Victoria Transportation

Trams are the best way to get around Melbourne

Awesome city thats is super easier to get around, take the free tram it takes you too all the great spots and you can get on and off as much as you wish. Great shopping so have your credit card nice and full of cash!! Handy to stay in the city but try and organise early what you feel like for dinner as places fill up pretty fast.

You can take a tram here from Spencer Street. It is where you catch the Spirit of Tasmania ferry to Devonport.

Built in memory of those who fell during the First World War, the Great Ocean Road often gets missed out when travellers are planning their itinerary across Australia, perhaps because places such as Uluru and the Gold Coast are so much more well known and publicised. This is a shame, as the South-Western corner of the Victoria Coast from Nelson to Torquay - the surfing capital of Australia - is home to two National parks and is easily one of the world's most scenic coastal routes. Nowhere more than here is it so obvious that Australia focuses all it's energies on ecological tourism much more than building theme parks and nightlife destinations - suggest to an Australian that they should build anything near any sort of natural site and see how long it is before you find yourself hanging upside down from a lamp post. As a result of this national love for the environment, this is one place on Earth where you can still spend days without having to encounter another human being, just wandering through rainforests or visiting natural attractions - and I can't honestly think of a better reason to head for Australia. Tour guides and local information centres also appear to be overflowing with information on the history and ecology of Australia, which is refreshing to those of us who wish to learn about what we're seeing rather than just moving from place to place going "Wow" at regular intervals. Information plates can also be found sticking out of the ground at every site, not just containing a bit of information but almost the whole history of the area. In Britain it's often hard to find a shop where the salespeople know anything about any of the products they're selling, so to be able to ask a question and be given an in depth five minute explanation comes as quite a pleasant surprise. Tours of the Great Ocean Road can be booked in either direction from Adelaide or Melbourne, and can be taken either on large coaches with groups of tourists or in the form of a more cosy four wheel drive tour. In 2003, Tanya and I booked a small group tour along the road and were driven from Adelaide to Melbourne in a six seat vehicle accompanied by just one other person - if at all possible, this is the way to explore the route. We stopped at outback accommodation which consisted of not much more than two bedrooms and a kitchen, and was sited on something resembling a cattle ranch - and we had our guide's entire attention as we saw the sights of the road without having to mill about as part of a large group. Such small group tours can be booked from local Youth Hostels or by calling in at one of the roadside tour offices in cities around the country which cater for small parties. Along the way, the Great Ocean Road snakes through rainforest, past spectacular beaches and incredible rock formations - sometimes only feet from the edge of the cliff. One day, part of the cliff is going to fall away unexpectedly and take somebody with it, but that doesn't stop nature lovers flocking here to make the same road trip year after year. Careful and quiet visitors will even see Fairy Penguins and Seals basking on the beaches along the way, or perhaps even spot a whale tale rising from the waves far out to sea. The National Parks in South-West Victoria are also home to some of the last remaining colonies of the Rufous Bristlebird, an almost flightless bird which only continues to survive here because it makes it's home in the thick vegetation of the cliff tops where predators cannot reach it. Known for it's breathtaking scenery and such natural wonders as the Twelve Apostles and London Bridge, the Great Ocean Road is also a place of tall stories and legends - all of which are predictably heart warming and romantic as tales of shipwrecks and mysterious rock formations jutting from the ocean often are, but many of which have probably been altered over the years. Nevertheless, these stories create a mythology which brings visitors flocking to this part of the coast in their thousands, and anything that brings the wonders of nature to a wider audience can only be good in my eyes.

You can read my full travel journals at http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

My guidebook to Australia, which is going in the bin tonight due to the fact that I no longer need a tome the size of War and Peace taking up my luggage space, states that there is a lot to see around Melbourne. It then states that it all revolves around shopping centres and Skyscrapers, which isn't exactly my idea of sightseeing. According to the book, there isn't much here in the way of Scenery - so I set out today with the Melbourne what-to-see and map pages torn from their binding and stashed safely in my pocket, to see if I agreed. My hotel backs onto Batman Street, which has absolutely nothing to do with cricket or the caped crusader - it seems that back in colonial times Melbourne used to be known as Batmania, the sort of information you pick up on your travels over here which manages to raise more questions than it answers. Melbourne has one thing in common with Adelaide, and that is the fact that you can get around by tram. However, the system here is much more reminiscent of the one in San Francisco, with a whole network running throughout the city to provide a very good level of public transportation. A green and maroon coloured tram runs for free around the edge of the city for the benefit of tourists, although having tried it out on my first morning in Melbourne I am at a bit of a loss as to exactly what purpose this serves - in Sydney there is a brilliant tourist bus service which stops off at all the places of interest but the Melbourne tram visits none of the major attractions and still leaves the visitor a fair walk away from wherever they want to be, so wherever you get off you still need a map to get to where you're going. It is, however, nice to be able to walk around the cobbled streets and pedestrianised malls with trams trundling back and forth everywhere - it gives the city a real old world feel. In the afternoon, street entertainers appear around the central Mall area where they perform for a large crowd in much the same way as back home in London's Covent Garden - in fact, the acts were pretty much exactly the same as at home, but that didn't stop every one of them claiming to be the only people in the world able to do them. Today there was a fire-eater, a magician and a guy on a unicycle who juggled lit torches and samurai swords and who followed every tram down the street pulling faces at the passengers. This is part of what makes Australian cities different - just when you think you've seen everything, you turn the corner and somebody's coming at you balancing a lit torch and riding a unicycle!

You can read my full travel journals at http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2