8. October – Melbourne – Victoriamarket – Boat Tour – Botanical Garden

Today is our last day in Melbourne. We try to get up relatively early – but we have to pack and have to do some bookings – and at the end it is 11.30 a.m., before we start. We follow Jan’s advice to take the car the a tram station in the area and take the tram, again no. 58, downtown. It is a ride of 30 minutes for about 30 stops until Queen-Victoria-Market.

This is probably the biggest market (hall) in the Southern hemispere, anyways, there are lots of stalls selling food, clothing, houseware etc. Annette got two sets of special peeling „knifes“, to do vegetable spaghetti etc. And there are lots of exotice food and other stalls. This week-end, there is a Dawali-Fest (indian?) going on here – there are lots of Asian people and lots of interesting food stalls, nepalese, indian, malaian, Sri Lankan. Here you can see the chef preparing a dish from vegetavles, eggs, cheese and so on – he is treating it as a savage with 2 spatulas on a hot plate.

But it tasted good.

Then we make our way to the shore of the river Yarra to get a boat there that is supposed to leave at 2.30 p.m. We are lucky and made it in time – but the boat went into the „wrong“ direction, that is, instead towards downtown and the docks, upriver along some subburbs.

After this tour we took a nice coffee on the Southbanks of the Yarra – with a grat view on the citiy.

We end the day with a visit to the Botanical Garden. It is a lovely park. And next to it is the Sydney Myers Concert Bowl – and close to it they constructed a Shalespearean Theatre (from corrugated sheets that will be taken down again) Actually, we would have liked to see a stage play of „What you will“ but couldn’t get any tickets any more – and were to late to try it infromt of the theatre.

But the Botancial Garden offers at this time of the year a lot of plants blossoming.

We go back by tram to our car and by car to our home. Here, Jan prepared a wonderful vegetable pie for us (she had an appointment and wasn’t there).

Then we left for the airport. It is said that Melbourne has 4 seasons in a day. We experienced a heavy thunderstorm and rain on our way. And that means that all plane are late. We had a dely of 1 hour and arrived only at 1.30 a,m, in Cairns….

Until tomorrow!