I drove back to Sydney via the Hume Highway. This is more of a straight shot than the “scenic route” I took along Princes Highway on my way down to Melbourne. All the same, it was a beautiful drive and I got to see a lot of small rural towns along the way. The Hume is a 4-lane divided highway, just like the interstates in the USA, with 110-120 km/h speed limits. I think the trip took me about 10 hours.

I spent two whole days in Melbourne.

It was pretty fun but again, driving was a real pain. Melbourne is really a good city for public transport… it seems like you could go anywhere that way, faster and cheaper than driving. I still don’t really think trams are the best approach, though, because they don’t offer anything better than buses do but they tie up traffic a lot more, and require suspended cables above the roads everywhere and that really does get ugly. They also have a good network of trains for the longer trips. It seems like trains are a better approach, if you have the luxury of planning ahead of time where their tracks will go, but I suppose it’s difficult to add a decent train system in after the fact. Take Phoenix’s light rail for example… that thing is a step in the right direction, but will probably never achieve the “critical mass” to make it useful to a lot of people.

Anyway, these two days I took public transport almost exclusively, and I was a lot happier that way.

Some highlights from my time in Melbourne:

• Ate at Pho Chu The in Richmond. This one is supposedly kind of famous and was featured in one of those Vietnamese variety show travel episodes (by the eponymous Chu The himself). It was pretty tasty but not great — the only big difference between Viet-Australian Pho and Viet-American Pho is the quality of the beef… the Australian beef seems fresher/softer/tastier.
• Walked down Chapel Street from Richmond to St. Kilda. This is one of the interesting shopping districts in Melbourne and was fun and pedestrian-friendly. It was different from so many U.S. shopping areas because it grew that way “organically” instead of being centrally planned, and it shows in the variety of architecture and businesses. Instead of large, nationwide chains it was mostly smaller, unique shops.
• There are a lot of nice water views… I walked along the strand near St. Kilda and it was refreshing, with a sea breeze but smaller waves because it’s sheltered in a sort of harbor. There were some nice parks that seemed very family-oriented.
• Passed through Footscray, which is the other big Asian area outside of Richmond. There were a lot of pho places but I didn’t try any there.
• The CBD was all right but didn’t have a lot of the tourist stuff Sydney does (for better or worse).
• The Melbourne suburbs have street after street of interesting period architecture… some suburbs of Sydney are the same way, but it seemed more pronounced in Melbourne. It was interesting to see little pockets of history in places where people go about their day-to-day lives… we don’t get much of that in Gilbert, AZ where everything is so new and artificial. Melbourne has a real personality.

This morning I woke up at Karbeethong Lodge around 7am or so, had breakfast there, and after a walk around the lake I checked out. This was a nice place that I’d definitely like to stay at again.

This third day was the longest leg of my journey into Melbourne — about 7 hours of driving. It was an enjoyable drive the whole way though. I was kept company by the Australian public radio, which had surprisingly intellectual discussions about philosophy, politics, and (most surprisingly) theoretical computer science and cryptography. I’m not sure who listens to that in the Gippsland region of rural Victoria, but it was entertaining for sure.

For lunch I had some mediocre meat pies at a roadside cafe. Australian meat pies were one of the things I missed the most for the past seven years, but once I got there and ate a few, I realized they are really not even that good… definitely proletariat fare, filled with mutton or other savories with the consistency of cat food. Slathered in ketchup (”tomato sauce”) they are quite edible though.

Other interesting things about the 7-hour drive:

• The road signs depicting wombats and koalas (road kill).
• Everybody down there takes American Express.
• Most of Victoria was originally heavily forested but has been slashed/burned to make room for grazing.

This coastal drive, which I did in a leisurely 3 days, could easily be done in a week and still have plenty of fun stuff to do.

I got to Melbourne late in the afternoon, around 4pm or so, and began to really wish I had brought our GPS and paid $269 or so for the Australian maps. Melbourne streets were clearly not planned out very well ahead of time. They wind around haphazardly, and some of them are divided into four or more sections, with medians in between. The biggest single road hazard is the trams. Beloved of Melbourne’s people (I hear), these trams wreak havoc on road traffic. I read a statistic that there are around 400 collisions between cars and trams annually, and I believe it. Many of the roads are only 4 lanes total, but the outer two lanes are always filled with parked cars. This leaves only the innermost two lanes, which have to be shared between cars and trams. So what you have is a situation where you have to look all around and if there are no trams in view, you dart as fast as you can through the narrow portion to the next safe haven. Usually trams will be coming from one direction or the other so you have to be fast. The craziest thing of all is the “hook turn” which I think is unique to Melbourne. Here is an animation of how it works: hook turn.

The first hotel in Melbourne I stayed at was so bad I checked out early the next morning and found a different one. It was dirty and not well maintained. It wasn’t exactly cheap either. The funniest thing was this fat Aussie kid, probably 16 or so, who called me out onto the patio to look at some strange lights he was seeing in the skies. Turns out it was just those searchlights they shine into the sky to attract people from miles away, like when a store is having a grand opening. The poor kid had never seen them and was convinced it was UFOs or something. “I reckon it’s trippy!” he said, totally unconvinced by my explanation.

Got up early and walked along the beach in Jervis Bay. It was totally different from any California beach I’ve ever been on — the sand was a little whiter, there were trees growing right up to the high tide line, but the real difference was it wasn’t overpopulated. There were a few houses along the strand but after I walked a minute or two it felt like the middle of nowhere. I guess in a country with roughly 20,000 miles of coast, and only 20 million people, there’s a lot more beach to go around. Jervis Bay is particularly known for its dolphins, but I didn’t see any that morning.

Later that morning, I bought some breakfast at a little bakery in town and then continued driving down the coast. I think I drove about 5-6 hours that day, sticking to the Princes Highway most of the way except for a couple detours in Ulladulla (another coastal town even less populated than the Jervis Bay area) and along a couple of forest/logging roads. A lot of the area down there was state forest land, with towering eucalyptus trees (probably dozens of different species) and ferns. There were also some huge termite mounds as tall as I am, but the termites must have abandoned them or maybe they all stay underground. That day the weather was kind of misty and it felt like a true temperate rain forest (which maybe it was).

I reached my next destination, Mallacoota, late in the day. It really was in the middle of nowhere — just a small town of perhaps a couple thousand people, at the far southeastern corner of Australia. It was a 20 minute drive from the main highway, along a winding mountain road. The town itself is situated on a lake (or an “inlet” officially, that is separated from the ocean by a levee or something like that). The lake had a lot of big cranes and other birds.

I stayed at the <a href=”http://www.karbeethonglodge.com.au/”>Karbeethong Lodge</a>, which is really a bed and breakfast. I think I was the only one there that night, but it probably fills up quite a bit more in the summer. It was a comfy little place, on a hill right by the inlet, with beautiful views. It was odd for me to see such lush green grass everywhere and nobody even having to water it. There was a group of 10-15 gray kangaroos grazing on the hillside next to the lodge. I took a bush walk along the inlet for a ways. It would have been the perfect place for a small sailboat.

I had a quick dinner that night (a burger with beets and eggs, an Aussie favorite) from a takeaway shop, where I met an old Australian guy who was really friendly but I could barely understand a word he said. A real country accent. I felt bad later for not trying harder to have a conversation with him, because he was super cool but half the stuff he said I had to just nod and fake an answer. He probably thought I was a German backpacker or something. He seemed like basically an Aussie equivalent of Grandpa Bob.

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I checked out of the hotel and drove in the general direction of south Sydney, eventually meeting up with the Princes Highway. I ate lunch at Master of Yeeros in Bankstown (an old favorite) which was delicious of course. I then stopped at an internet cafe in Marrickville to print some maps — Marrickville sure has improved. It’s really an interesting little suburb now.

Around noon I finally got underway and started down the South Coast on the Princes Highway. My destination for that evening was Jervis Bay, which is about 3 hours south. The drive between Sydney and Jervis Bay is one of the most beautiful pastoral places I’ve ever been, with bright green grass and blue water. It looked just like the countryside where they filmed “Babe” (and it turns out it was; “Babe” was filmed in Robertson, NSW, which I passed within 5-10 miles of). The colors were made even more dramatic by the late afternoon sun, which always brings out more color in things for some reason.

I spent a little bit of time in Wollongong, driving past the Nan Tien Buddhist temple but I didn’t stop. Wollongong is a nice smaller city and it’s only an hour outside of Sydney. It has new, clean infrastructure and houses. Along the road there were all kinds of colorful tropical-esque birds.

I stayed at a nice little hotel/motel in the small town of Vincentia. The place was new and comfy and only a 3 minute walk to the beach. I ate pizza at a little pizzeria in the town that was okay but unremarkable. There was also a Mexican food place (!) but I had been forewarned about Australian-Mexican food.