Melbourne 24 February

Today we arrived after a rough and rocky sea for almost 3 days in Melbourne with lovely sunshine. Bought a Mikey Ticket and took the tram to downtown in full sunshine.

First I took the tram downtown to Collins Street, had lunch and rushed back to my tour starting at 1.15 p.m. We saw a lot of this dynamic and beautiful city from the comfort of our motor coach passing at St. Kilda beach with all the nice old, renovated houses looking over sea and beach and lots of restaurants. We strolled through Fitzroy Gardens and passed at all the arenas built for the Olympics in 1956, renovated and still in use. We than had an hour break on a ship on the Yarra river which revealed the sites of the city from a wonderful unique point of view. 

Melbourne has approx. 4.3 million inhabitants and the number is growing by about a thousand a week. Contrary to other cities Melbourne kept his Tram net which spans over more than 220 km with between 40 to 50 different lines which take you almost everywhere. Melbourne became wealthy in the 1940s when they found gold. The gold rush attracted lots of Chinese but also others. During the rush around 7000 tons of gold were brought in a day! The biggest community in Melbourne is the Chinese one followed by a big Greek community of about 450.000 people and more than 350.000 Italians which brought not only good food to Melbourne but also coffee. Melbourne is coffee crazy and I must say, I had several good expressi and a fantastic smoked salmon sandwich in an Italian coffee bar. 

Alan, there was also an excursion to visit 3 local micro breweries with tasting sessions of fine Australian beers. 

Contrary to Christian, I think I like Sydney better. But we will see as after this voyage I will have three full days in Sydney before going on my 2nd cruise followed by another 3 days in Sydney after the Fijji cruise before flying to Ayers Rock and going back to Europe.