetishist’s fairground
or hen party’s final resting place. Either way, I was more than happy to
people-watch from across the street rather than risk poisoning from a pint of
witches brew.
Away from the CBD, it turned out Melbourne offers almost as much seaside interest as the more famously beachy Sydney. A tram ride through the gentrified and leafy suburb of South Yarra and the shopperheaven that is Chapel Street led us to St Kilda, where a long beachfront walk culminates in a cluster of oceanside bars, gourmet patisseries and the glamorously fading Luna amusement park.
More scenic was the daytrip we took with a hire car to
the Mornington Peninsular,
south east of Melbourne and a good two hour drive to its spindly apex. Once we
escaped the clutches of the city’s seemingly endless outer suburbs, the
landscape opened up into an idyll of rolling hills, lush woodland and sparkling
sea views.
Though the area is renowned for its wineries, a
limited timeframe for returning our vehicle sadly prevented us from indulging
in any cellar door tastings, but we were able to stop for a good old-fashioned
pub lunch at the seafront hotel in Portsea and then gobble down a hopelessly
decadent vanilla slice at the otherwise uninspiring town of Sorrento, where
such slices are proclaimed, somewhat dubiously, to be “world famous”.
If we harboured any negative feeling as we departed
Melbourne, it was reserved only for the cost of eating out, which felt high
when converting back to the NZ dollars in our bank accounts. But Kiwis have
long bemoaned how much better paid Australian jobs are compared to their New
Zealand counterparts, so the more expensive cost of living probably shouldn’t
have come as a surprise.
As I’ve blogged about it previously, I won’t linger
too long on Sydney, where we spent five nights following our week in Melbourne.
The city remained as intoxicating as ever, in part thanks to the exceptional
weather, unblemished blue skies and thirty degree temperatures belying the fact
that it was officially only a couple of weeks into spring.
With an ever-rising number of Kiwi and British friends
now based there, Sydney continues to hold an allure for me, and our mates
didn’t hold back from teasing us about our impending return to the damp and
chill of the British winter while they bask smugly in the searing Australian
sunshine.
Sydney’s weather though is not without its drawbacks,
as we discovered during a hot but lasciviously windy walk through scene-setting
Surry Hills. Every gust of muggy air
swept up and forged a maelstrom of tree dust, engendering the unpleasant sensation of
battling through a sandstorm. Our eyes and throats were so raw after only a few
minutes of valiant exploration in the face of this woody onslaught that we were
compelled to take refuge for a good half an hour in a gift shop until the winds died down.
The blustery weather again proved obstructive the
following day, when we were forced to call off a planned boat trip around
Sydney Harbour just as we’d finished loading aboard our hired vessel enough
food and beer to pacify the Wallabies. Though there was certainly a hot breeze
coursing through the bay where we were moored, it hadn’t initially seemed to us
seafaring novices to be anything particularly untoward, but the boatyard’s
owner was insistent that it would be far too choppy to be enjoyable once we got
out on the water.
Before disappointment could set in, however, the owner
graciously suggested that we could move to another, far more luxurious boat in
the marina and spend the afternoon playing on it, albeit without actually
moving anywhere. Though this wasn’t quite the sightseeing afternoon we’d had in
mind, it would have been churlish to complain about spending four hours hanging
out with friends in brilliant sunshine, and with all that food and booze still
to be guzzled. We even managed to fit in a spot of fishing - not that we caught
anything, so well adapted the local fish proved to be as they nibbled through
all our bait without once attaching themselves to our increasingly deflated
hooks. A couple of our group went for a dip themselves in the water, though
when we later noticed, mere meters from the boat, a stingray that was closer in
size to Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi submarine than your average marine life form, I
was thankful I hadn’t joined them.
The rest of our time in Sydney was spent exploring
some of its inner suburbs. The quaint terraces and shady trees of Paddington, for example, provided
the backdrop to a pleasant afternoon dipping in and out of boutique shops and
cafes. We especially enjoyed a pair of lunchtime toasties at a café called,
cutely, Not Just Coffee,
on narrow Perry Lane off Oxford Street, followed by a stroll around the
perimeter of the vast Centennial Park. We also paid an early evening visit to
Bondi Beach, where lively seafront pub The
Bucket List cleansed our weary limbs with pints of pale ale soundtracked by
a live dreampop band.
Outside of the CBD, we were fortunate enough to spend
a couple of nights with friends who live in Little Bay,
a sleepy community several inlets down the coast from Bondi. Though the area
has none of the entertainment options that abound in the more central suburbs,
it does boast a stunning secluded beach and cliff-top walking track that
meanders for a couple of kilometers through the local golf course. We enjoyed a
memorable afternoon flip-flop sauntering along it, dodging golf balls and wary
of the snakes that were said to have been spotted in the area, but also
marveling at the tourist brochure views that left me briefly questioning why on
earth I was giving all this up for the grime of inner city London.
Yes, I’d be lying if I said that leaving Australia after a fortnight of non-stop sun-kissed fun didn’t tug a little at the heartstrings. Certainly, it hit home as we boarded our Thailand-bound flight at Sydney Airport that this really was the end of our time ‘down under’. But with so many friends this side of the world, and with so much of Oz still undiscovered, we won’t need any excuses to come back again and again.
Jonny
