At around six o'clock in the evening on a Thursday, we arrived at an empty shell of a house with missing floorboards, dust sheets up everywhere and a half complete circuit board.Why were we in this house, you might ask - were we squatting? No. We had, in fact, been invited to stay here.
Cast your mind back to the last time I was in Melbourne. A kind lady called Sara cooked dinner for Charlie and I, and told me to give her a call if I was ever in Melbourne again. Well, I gave her a call, but unfortunately her spare room was full. She tried her sister's house, but that was full as well. As a last resort, she said that we could stay in her son's house, which was being renovated (hence missing floorboards, etc.). So we arrived and settled ourselves in on the sofa beds in the dusty lounge rooms - but it was like heaven compared to sleeping in the van!
The next day, I left the other two to their own business, as I was on a mission to buy some nice clothes (everything I'd taken with me had been practically ruined over the month we'd been on the road). While I did this I took the time to look at some more of the street art, and sample the city's "best coffee" (it wasn't all that). That evening, we took the tram down to St Kilda, which had been advertised to us as one of Melbourne's trendy streets with some nice bars, but in reality it was actually the place where all the prostitutes hang out (I didn't actually notice any, I was too busy trying $5 mystery cocktails and shisha pipes).
On Saturday, we went to visit Sara (it was the least we could do since she did find us somewhere to stay). She told me that she'd be with a client in her home office (she's a big-shot lawyer) so we could just walk in, make ourselves at home and help ourselves to anything in the kitchen. Her house was big and full of leather bound books - Matt and I were very jealous. After guiltily gobbling down some cereal, we didn't really know what to do apart from sit there playing with the dog in hushed tones until Sara was finished with her client, after which she almost force fed us and drowned us in cups of tea. After we'd been speaking for a while, Sara popped out of the room and returned with a key dangling from her finger and said "by the way, we have a beach house about an hour south from here if you want to stay there for a few days?!" We were all taken aback and didn't really know what to say. Being the polite, British idiots that we are, all we could do was repeatedly say thank you over and over again. Not only did she give us access to her beach house, but she then went out and bought bags and bags of food for us to eat while we were there.
The plan for the next few days was to drive down to Philip island to see the penguin parade, then stay at the beach house in Mount Eliza for a couple of nights. We ended up leaving too late to make it to the penguin parade, so went straight to the beach house with the intention to see the penguins the following night. We never made it due to poor weather, and we just spent two days at Mount Eliza mainly playing jigsaw puzzles (Amanda and I had a race to see who could finish one first, but I did the gentlemanly thing and let her win ;) ), eating, reading and watching movies.
On our return to Melbourne, we took Sara's dog Bonnie for a walk to the war memorial, which was closed by the time we got there, but to be honest I didn't mind so much because I've really missed walking dogs!! It was also a big novelty to have a dog that fetches sticks instead of just chewing them and growling when you try to get it back. After one final night at David's house, we set off for the capital of Australia - Canberra.
It's a long drive from Melbourne to Canberra - especially when you take the long route. We did pass a cafe on the way that served excellent tea and scones, though. I'd say it made it worth it. Luckily, petrol prices had dropped by 10c per litre since we last drove anywhere. Unluckily, every time we needed to buy more petrol we were away from all civilisation, so petrol costed about 10c per litre more than everywhere else in Australia, so we ended up paying normal prices. It's still cheaper than England though. At around 11pm, we arrived at Katy's house in Canberra (I lived with Katy last semester in Wollongong) and after a quick catch up we all passed out.
In the morning, Katy took us on a whistle stop tour of the city which involved seeing old parliament house, new parliament house, the aboriginal embassy, the war memorial, and the memorial fountain (from afar). It was all very pretty, but it was a very strange city. Most cities are built as people start to live there, but I got the feeling that Canberra was built before anyone moved there. A lot of people say that it was purpose built to be the capital, and you can see why. A lot of people also hate Julia Gillard (the Australian prime minister), but when we went to see her in parliament she seemed nice enough and quite charismatic. She does keep trying to enforce silly policies though (for example, a huge carbon tax, even though one of Australia's biggest exports is coal).
The next day, we went to Questacon, the Australian science museum (come on, we do biology, chemistry and physics - we couldn't resist) where we found out that Matt has the taste buds of a non-taster but the habits of a super-taster, I have the taste buds of a super-taster and the habits of a non-taster, and Amanda was patronised by a member of staff while she assembled a model of the human body ("Do you know what the gall bladder does? Erm.. yeah I think that's right...").
We were pretty keen to sample the night life in Canberra, but apparently because uni hadn't started yet, then it would have been rubbish. Maybe one day we'll be back, but for now, it was time to come back to Wollongong. I had a great three months travelling around and living out of a very small back pack. There were high points and low points, times when I was frustrated, but also moments that I never wanted to end. I met some amazingly generous, kind, interesting and funny people along the way, as well as a few weirdos, but I'd do it all again in an instant. Most of all, this summer has inspired me to try to be that person who takes in random travellers and treats them like royalty, as so many people have done for me. A huge thank you!
This will probably be the last blog for a while, until something interesting happens in my life.. for now it's just normal university life, so until next time, thanks for reading!
