Melbourne

MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA:
After leaving New Zealands' fiordlands we spent 2 days 'at sea' sailing through the Tasman Sea, on our way to Melbourne. The weather in New Zealand was much cooler than we had expected, so we’ll be looking forward to warmer temperatures when we get back to Australia. Each night of the 2 nights ‘at sea’ we had to turn our clocks ‘back’ one hour. So back 2 hours before reaching Melbourne. Australia has 3 different time zones, with each one having a difference of 1 ½ hours, some honoring daylight saving time and some not. So weird!

The strait between the  Australia mainland and Tasmania is the Bass Strait. We were close to Tasmania, and as we went by we could see wind farms all along the shore.  This was the first place in Australia to set up wind farms. Tasmania is an island State of Australia and is 150 miles south of the Australian mainland.  The capital and largest city of Tasmania is Hobart. The population of Tasmania is 515,000.  There are 334 islands surrounding Tasmania, some inhabited and some not.  A ferry runs daily between Melbourne and Tasmania.

Arriving in Melbourne early morning, was beautiful. The lights of the city from the harbor was a beautiful sight.

Just before sunrise

  Melbourne is Australia’s ’sports’ capitol. They love their sports. They enjoy soccer, cricket, which is a very odd form of baseball, rugby, and Australian rules football, which to us looks like rugby, with a few different rules and Tennis. Gene has been watching the sports on TV, the soccer he understands the rules, but the rest, he has no idea what the rules are.  The day we were in port Australia and United States were competing in the Davis Cup. The World Cup of Tennis.
The United States won. Not sure what the score was.

Melbourne is the Capital city of the Australian state of Victoria. It is Australia’s second largest city with 4 million people

The tour we decided to do was the Koalas and Kangaroos and Emu's.

Our tour bus and guide took us to 2 Sanctuaries. The first was Serendip Open Range sanctuary where did see lots of Kangaroos. The kangaroos are very visible along the edge of the bush and fields. All spread out, and all different sizes.

The guide allowed us to walk leisurely right towards them, once they noticed us, and stood up to check us out, we stopped, waited a bit, they went back to eating, so we walked closer. Once they feel uncomfortable about the distance between us, they hop off into the bush, and usually others follow. So we tried to pace ourselves We were able to get pretty close.

Some of the kangaroos had ’joeys’ in their pouch. When kangaroos are born they are about the size of a jelly bean, they live inside mom’s pouch 18-24 months. As they get older they do spend little bits of time outside the pouch, but are most comfortable in moms pouch.

After seeing these real kangaroos, I realize what we saw in Sydney at Featherdale wildlife park, was Wallabys, not kangaroos. Koalas can also be spotted in this open range sanctuary, and we did see a couple of them. One of them had been spotted near a watering hole the last few days, so our guide was pretty sure we’d see one today.

So DARN cute! But he quickly got comfortable on a branch and dosed off. They sleep 19-20 hrs a day.

Sure enough we did, we actually spotted two. Our second park was the You Yangs Regional park which has over 200 bird species, koalas and kangaroos. Where we saw the second koala was also the same place we saw this beautiful cockatoo. Our guide spotted it up in a tree, a ’galah’, a pink cockatoo, that has a rose colored breast,  we were all able to see the bird before it flew away, when it spread its wings you could really see the pink. We did get a picture,

but I’m going to post a better picture, one that I did not take. They are beautiful birds for sure.

  There was a ’morning tea’ stop mid morning on our tour, They have morning tea a lot here, usually a small danish to go along with it. Near the picnic area where we had our morning tea, was a possum sleeping in the ’y’ of a tree, just about 4 foot off the ground. He never woke up, but he got his picture taken by every single person on the tour bus.

The port in Melbourne is a beautiful port, and the harbor area had a lot of sail boats near our ship as we were departing Melbourne for our next stop.

Adelaide Australia. Before we went to bed after leaving Melbourne we had to set our clocks back yet another hour.