Tag Archives: travel

Melbourne: Day 00

I arrived in Melbourne on Wednesday afternoon from Hobart – despite being full of coffee I managed to end up sleeping on the plane, but woke up in time to watch the plane fly over Melbourne on a very clear day, which is always awesome – seeing the CBD towers in the distance.

My delightful tour guide for Melbourne is MissNickiBee who meet me at Southern Cross Station and proceeded to take me back to her dungeon flat via tram.

Tour guide plotting my fate

Despite having been in Melbourne about three times before, this is the first time I’ve actually gone and caught a tram – was a pretty neat experience, they’re basically like thin trains but going down the middle of the street – much speedier and less annoying that Wellington’s buses since they don’t need to pull in and out every few minutes, they have mostly straight runs and primary right of way for all traffic.

One of the older trams, the newer ones are articulated into four sections and ride lower to the ground. If you're lucky, they have aircon and if you're very lucky, there's not too many people on it. :-)

After dropping off all my junk at her flat, we headed out for dinner at an awesome vegetarian only restaurant just block from her flat.

The thing I love most about Melbourne is it’s food – there’s a massive amount of selection, it’s like taking Cuba St and scaling it up by a factor of 20x whilst still retaining that small and cosy feel.

Whilst I was there, I must have passed about 4 different vegetarian only restaurants, including one particularly large one on the Thursday evening which was extremely popular and large enough to justify about 6 staff.

Didn’t get up to much as I was pretty worn out from Tasmania, so we had dinner, went along to a pub for a few drinks with a flatmate and then headed home to plan the next couple of days.

Looking out over part of Melbourne from a pub

Hobart: Day 02

1 Reply

My third day in Hobart is more of a half day, as my flight to Melbourne was scheduled for early afternoon, which did limit what I could get up to.

Ended up spending a good 1.5 hours at The Cupping Room, a very excellent cafe and coffee roastery.

To give you some idea of how much this company loves it’s coffee, there’s a bit blackboard showing the “family tree of coffee”, how different styles have become derived from one another.

OMG coffeeeeeee

And there’s a menu for the beans you’d like today….. @chrisjrn and myself went through the menu – my favourite is undecided, they are all quite different, yet all of them delicious.

So much awesome

And of course, the tasty, tasty cup porn:

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Certainly beats the “flavoured milk” airport coffee I had at Brisbane Airport which left a terrible aftertaste and breath. :-/

Aside from coffee, spent the morning getting shown around Hobart at high speed before heading to the airport to depart to Melbourne, all in all, a great trip. :-)

Many thanks to the awesome Chris Neugebauer (@chrisjrn) for acting as my personal guide for the three days I was in Tasmania. :-)

Hobart: Day 01

3 Replies

Wow, been so busy socialising and being outside I haven’t had time to blog post for the last few days… the horror! Currently sitting at Melbourne, waiting for NoFlyAirNZ to arrive 40mins late so catching up on posts….

My second day in Hobart was actually really a trip over all different parts of Tasmania – started off in Hobart, but headed up into the highlands, visited hydrodams and took a long scenic route to get to Launceston to meet my twitter friends IRL.

We started the day with a visit to the Cupping Room, a very excellent coffee roastery that I’ll blog about in more detail in tomorrow’s post. After filling up on delicious caffinated fuel, we headed off into the wilds of Tasmania.

@chrisjrn planned a route around the state that involved taking me through the hydroelectric dam areas, the highlands, many dirt roads and the reservoir lakes used by the dams.

The hydroelectric power stations themselves are actually not that large compared to the huge pipes running to them – I managed to get a picture of the pipes running down the side of a valley to one of the many stations:

My pipes are bigger than your pipes!

After seeing the dams, we headed up into the highlands where there are heaps of large lakes feeding water to the dams – I believe most of the lakes were originally around, but extended and enlarged for the needs of the dams.

It’s pretty barren up there, but a number of holiday homes/batches around, apparently there’s some decent fishing to be had.

Look upon my camera oh lakes and tremble as I convert you into pixels

Look, I'm being a posing tosser by some lakes!(pic by @chrisjrn)

I'm king of the highlands!! (pic by @chrisjrn)

We made it to Launceston in the afternoon, to meet my twitter friends @stumbeline, @kestra and @Wordy_Anansi for the first time IRL, which was awesome.

There was some time to kill, so we detoured to Cataract Gorge which seems to be a very popular swimming area – probably helped by the 30 degree sunny day :-/

It's got a bridge that's bouncy! *insane glee*

After crossing the mighty bridge of almost certain death, I headed over to meet with @Wordy_Anansi, who had made a huge amount of vege food deliciousness for us.

With the addition of wine, we had a fantastic evening and it was awesome to meet so many great tweeple IRL for the first time. :-)

@stumbeline, @kestra, @jethrocarr (duh), Mark (not on twitter) and @Wordy_Anansi

Me with @kestra

Hobart: Day 00.1

1 Reply

Some additional pictures from yesterday’s excursion into the wilds of Tasmania by @chrisjrn:

Photographic proof that yes indeed, I can sometimes go outside.

Hehehe, I got a dirty txt! ;-)

I'm going to twitpic these rocks!

I have conqured nature!

These bars can't restrain my awesome!

hmmm maybe they can actually.....

Come maul me babe..... ;-)

I was a little tooo naughty so had to go spend some time there.....

That’s all the dodgy pictures for now – come back soon for more blog posts as I tour AU :-)

Hobart: Day 00

3 Replies

Whilst I did technically land in Hobart yesterday, I only started looking around Hobart and Tasmania in general with the native @chrisjrn today.

We started the trip by going up Mt Wellington, but sadly were impacted by a lot of low-lying cloud making the views difficult.

Here’s a view from about half way up the mountain down onto Hobart:

With all the cloud instead of the amazing views I had been promised, I just had lots and lots of white, which whilst kind of charming in it’s own way, is clearly false advertising ;-)

After visiting Mt Wellington Fog, we headed onto the road around to Port Arthur with detours to interesting places along the way.

Always an excuse to stop for random self-camwhoring.

Chris took me to some really interesting natural rock formations at a cove, the geological activity forces the rocks to break in straight lines, they look like man cut blocks!

Check out those rocks!

@chrisjrn checking out the rocks

Following mystical rock cove (maybe not not real name) we decided to go checkout a blowhole.

Sadly it turned out to be a natural geological formation rather than some dodgy deviant makeout facility.

Natural tunnel formation - watch the water coming in before it splashes up

Splash! It's pretty hard to capture on camera really :-(

Of course the best part about the blowhole action was the salty salty deliciousness:

Fresh from the deep fryer, all chrispy and nommmmm

After refuelling at the blowhole, we headed to Port Arthur, where Tasmania had it’s convict colony to look at all the historical buildings:

Main prison block in the foreground

I can never say no to exploring a dungeon....

There’s some more dodgy pictures involving bars and chains that I’ll have to wait for Chris to upload at a later stage.

Meanwhile, here’s Chris looking dodgy and being reminded why long hair may be cool to look at whilst being very annoying to actually have:

Also, we went on a boat:

Boat View!

Captain Jethro!

After the boat trip, we headed back home – although did get interrupted by an (amazing for me) sight of a bridge being swung to allow a sailing boat to pass through the bridge.