A Day with an Australian

Today we were shown around Melbourne by Debbie, a 32 year old native Australian who was Shirley Jackson's roommate on her trip to Machu Pichu. In other words, a total stranger half our age spent her entire day driving us around. It was a delight. She is a lovely young woman and we totally enjoyed our day out with an Australian. Debbie is an event planner (actually trained as a zoologist, but got into event planning because there are more parties than zoos) who loves to travel, and has been all sorts of interesting places. Her next trip is to see gorillas in Rowanda.

The weather wasn't totally co-operative for sightseeing as it was foggy today, so the Brighton Beach bathing boxes were still colourful, but there was no view of the Melbourne skyline across the bay. By the way, those little sheds sell for $150,000. Melbourne is a lovely city and obviously a temperate climate, as palm trees grow here. It has ocean front (expensive area) and the Yarra River flowing through it. Lots of art galleries (all in one area) and sports arenas (for football, rugby, cricket, etc. - all in one area). We had lunch in a little Italian place that did wood fired pizzas.

Then we drove up Mount Dandenong. We stopped at William Ricketts Sanctuary - all sorts of clay fired scupltures placed in the natural environment, with moss, water, tree ferns, gum trees and so on around them. The sculptures are largely of aboriginal people, the only non-aboriginals are depicted as despoilers of the environment (William did not seem fond of his own people).

Then we went to SkyHigh to the look-out over Melbourne. Unfortunately, although the sun was shining up on Mount Dandenong there was still fog on the city below.

Then we went to Debbie's parents home on Mount Dandenong for tea - Debbie had requested scones and cream cakes, so we had a full English tea in Australia. We had a great visit with them, met their two Airedales, stuffed ourselves, and and saw a kookaburra close-up and heard a kookaburra laugh. We also saw red and blue parrots flitting around the trees.

Debbie brought us back to town, and we are now ready to go out to a Chinese restaurant for dinner (apparently we are only a couple of blocks from Chinatown).