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The Heat!!
We had heard that the climate in Melbourne is similar to England so we were hoping we'd have a chance to cool off after Canberra. Not a chance! We spent a week there and it was so hot the whole time, nothing like England whatsoever! We'd also heard a lot of good things about Melbourne, a lot of travellers prefer it to Sydney, and as we loved Sydney we were hopeful. We found Melbourne to be a very modern, multi-cultural city which was obviously very good but it didn't have the same feel as Sydney, it felt like it lacked something. We spent a few days exploring the inner city, riding on the trams and visiting the Botanical Gardens. On one night we came across a free music concert in a park, described as Australian reggae mixed with hip-hop and Latino, a very strange combination but it turned out to be a really good night. Everyone took picnics and wine and it was a very chilled out evening.
St Kilda
We found there wasn't much going on in the evening in Melbourne centre and discovered that everyone goes to St Kilda to party. It's a pretty seaside suburb about 10 minutes outside of Melbourne which was a strange mix of modern and classic. We found we liked it a lot and were glad we could stay out of the city centre for a while. We visited the beach and ate fish and chips over-looking the harbour, spent a day on the free trams visiting a seaside resort called Brighton! It had brightly coloured beach huts behind which was a beautiful skyline of the city.
Tennis!
The main reason for visiting Melbourne was to go to the Australian Open. I hadn't planned on going but ground passes were really cheap and I'd never been to a tennis event before so thought I'd give it a go. We had an excellent day, watching lots of games and trying not to get too burnt. We saw Andy Roddick, Davedenko, David Nalbandian and many more!! To be honest I'd only heard of a couple but it was really exciting and the crowd really got into it.
Craig loved it so much he went again the next day while I intended to spend the day on the beach. However, the temperature reached 40 degrees and the tennis was called off for the majority of the day and didn't start again until the evening but Craig had a good time bonding with fellow Andy Murray fans. I spent the day in the sea, floating around the calm bay, as it was incredibly humid and too hot even to sit on the beach.
Internal Flight
That night was one of the worst nights ever, the temperature didn't drop below 31 degrees and we had the smallest fan in our room ever. We had a flight to catch to Newcastle and had to get up at 4.30am with very little sleep. Consequently I was very ill on the plane and was nearly sick as we came in to land (where would you aim?!). Anyway, we made it to Newcastle and were ready to begin our mamouth trip up the cost to Cairns.
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