Melbourne and Sydney

We arrived in Melbourne on Friday February 25, Eiko’s birthday for a 2-day stop. The port is within view of the downtown just a couple of kilometers away. Arriving the same day (Friday) was the new Queen Elizabeth of Cunard. We took the shuttle bus over to the Federation Square and picked up the on-off tram for a bit before getting off at the 1880 Exposition Grounds to view the gardens(see picture)and the exhibition hall. These were magnificent. We walked north a bit to pick up the on-off bus and rode this back to our start. Melbourne has a compact complex of tall buildings. It spills south over the Yarra River to form an area called Southbank. Here is a casino complex, museums, concert halls and gardens. On the following day, Saturday 26 Feb, we went to the library for some internet, and headed over to the Immigation Museum. I was surprised to learn the Australians also interned suspect foreign nationals and its own nationals of Japanese and German origin in camps during WWII. These predate the American camps. We then headed off to the open air market. These are almost identical in any city on earth and didn’t hold too much interest. Melbourne is a dynamic and clean city. There is a tremendous amount of activity here. The parks are beautiful. I’ll show you an equestrian statue of Edward VII and a picture of the railroad station on Flinders Street which dates to 1910. The Australians have done a great done of maintaining their colonial architecture and combining it with great new skyscrapers. Following a day at sea, we arrived in Sydney and parked right across from the opera house. If Melbourne was really good, Sydney is just sensational. It has a downtown absolutely bustling with people and buses, cars and trams. The buildings are immense, tall and broad. The skyscrapers are modern and tower over the colonial era structures. Sydney has spent an enormous sum redeveloping its colonial era buildings and developing its waterfront. They have created a magnificent downtown, maybe the best I’ve seen. It is packed with just about everything, exhibitions halls, museums, casinos, parks, shopping centers, luxury hotels and office buildings. It is beautiful and clean. They even have a new swimming complex named after Ian Thorpe, their recent Olympic hero. Can you imagine a project brought to fruition so quickly in any American city? There is certainly no city in Europe which matches the dynamism one finds here. We spent our day on the on-off bus. One segment covered the inner city, the second took a trip out to Bondi Beach, about 20 minutes by car to the East. Bondi is a resort beach but the communities leading back to the city, such as Double Bay, Point Piper, and Rose Bay, are even nicer. It was a beautiful day to be on the top of an open-air bus. We left Sydney at 11:59 Monday night, Feb 28 headed north to Brisbane.