A bit of Sydney and Melbourne with photo blog #6


A bit of Sydney and Melbourne

We’re on our own for a couple of weeks – very different style of travel, but more what we are used to doing. We had two enjoyable days in Sydney while again staying with a with Colleen. We found the “I’m Free” walking tour at the town hall. As it happened, our guide was the founder of the company (now has tours in Melbourne, too). We ate at a recommended café on a back street in the Rocks (Playfair Café) – good food and reasonable prices.

Later we took a ferry up the river to Parramatta. There isn’t much of interest in the town, but the ferry ride was fun. It started raining as we walked around a bit and with less-than-clear late afternoon ferry options back to Sydney, we took the train back into the city. We had several thoughts for our last day but ultimately decided to take the bus to the famous Bondi Beach and walk along the coast to Coogee Beach, stopping at Bronte Beach for a fish lunch. It’s a six km walk, paved with stairs here and there – not difficult at all. It helped that the air temperatures had cooled significantly for the day. Then we settled in to packing for our train ride to Melbourne early the next day.

We had spent a little bit of time on the way into town checking the layout of Central Station to have a sense of how to get to the Melbourne Train. As it happens, it leaves from the first or second track, but coming in by the subway train put us on a different platform each time. It worked quite well early in the morning, before the morning rush hour has arrived in Sydney. We found the train trip to be interesting, terrain changing a lot throughout the day. The last hour or so was increasingly dry and not so interesting but otherwise we enjoyed watching a lot of bush, then farm land as we traveled south. We were about a half hour late into Melbourne but had taken sandwiches with us so we didn’t need to find dinner that night. Our AirBnb apartment was right next door to the train station – couldn’t have been easier. It was in the old Victoria Railway Building that has been turned into apartments with the top two stories reserved for a hotel. The location was perfect.

We had one day in Melbourne and planned to do another walking tour – this one started at the State Library. Our AirBnb host recommended taking a few minutes to glance inside if we had time. Beautiful main reading room and a regular exhibit on the State of Victoria’s history, including Ned Kelly (kind of their Jesse James). We only had time for a glance but it is very well done. Our walking tour got off a bit slow but didn’t stop much after that. It was fun to see some of the back-alley cafes as well as the traditional stops around town.  After the tour we wandered back into one of Melbourne’s “little streets” to a recommended place for Chinese dumplings – really good. The core of downtown Melbourne is a free tram zone, with an additional free Circle Tram using the old style cars, which is a bit of a tour tram. We took that back to our apartment, made dinner and went to get our Miki Card for our trip to Geelong (Melbourne’s closest beach town).

Here's is Stan's Photo Blog # 6 - more of Sydney

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EWwrAXkrcbxPB-hHAQ7rMgBVWGrwzQD4/view?usp=sharing






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