I took my mid-week trip to the market for supplies of super fresh pasta (leek and sweet potato ravioli sold conveniently by the each) and some of the amazing range of cheese available here. On my way back I decided to take the frivolous tram route. In other words the one that took me nowhere near the right place but offered instead a far more interesting exploration opportunity. Just call me the modern Kiwi chick version of Burke and Wills but better prepared with fresh market supplies to sustain the lost expedition into the Melbourne interior.
I discovered that a number 112 tram gets me to the vicinity of the beach promenade on Beaconsfield Parade. This looks out to Port Phillip between South Melbourne and St Kilda Beaches.
Beaconsfield Parade is a wide avenue of traffic and apartments, old and new, with sea views bordered by palm trees and carefully racked yellow sand. Sand IS yellow you ninny, I hear you all tisk at me but not all sand is quite this yellow. Some stretches can be white, others black like West Coast Piha grit, but the sand along the entire plush coastline of Port Phillip looks as if they've added yellow food colouring to enhance it's attractiveness. Groomed is the term I choose to apply to the boulevards of the Melbourne Riveria. It reminds me of Napier's Marine Parade or Wellington's Oriental Bay, in party dress.
They like regiment in Melbourne. First the shop window displays, now the beaches. I have to say however that having a decent long stretch of wide sand, pavement boardwalk and grass reserve to potter along is extremely pleasant, especially on a day with such glorious sunshine as this one. No riparian rights for the rich here, the beach is for everyone. Europeans with your rocky shoreline and three deep rows of beach huts and deck chairs, eat your heart out!
That brings me nicely to one of two sets of people I chatted to today (I have my mother's permission now to talk to strangers just as long as I don't accept any sweets :-). Marieke from Koln (Cologne to the non-Germans among us), and French-Spanish Camille are two sweet backpacking girls I led to the Acland Street eateries after wrong directions sent them in the opposite direction. Headlines read: 'Kiwi chick turns Melbourne tour guide'. I know my way around now better than some locals! The girls are at the end of their Aussie sojourn and about to head home with observations about the backpacking lifestyle similar to mine.
After two months of itinerant living they were ready to return home and settle back down to reality. Living out of a suitcase is fun for a while but there is always a hankering for a bed to call your own and somewhere to hang your hat. You meet great people on the move, see the world with fresh eyes and experience more than you would if you stayed at home. You cram so much more into an international backpacking trip than you ever would vacationing at home. It's just the way it is. If you make the effort and spend the money uprooting yourself to another country, you make the most of every minute. The girls agreed that they would be going home for a rest as every day touring Australia had been filled with activities they would never have contemplated at home, like snorkeling, skydiving, that sort of thing.
They also admitted that exploring Australia made them ashamed at how little they had seen of their own countries. I had the same realisation some thirteen years ago when in England, I had to deflect interested questions about NZ destinations with: “Hmm, good question, I dunno, never been there.” It was this shameful epiphany that led to my lifetime's New Year's Resolution to travel every road in New Zealand. Most intrepid Kiwis look at me as if this feat is an impossibility and I'm obviously deluding myself, but that has not stopped me making a serious dent in my target. Anyway Camille and Marieke were both friendly and chatty and quite unlike the Aussie fishermen suffering at the hands of my interrogation earlier on my walk.
Typical of the Aussie bloke (similar to the Kiwi brand), this group of recreational pier-fishers answered my questions about the day's catch, like their teeth were being pulled with rusty pliers. Their faces were so transparent that I could see the same silent freaking out on each one of them without needing to read the otherwise blankness of their minds. The saucer eyes of the collective (what do you call a group of fishermen? 'A Catch'? 'A Tackle'? 'A Keeper' or better still 'A Tosser' of fishermen perhaps?) all screamed the same terror, namely: “Oh my God Jonesy, it's a gurl and she's tawking! Whadda we do, whadda we do? Why is she picking on us to tawk to? Please God make her stop.”
The best I got out of them was that they had caught baby marlin and they were not the slightest bit interested in New Zealand although they work with a few Kiwi blokes. One of them however tried a nice bit of sidestepping, throwing his mate Jacko into the lion's pit by suggesting that because he had been as far as Geelong, that made him a traveler and a starter to give New Zealand a “beet of a go”. Apart from the amusement, talking to them was like picking oakum so I waved farewell and found me instead some friendly backpackers.
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