My head is spinning from our whirl wind tour. It was quite a week. Melbourne was beautiful, and we walked along the Yarro River,

and around the precision of the gridded streets, avoiding celebrating football fans, and taking trips on trams to see the sights.

Look at the sculpture above….and the sign above John’s head! I didn’t even see that when I snapped!

I loved how people have slid off the well-heeled streets and make use of the lanes running down between them…it is almost reminiscent of Hanoi.

Restaurants and bars are set up and people dine amongst the graffiti.

In one lane there is an argument scrawled in white paint on the wall of a property, concerning the lack of maintenance of a tenant’s property! Mostly though it is just colourful artwork.

Didn’t like seedy St Kilda, but was drawn to the cake shop windows…oh my. This area was originally settled by Poles and people from Eastern Europe and their cakes are still made and displayed…I even saw the almond crescents that so bewitched me in Kiev. Sadly I had just eaten, alongside some Hell’s angels, told you the area was dodgy…you wouldn’t like to wander about there, alone at night.

Talking about nights, we were wakened by two lesbians next door, obviously having an emotional fight, as one woman was crying, ‘but you called me Anna!’ Time for the ear plugs!

But the best part was taking a tram way outside the city to the Dandenong Ranges, where we caught a bus that whisked us up to cute villages specialising in cream teas amidst native gums and giant ferns.

We ate pumpkin and ginger soup beside a bird feeder with about 6 crimson rosellas.

We decided to walk to William Ricket’s sanctuary, through the bush, and so felt very in tune to what the man envisaged with his special place.

He lived and worked at Mount Dandenong from 1934-1993, making 92 ceramic sculptures of aborigines which merge into the trees and ferns. It was truly magical. Funny how creative people are so eccentric, and how they somehow leave their mark in the most unusual ways and places. After oohing and aahing and snapping the various sculptures we crossed the road and went down to a restaurant. There we found the owner busy feeding a wild kookaburra on his wrist.

It was enjoying some red meat. He told us that he had been feeding it tit-bits for about 2 years, and later when we walked away we saw the bird laughing happily on a branch, wild and free. Wonderful.

After the impressive aborigine sculptures we decided to visit Melbourne’s Art Galleries.

I was quite taken with one that specialised in indigenous art. To be honest, I have never really been a fan, but seeing these massive canvasses and reading the stories behind the blobs and blotches of colour I realised they are more a story than just a brilliant combination of colour and pattern.

There was a recording of one elderly artist describing what he was painting, ‘the round red blobs are the women’s bottoms and the circles around them are the lines that women draw when sitting on the sand whilst talking about men and whether they might marry. The long line here is the snake, and he is really a man disguised, and he is looking for the water hole where the red kangaroo has its dreaming place.’ Aaah! Now I could see it!

Auckland was alive to the sound of Rugby. It was busy, and John had to meet with colleagues to discuss him going to work there. I went to see Jane Eyre! Then we flew down to Queenstown in the South Island, where we were stunned by mountains that make Ben Nevis look like a hill and as for the Adelaide hills, you could just spit over them! The Remarkables are over 12,000 ft, and frame the lake like mountains should…blue blue  water and sky and snow-capped rugged peaks.

Around the lake I snapped the weeping willows and the cherry blossom and we dined on green tipped mussels and drank wine that grew in the alpine region. It was all story book stuff. We went up on the cable car to where my Gerry worked ten years ago, in the Sky Bar, and looked with horror at crazy people para-gliding and bungee jumping.

Much more appealing was fine dining with Catriona and catching up and falling back into the friendship that began when we were about 12.

The meal was something from ‘Master Chef’ and the waiter almost told John just what part of Canterbury his duck came from, and we watched quietly bemused as he steam ironed the tablecloth on our left, ready for the next customer. Such elegance!

Next morning, Catriona took us on a tour to Glen Orchy and Paradise! Imagine!

We dined in Kinloch, beneath a mountain range that features hugely in Lord of the Rings, and each corner we turned we couldn’t believe how beautiful it all was.

The following day we went to Arrowtown, a quaint old town, that looks as though it has been preserved as the Gold Rush Town that it once was. We visited the museum, and I was struck again how amazing these first settlers were. Hardy boys, that’s for sure, and the girls were no mamby pambies either. Aye, they were made of stern stuff back in them days! I looked at a list in the ‘doctor’s surgery’ of the deaths and causes of….cholera, diphtheria, drowning, horse kicks, and one poor woman died of childbirth at the age of 53, delivering her 10^th child.  Was it all for ‘the greed of gold?’ Apparently gold is still being found, and a school kid found a big nugget up in a river just a few months ago. Bet his Dad (or school teacher) confiscated it pretty damn quick! HA HA.

Back to Auckland to watch the defeat of England, and Ireland and I got 4 flea bites from the awful room that was the only available accommodation that we could find.

And the news…a man taken by a shark in Perth, and a 48yr old woman rescued from the Katherine River in the Northern Territory. She was going for a swim in a croc infested part of the river…drunk as a lord. The police had to use a winch cable attached to the patrol car…you’d think the crocodile would have had her by the time they had got that all in place.

And now, it’s back to Adelaide and our lovely flat, and the ocean just outside, and a mountain of washing. But it’s so easy to put on the machine. Thank God I am not a pioneer!